Ancestors

Inspired by Tanila's comments about ancestors and ancestor photos I had to go find this. Samhain is coming, time to remember those who came before.

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It's not just our personal past we should remember for it's part in making us who and where we are now. We should also remember the people and the generations who have gone before us, our parents and grandparents and the many generations beyond them, lost now to the haze of history. They each had their part to play in how we came to be who and where we are now.

Most people don't think too much about their ancestors, and most people don't need to. It does seem though that there really is at least one born into every generation who does care, who is driven to find and document them and to rediscover them before they are lost to obscurity forever. Driven to put names, places, faces and dates together, to piece together some parts of their stories, be they happy, sad, tragic or heroic, for each of them did have their own story.

Perhaps it's the modern day equivalent of being the storyteller, the one who preserved for the next generation the tales of myth and legend, the stories of hardship and celebration, and shared them with everyone else during long winter nights huddled together around the fire. Maybe those who are driven to uncover family history are simply the modern day incarnation of an ancient tradition.

There will always be skeletons hidden away that some would prefer be forgotten, there will be heroes and homemakers, adventurers, rascals, scoundrels and simple hardworking men who did nothing more remarkable in their lives than toil day in and day out to keep their families housed and fed. They are all a part of our past and deserve to be remembered.

"Putting together a family tree is like weaving an intricate multi-dimensional tapestry without knowing anything about the final design, because that final design doesn't exist."
Peter Baltensperger - Roaming in Ancestral Cycles.

Some people will always be little more than names and dates, the rest of their story already forgotten. Others will carry more colour, the sadness of children lost in infancy, the joys of children surviving to adulthood and producing offspring of their own. Still others come to life in faded photographs, or put a name to previously anonymous face, or turn out to be the grain of truth behind an old family anecdote.

Better that someone collect and record the fragments so that it remains available for the next generation than for their stories, great or small, to be lost, for once they are lost they might be gone forever.

Some families lived generations in the same place, working the same land, facing the same struggles to raise their families. They deserve to be remembered too, or do we want to forget the Audoires, French descended farmers raising generations on rough farmland on a tiny windswept island? Like Jane, who raised thirteen children there before her eldest son, Peter Henry, inherited the farmland and sold it off, using the proceeds to buy her the 'first real house' she had ever lived in.

Do we want to forget the Patton boys of Grayson county, Virginia, who left behind wives and children to fight for the Confederacy, in defence of their homeland and for what they believed was right? Leftwich and Creed Patton, close as brothers could be, grew up together, enlisted to fight together, forever torn apart when Leftwich was killed at the Battle of Middle Creek. Creed fought on, leading his company through the rest of the war before he finally returned home.

Or should we forget the women they left behind to hold home and family together not knowing when or if they would see their menfolk again? Or the Patton sisters, Cynthia and Martha, who devoted years to helping raise Leftwich's children after he was killed in the War Between the States, four small children who never had a chance to know their father.

The same goes for the Guernseymen who volunteered to fight a war they could not drafted into because they believed it was right. Many marched away to the Great War and a lot of them never returned home, and many of those who did return were never the same again. Should we forget the women and families they left behind? Or the babies who died, as so many did in times past, before they ever had a chance at life?

Perhaps we should forget the women like the two Nancy Patton's, of different lines and generations, who each defied society, convention and church to raise the children they bore outside wedlock, and whose children each married and raised large families of their own. Or the Guernseman who stood before God and congregation on his wedding day and declared that the child his new wife held in her arms was his? Was it? who knows, it doesn't matter, his declaration is forever recorded immediately below his marriage in the church register and it would have taken a brave man to call it other than truth.

Perhaps we could ignore the quarrymen, like Thomas Smith Brown, who did nothing more than work long back breaking days quarrying granite in Guernsey, a world away from their native Devon and Cornwall. Or maybe immigrants like the Aeicheles who came from Russia, Poland and Germany, halfway around the world in search of a better life in Canada and America?

Maybe the Whalleys and Kays from Lancashire, who were 'only' miners and weavers, the very backbone of life in the north of England. Maybe the interestingly mis-transcribed "card loom worker" who was listed as the much more mysterious and exotic sounding "card Room Worker" when one census was released. Or perhaps the Scottish tenant farmer, William Murray, a man of obvious means, who late in life married the innkeeper's daughter and raised a large family.

Could we forget Cornish born Susan Jane who literally married the boy next door, then followed him to Canada with their children, suffering the loss of one child before she even reached Manitoba? Or Cecil, who was invalided out of the Great War, and had to wear his silver discharge badge so as to avoid being accused of cowardice? One war wasn't enough for him, for he also endured four long years of his island home being occupied by invading German forces, separated from the wife and child he had evacuated to safety in Rochester, and facing the same near starvation as everyone else who remained behind on the island, a starvation only alleviated by the ships of the Red Cross.

They all have a part in the story of our past, they are our roots, they are part of the foundation on which we can build our future, without any one of them we wouldn't be here. And for that, they deserve to be remembered.