Family History: A Mix of Fact and Legend

In an earlier blog, I noted Nanna’s understanding of our ancestor’s journals. Her conception was correct in essence, but factual in a partial and muddled way. Given that she had the journals for many years, her constrained understanding may be surprising. However, if you have a little context about our distant family history and saw the journals for yourself, you would be less surprised.

There are maritime officers in both arms of Nanna’s ancestry across generations. There are similarities in the values, hopes, and emigrations of ancestors from Scotland and ancestors from Yorkshire. There are common threads of resourcefulness, determination, entrepreneurialism. There are also less constructive similarities. Occasionally, there appears to have been family strife due to religious disagreements – Roman Catholics versus Protestants, Protestants versus Protestants with different emphases in belief or practice, and followers of traditional Christian doctrines versus those who converted to Mormonism. (Nanna never mentioned the latter source of friction and I doubt that she knew of it. It came to light through my genealogical research and explains some very different emigration choices within one arm of our ancestors.)

There are also patterns of family fracturing for non-religious reasons. Relationships also fractured through abandonment, ‘unacceptable’ marriages, betrayal, death, disaster, divorce, extensive age differences within generations, geographical distance, greed, infidelity, injustice, shame, sibling rivalries, stubbornness, unresolved arguments, and war. There are probably more causes of family fracture than I have yet identified. (You probably can list a portfolio of sources of tension and fractures within your own family lines.)

When conflicts were not resolved, the outcomes were often enduring relational splits and stark contrasts in family members’ financial and social wellbeing. Broken relationships in one case meant half-siblings ended up amongst the wealthiest and the poorest people in Sydney. Descendants of these family members have never reconciled. It is quite possible that many in the current generations on each side of the split do not even know that their ancestor had half-siblings.

These ancestral fracturings meant that, in addition to the journals, Nanna had old photos of unnamed people – some of whom I was told as a child not to ask questions about and some about whom Nanna also had either never been able to ask questions or had not received sure answers.

In each generation, silence, rumours, and misunderstood ‘facts’ camouflaged secrets; personal and family pain was hidden and often endured in isolation. It seems some people, especially my maternal great grandmother, Mary, learnt through their suffering and the love of others to love generously and unconditionally; others, however, did not.

Loss of family information was not always associated with pain or relational breakdown. Pre-WWII and even the 1960s, society had many taboos; one just did not speak about many things, at least not with children. Family information was rarely consciously conveyed to children. It was generally considered that children had no rights, certainly not in family matters. If family information was required by children, either it would be revealed ‘when the time is right’ or, over time, children would discern the ‘obvious’.

Loss of family information perhaps also occurred because of deep wells of love, joy, and relational closeness. Such losses were not intentional; they were just not foreseen. Unlabelled and obviously well-cared for photos provide pertinent examples: why would anyone label a photo of a much-loved family member? ‘Everyone’ knew and treasured the photo’s subject: no label was needed, and no explanation was required regarding the effort to capture that person’s appearance. Another pertinent example is a marriage between second cousins not being specifically mentioned to younger generations: why would it have been when everyone at the wedding knew? It was taken for granted that this knowledge would be retained within the family. And perhaps it was for one or two generations.

Until recently, family history for ordinary people was not a ‘thing’. Although direct lines of descendance were often recorded in family Bibles, an interest in genealogy outside of royalty and the aristocracy was frequently considered eccentric, nosy, or just plain weird! It was also difficult and very expensive. Likewise, personal and family photographs were expensive and time consuming to produce. Hence, they were special and rare. Most photos were taken during memorable events or special trips to a studio. For the less wealthy, just having a photograph taken was a memorable event! 

Whatever the cause, the loss of family information conceals or blurs the past. The loss can distort or obscure the origins of present family dynamics; it can also blind and mislead us regarding its future influences. The losses mean history has become almost mythical; at times, research has shown it to be simply erroneous. 

Part of the intention for this blog is to reflect on words as inheritances and to ponder their legacies. Those inheritances include family history available from public and private writings and records. I hope the blog will help anyone interested in who and what they have become – and how they became who they currently are – reflect on the various legacies they have received. 

More importantly, I hope it will help us consider who we might yet become, how we might become more like the people we want to be, and the possible legacies of lives richly lived that each of us could impart.

(In case a reader may think I’ve singled out my nanna’s family lines for criticism, I hope it’s clear that unhappy occurrences are not restricted to either my maternal or paternal ancestry. No family escapes the effects of the human condition!)