Time travelling to our Victorian pasts
01/07/2006
We’ve all got them. Mysterious, sepia-coloured photographs of serious-looking groups of people dressed up in their Sunday best and posing, poker-faced at the camera.
What few of us know is more than a smattering of the characters and history behind those faces. Yes, that’s Great Uncle Silas, but what did he do? And why are their four girls in this photograph – we only know of three daughters on that side of the family?
The urge to know more about our forebears is fairly universal. Given the chance, we’d all love to know just who was lurking in our family tree.
Until recently, unless one has come from a titled family, that knowledge has usually depended upon a family maintaining an oral history or – even rarer – diaries. But now, through the wonders of the world wide web, we all have access to rich mines of data: censuses, other people’s research, war records…
“The web has made it totally democratic,” says Tony. “Even a technophobe like me can soon find out how to use these records. Once you get going, you can start emailing people for their information and link up with distant relatives who are also researching.”
Tony has gone one further and used his experience tracing his past to show others how to track down their ancestors. In a website appropriately entitled www.ancestry.co.uk, Tony describes how he learned more about his Victorian family; and, as he says, it proved an illuminating experience. “It wasn’t just finding out about what my father’s father did as much as realising just how connected I am to certain parts of London where the Robinsons lived. I really do feel part of Bethnal Green and Hackney.”
It’s an experience I can vouch for when I discovered through my family’s research that generations of Wattses lived in the Temple and Redcliffe areas of Bristol – a part of the city where I had always felt a strong bond. But can we have these powerful links to places as well as people?
“I’m sure we can,” says Tony. “These days we’re all a bit cut off from where we started, floating in space. There’s something deep in the psyche that needs to connect to our roots.”
Tony’s own past includes one forebear who was in service, a seamstress, a commercial traveller, a “fancy box maker”, a merchant seaman and – more grandly, the owner of a pickle factory. His mother’s grandfather (born 1847) rose spectacularly from the ranks of ploughboy to become a piano maker. But, as far as he can gather, there’s no downtrodden servant to a man called Blackadder!
Did he, I wonder, get the same huge emotional response as other people have felt in making the TV programme “Who Do You Think You Are” where TV personalities trace their ancestors. “It wasn’t quite like that,” says Tony. “For a start, their researchers tend to dig out a dramatic piece of a person’s past and present them with it. My experience wasn’t quite like that – though I did find it fascinating.”
Knowing more about our family’s past – for many of us – is just as intriguing a process. With so much resource now available, there’s no question that more and more detail will emerge as enthusiastic ancestor hunters all over the world dig deeper and deeper into the past. In countries like the US it is almost an industry, as families trace their roots to the towns and villages in the “old country” where they began.
Once you’ve gone through the Victorian past, many people will be tempted to explore even further. “We’re all storytellers,” concludes Tony. “And what more seductive story can there be than the story of our own past?”