Symbolic Forest

I grew up not far from the sea. I didn’t go down to the beach or the seafront very often, but I was close enough that you could see out to sea from the top deck of my school bus. I’ve always felt good by the sea.^*

On the other hand, I grew up in an area where the sea is the colour of weak milky tea. So it’s always nice to go somewhere and find that the sea can, actually, sometimes be storybook blue.^**

In other sea-related (or, at least, tidal) news: the mystery words on the shore of the Avon, which we spotted last weekend and posted about, have been identified: an artwork to highlight litter in the sea, by an artist called Pete Dolby. Thanks to Liz for writing and letting me know.

* You could argue some sort of genetic memory, because my mum’s family’s descended from a bunch of 19th-century Cornish fishermen (and smugglers, no doubt), from Looe and Polperro. On the other hand, my dad’s family’s from Derby, which is as unmaritime as you can get.

** Pure water is, as a matter of fact, very very slightly a pale blue colour. You can see it, just about, if you run a bathful of water in a white bath. That’s not the main reason the sea can look blue, though. And different cultures have seen it different ways; the Homeric adjective for it is “wine-dark”, and you know how dark Greek wine can be. I’ve heard that the ancient Greeks didn’t quite distinguish between blue and green in the same way as we do; but I don’t know enough Greek to tell you how true that is.

Keyword noise: art, boats, Carrick Roads, Cornwall, Falmouth, feedback, fishermen, genealogy, Gyllyngvase, harbour, holiday, Pete Dolby, photography, Porthminster, sea, smugglers, St Ives, summer, water.

Within a month, another slightly silly news story about paleogenetics. This one isn’t quite as daft as tracing the descendants of Edgar Aetheling, though. Scientists in Leicester have discovered that loosely-related members of a Yorkshire family share an African ancestor, from at least 250 years ago^* and probably further back than that.

Unlike the previous story, the research in this piece is all very sensible. What’s silly is the idea that it should be surprising, or that it’s a news story that we have African ancestors. Everyone in Europe probably has black ancestry somewhere in their family tree, if you go back five hundred years or so; and definitely if you go back a thousand.^** What’s depressing, I suppose, is that there are people who don’t realise this: people who think that their family is white, has always been white, always will be white. They’re wrong, of course.

* because that’s the most recently their latest common ancestor can have lived.

** I am haunted by a vague memory from university, that the skull of an African monkey, a couple of thousand years old, was found somewhere in Ireland, thus proving contact with Africa back then. I can’t find any references for this at all, though.

Keyword noise: ancestry, descendants, genealogy, genetics, history, Yorkshire.

Today’s top news^* story: English Heritage have been putting out newspaper adverts around the world announcing that they are searching for the descendants of Edgar Aetheling, claimant to the English throne in 1066. As the closest relative of Edward the Confessor, under modern law he would have received the crown; but under Saxon law kings didn’t automatically inherit their position, so he didn’t. Everyone remembers the other kings of England from 1066, but everyone forgets the teenage Edgar.

To be frank, I think it’s a silly idea. Edgar will have millions of descendants, all around the world, most of whom will have no clue and no chance of knowing. Out of these millions, only a small handful of people might be able to prove a connection.

We know this, because a few years ago geneticists managed to trace thousands of men who are probably descended from Niall Noigíallach. Niall Nine Hostages was one of the greatest kings of Ireland,^** founded a rather large dynasty, and is the reason O’Neil is a common Irish surname.^*** Niall lived around 1500 years ago, half as long again as Edgar, and probably fathered many, many more children than Edgar did. Nevertheless, around 20% of men in north-west Ireland are probably descended from him in the direct male line. If you include everyone who has a woman somewhere between them and Niall in their family tree, you’d probably find that everyone in Ireland is descended from him by one route or another.^**** The Queen of England certainly is.

The chances are, you’re descended from someone important in history too. You won’t know it, but you almost certainly are, just because there were so many important people in the past. There’s no way of knowing it, either. English Heritage are on a bit of a wild goose chase, because the people they are looking for are in the country all around them, invisible.

* yes, another topical post

** one of the greatest kings of the Irish or Scots, in fact; when he was around, “Scots” still largely meant “people from Ireland”.

*** You can’t entirely blame him for all those crappy theme pubs though.

**** but the geneticists didn’t do that, because it would have been almost impossible.

Keyword noise: 1066, ancestry, descendants, Edgar Aetheling, Edward The Confessor, English Heritage, genealogy, genetics, history, Niall Nine Hostages, Niall Noigíallach, O'Neil, William the Conqueror.

Like a lot of people, I’ve spent a while today playing with the Surname Profiler website,^* looking at how distant relatives are spread around the country, now, and 125 years ago. As I was expecting, in the 19th century my mother’s family was very heavily concentrated in one area:

…because we know from her genealogy research that her father’s ancestors have lived in this village and the neighbouring one for as far back as anyone can trace.

I was also expecting to find that today, we would be spread all over the country, what with modern transport making migration much easier.^** However, our own family just demonstrates what the research project proved: in the words of the project leader, “migration is traumatic.” We don’t seem to have moved about much at all:

Of course, that’s for a name that isn’t common anywhere – that site suggests that the majority of people with our name live within our local phonebook area, and that phonebook lists about 30 numbers under it. If you have a more common name, individual family movements won’t show up. Another branch of my mother’s family – still with a fairly obscure name – is from Cornwall. In 1881, almost all of them lived west of Bristol:

Our branch of that family, at the time, lived in Brixton. Not the one in Devon, though, the one at the end of the Victoria line, in a completely blank part of their family map.

* Update, August 22^nd 2020: It since seems to have disappeared from the Internet.

** “Nor should we forget the benefit in rural human genetics brought by the railway: with less intermarrying the ‘village idiot’ has disappeared” – David St. John Thomas, The Country Railway, 1976.

Keyword noise: ancestry, cartography, Cornwall, family history, genealogy, history, maps, migration, spatial analysis, Spatial Literacy In Teaching, surname, Surname Profiler.

If you’re not just a regular reader, but the sort of regular reader who reads all the comments too, then you’ll have noticed that Colleague M dropped by the site the other day to let me know that her sister Lydia had been asking for its address. “I think she’ll be upset,” said M, though, “to find you haven’t written about her for some time.”

Well, I originally wrote about Lydia because of her haunting problems, and as they seem to have gone away recently, I haven’t written about them for a month or so. I forgot to mention, though, that I did have a Plan.

As I’ve mentioned before, The Mother has been heavily into genealogy recently, and as part of that she has subscriptions to all sorts of websites, including ones which let you search 19th-century census data. Lydia’s friendly psychic investigator had told her that her ghosts were from the 19th century.^* Furthermore, she’d also told Lydia their first names. So, my cunning plan was: get The Mother to look up who actually lived in Lydia’s house back then, to see if we had a match. If not, well, censuses are only held once per decade, so it doesn’t necessarily mean the psychic was wrong; but if we did have a match then that would be very impressive.

Unfortunately, the plan fell through, when Mother found that back in those days, the houses in Lydia’s street weren’t actually numbered. Bugger. Given that I only had a couple of first names to go on, she didn’t really fancy trawling through census returns for the whole street. After all, it’s a fairly long street. And, if we did find a match, it wouldn’t really be particularly good evidence anyway, given that we couldn’t firmly link them to Lydia’s house. All-in-all, I was a bit disappointed, which is why I haven’t mentioned it earlier. But I thought I would. Just in case you’re reading, Lydia.

* they couldn’t really be any older if they’d actually lived in her Victorian-built house

Keyword noise: census, Colleague M, genealogy, ghosts, psychic, history, research.

Heard on the radio this morning: a member of the Lords claiming that gay marriage Civil Partnerships are a bad thing because they’re unpatriotic.^* This country was built, apparently, on the values of two parents, their children, and the sacrament of marriage.^**

As I’ve said before, my mother is becoming part of the Genealogy Boom, one of the thousands of people who are using the internet to research the names of their ancestors. And, one of the good things about this is that the thousands of people doing this are finding out that the typical Family Values chorus – in the past, everyone lived in a happy, stable two-parent family and the world was a Better Place – really is a load of rubbish. In the past, people didn’t divorce. That’s because they couldn’t afford to. They still had affairs, though, and multiple relationships, and children out of wedlock. Every family has tangled knots in its family tree, because the people in the past really did behave just as badly, or well, as people do today. Family Values is a political myth, and nothing more.

* I tried to look up which specific homophobic peer I was listening to, but her name isn’t listed on the Today website running order, and I don’t want to have to listen to it all again just to catch her name.

** although she claimed that even though she was describing marriage as a sacrament she didn’t mean it in a religious way.

Keyword noise: Civil Partnership, conservatism, divorce, family, gay marriage, genealogy, history, homophobia, nuclear family, social conservatism.

My mother is still beavering away at the family tree, on various genealogy websites. She still hasn’t really got the hang of the internet yet, though…

“What’s a GEDCOM file?”

“Have you looked it up?” Google, google. “It’s a file format developed by the Mormons to store genealogical data.”

“That was quick! I didn’t know you could use it as an encyclopedia! Can you look anything up on it? I mean, if I didn’t know what an elephant was, could I look it up on the internet?”

The thing I try not to think about is: this is probably the level that most internet users work at.

Keyword noise: genealogy, The Mother.

The Mother has discovered The Internet. Specifically, she has discovered a plethora of genealogy websites, and is using them to try to track down our family tree.

Now, her family is fairly easy to trace back into the 19th century. They had a family bible, kept newspaper clippings and wedding invitations, and are nice, simple, and straightforward to track. My Dad’s family, on the other hand, is another matter.

Dad doesn’t know anything at all about his family tree, beyond his parents, sisters, and the names of a few more distant relatives. Questions to my grandmother, before her death, always went unanswered. However, my aunt has kept plenty of details about our family, and does know a lot more about how they’re all related. As we were visiting her anyway, The Mother asked her if she could get out her family births book so The Mother could copy it all down. And we quickly found out just how complex and baroque my father’s family really was.

For one thing, their surnames are all rather confusing. Once you go back beyond the current generations, very few people in our family bothered to get married. This was, it turns out, one of the reasons why my grandmother always refused to answer queries about family history. It’s very unclear whether her parents ever did marry – there’s no record of it, and my great-grandmother kept paperwork in both surnames until her death – but, my aunt told us, anyone who asked my gran directly about this would usually get punched. Some of my gran’s brothers and sisters shared her surname; but some of them took their mother’s name. My great-grandfather was apparently in the Cavalry – “there’s a photo of him in uniform, on a horse” – in India, in the 1920s, but nobody knows any other details about him.

My grandfather’s family is just as confusing. They, also, rarely bothered to marry. When they did, it often made things worse. One of my grandfather’s close relatives married a man called Frank. Her sister then married Frank’s son – I’m not even sure how you draw that on a family tree. Their son, incidentally, was the mayor of Southampton a few years ago. Having a grandfather who is also your uncle, in an entirely legal way I should add, clearly doesn’t stop you entering politics.

The Mother, being upright, respectable, churchgoing, and definitely no-sex-before-marriage, was rather shocked at all this. She is one of those people who sees The Past as a golden age of morality, when things were done properly and you didn’t get all these single mothers all over the place; so she was rather surprised to see that before her own generation, a lot of my ancestors just didn’t think that way. Myself, I’ve always had a suspicion that Victorian morals are both fairly modern and a middle-class innovation, so I was rather pleased to find all this out. Even though it might make genealogists blanche at the thought of trying to draw the tree out, I rather like my ancestors now.

Update, September 24^th 2005: we’ve since discovered that my gran’s parents never were married, because my great-grandfather already had a wife, who he never bothered to divorce.

Keyword noise: family secrets, genealogy, history, morality, The Parents, The Mother, social history.