Family History - August 2019

I never meant to start writing about family history, but there were one or two things about my family, and about my late wife's (Ellie’s) family that puzzled me. Years ago, when the Internet genealogy sites were in their infancy, I’d made an attempt to get to the bottom of these mysteries and failed. Then, having decided to write a short biography of Ellie for family and friends, I discovered that the amount of information available online had expanded exponentially. I found out a lot of stuff, but while this stuff was interesting to me it was difficult to explain to anyone else. I thought I’d better turn it into a story, or a series of linked stories. I’m a writer, after all. 

It turned out not to be that easy, and I still haven’t figured out the best way to do it. There are stories here that I feel it’s good for my family to know about, but the very things that make any work of fiction come to life—the insights into the minds and feelings of the characters—are unavailable. There are no diaries, only the records in parish registers and censuses.  There are no first-hand accounts because no one really talked about these things. What people did do however, which I found very interesting, was made up stories about themselves. I know this because the records show them changing their names, their dates of birth, their marital status, and all this to such an extent that it was often hard to follow them through the years. 

Ellie's grandmother?

Ellie’s grandmother was a domestic servant on Suffolk farms who left school at the age of 12. Aged 37 she gave birth to twin boys. No one knows who the father was, and no one knows how she felt about it. No one knows, either, how she felt when she gave away one of the boys (Ellie's father) to be brought up by her sister and her mother. She took the other child with her to various housekeeping jobs and one of her employers paid for that child to be educated at a boarding school. Eventually she married another of her employers, the proprietor of a seaside boarding house whose wife had died, and when he died in his turn, she inherited his house (and the one next door!) She lived in that house, with her son, for another thirty years. She became a recluse and an invalid, a hoarder of old newspapers, an expert on football pools. The house was frozen in time, almost unchanged from the day when it was boarded up ‘for the duration’ in WW2 . . . 

 

A guesthouse by the sea. 1930s. All these people have stories.

That’s the bare bones of part of the story. There are only a few people living who had met Ellie’s grandmother, and all they remember is a small woman with too many clothes on who wore a woolly hat and had a bad leg. One son didn't talk about her, the other wouldn't. Anything else I add to this story has to be made up by me. Except, that is, for the bits she made up herself.  She was born Bessie Emma Ruffles, then she was Bessie Evelyn Elliott, and finally she became Bessie Evelyn Crouch. When she eventually married she took ten years off her age, changed her father's name and made herself a widow. I can't help speculating about Bessie. An unmarried mother of twins at 37 she still managed to escape the village where generations of her family had lived and make a life for herself and her son. Then, just when it might have seemed that her fortune was made and she had become the owner of two seaside houses, she seems to have turned in on herself.

Is this the plot of a novel?  Maybe. There are the plots of half a dozen novels buried in my family’s history. There are the Police Strikes of 1918 and 1919 for example, or the migration of Italian organ grinders and animal exhibitors in the nineteenth century. One thing’s for sure: long lists of names and dates and places, arranged in little boxes, joined by lines, are not, in themselves that interesting or easy to understand.  I know this because I have tried to explain.  ‘How interesting!’ people say as they stare at the computer screen, moments before their eyes begin to glaze over.

So, I may add a little fiction to my account of my family’s history, just to encourage people to read it, rather than keep it on the shelf, or in their computer, or wherever it ends up. 

And if you decide you’d like to write a novel about my late wife’s grandmother you’re very welcome, but don’t forget to take me out for a nice meal if it makes you rich and famous. 

This post was originally published on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure.