‘Hah!’ My wife’s jubilant exclamation jerked me back from the reverie I had drifted into with the aid of the fire crackling in the grate, the television burbling in the background and the gin numbing the anxieties of the day. ‘I knew it!’
‘What did you know?’
‘You have criminal genes. I just knew it. Convicts!’
One of my wife’s addictions, every bit as debilitating as my own mild fondnesses, is to stalking ancestors who previously believed they were resting in peace. During many happy hours on the laptop (and a considerable number of visits to libraries and other archives), she managed to dig up her own relatives back to the dawn of time and then set about mine. Through my father’s line she discovered the extraordinarily colourful family of a Victorian Archbishop of Canterbury and some alarmingly close intermarriages within a limited number of families including that of Charles Darwin. I believe limited gene pools, particularly in his own family, was one of the great man’s prime worries, and a tendency to despondency at best and complete madness at worst seemed to dog many of the stories she was uncovering with such glee. She had now started on my mother’s lineage, finding a family that had made a healthy fortune by setting up a trading company in Australia, a fortune which was frittered away and had disappeared without trace two generations later.
‘Your great, great grandparents,’ she was peering closely at her laptop screen, trying to make out handwriting two centuries old, ‘or maybe there should be another “great” in there … anyway, they ran an illegal still in Scotland. An inspector from Customs and Excise confiscated it and they attacked him with an iron bar as he was loading it onto his cart to take away. They were both arrested, tried and sent to Australia on separate convict ships. She gave birth on the trip down. When they got there they were reunited and put to work for a man who owned a massive sheep farm. Your great, great, whatever grandfather then died and his widow married the sheep farmer, her children inheriting the whole thing.’ She sat back triumphantly. ‘I knew it!’
I relate this tale of unseemly gloating because my wife is not alone in her addiction. The internet has made it possible for thousands of people, alerted by television programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are?, to dig out stories about their families. Many of them need the help of ghostwriters to put these stories into a form where they can become family heirlooms, keeping voices that would previously have disappeared into the grave with their owners alive down the centuries.
When I was a teenager my mother wrote a short memoir of growing up in the thirties. Being an arrogant adolescent with my eyes fixed on my own glorious literary future I paid her labours scant attention and she was far too modest to do more than simply type them up and leave them in a drawer. After her death, however, when I started to wonder about how her life might have been before my father and I came into it, the book – now printed and published privately by a cousin who recognised its value before I did – has been an enormous source of answers. I only wish my father, grandparents and all who came before them had done the same. Such books might only ever be of interest to a few dozen people, but their relevance to that small audience is likely to be as strong as, or even stronger than, any famous and feted work of literature.