Everything Comes Full Circle: The journey from family history to a PhD.

To most 24 year old’s a Sunday spent in a cemetery looking for the grave of a close relative you’ve only very recently learnt existed, wouldn’t be the most favourable option. But not me.  And this is exactly what I found myself doing a few weeks ago – the most recent development in a journey that for me began a decade ago. “If it hadn’t been for you and that initial letter 10 years ago, this wouldn’t have been a possibility” – a fact I was reminded of as we sat and had lunch at a family gathering last month. It was only in that moment I was reminded of where it all began and how long ago. All of a sudden I felt very reflective. Everything had come full circle.

My Grandad died 10 years ago this year and it was hearing his eulogy at the funeral that left me with a lot of unanswered questions, many of which I wished I’d had opportunity to ask him when he was alive. He was quiet and reserved man and so I suspect my questions would have gone unanswered. But all of a sudden he felt like a stranger to me, not my Grandad - a man who’d led an extraordinary life and yet one that I knew very little about. So my way of grieving and of fixing that became to find out as much about him as possible, from those who had known him better than I did; those who could recall his childhood, his military service and work.

Cue a flurried exchanging of letters with members of my family from all across the world, some of whom I’ve since had chance to meet and get to know; trips to archives where I would have my first on site researching experiences; and hours spent hours poring over census records, birth marriage and death certificates and all manner of other things, to find whatever it was I was looking for. It soon became about more than piecing together my Grandad’s life and I was charting the entire family history – on both my paternal and maternal side! A mammoth task and not typical teenage behaviour it has to be said!

I had entered into a world that completely enthralled me. I’ve probably said before that the study of history is much more than a hobby for me and this is exactly why. It’s become part of who I am and has helped me to understand where I come from and the people I’ve descended from. What began as shear curiosity and a desire for answers has blossomed into this incurable thirst for knowledge about the past; to learn about the lives people led and to understand the times in which they lived, whether my family or not.  

But at times, the personal nature of my family history research has been difficult and has led to some shocking discoveries and rather difficult questions. Every family has its skeletons I know, but you’d be amazed how many more appear when you start enquiring and poking around. I’d like to use recent events as one such example but it’s both a complicated story and a delicate one, so I will refrain from saying too much. Just that a recent effort to locate the grave of a close relative, a sibling of my cousin, bought to light the life of another sibling, one we had no knowledge of prior to that enquiry.

As the first person to be notified of this news I found it quite unsettling. It was as if I’d made an intrusion into a private family matter, I think because of the proximity. This all happened within living memory and that hadn’t happened too often with other aspects of the research. As you can imagine this ‘discovery’ has prompted many new questions and been surrounded with emotional responses, but where it goes from here is a decision for the immediate family. We did however go and find the grave and were able to I hope, offer my cousin some degree of closure and, in a way, re-acknowledge and re-claim the two children as members of our family.

My Dad has jokingly referred to me as “guardian of the family information” – and it sounds odd, but in way I do now feel a responsibility to make sure things are recorded and that everyone is remembered and talked about. Incidentally, this weekend marks the passing of my other Grandad and in a conversation with my Grandma about the difficulty of talking about passed loved ones I was struck by her remark that “to not talk about them is to deny them and we mustn’t do that”. And we mustn’t; death really shouldn’t be a taboo subject- we should talk about people that have passed and remember them as often as we can. But I digress.

I wanted to draw on this example because what made this whole experience more poignant for me was that it coincided almost day for day with the news that I would be doing my PhD come September. It’s been a decade since I began on this ‘journey’ (I know the word is so over used but I don’t know what else to call it) and I’m so grateful for where it’s bought me so far. Not only have the discoveries and the knowledge I’ve gained through my family history research helped to give me roots and to construct my identity, but they’ve given me a hobby and, I hope, the beginnings of an career doing something that I really enjoy. It’s therefore been hard to separate these two threads as it’s because of the family history research that I’m on the road to becoming a historian. And so everything seems to have come full circle.

I’m sorry for the reflective nature of this blog – it’s not as entertaining, I suspect, as some of the others which usually offer reviews or rants, as I suspect some would describe them. I just thought I’d share this rather emotional and somewhat exceptional journey with you – one that’s headed into a new chapter and one that I am sure, will only continue to unfold.