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I've just read fellow BWL writer Susan Calder's blog post about near history and it took me right back to the time when I decided to research my family's past. The advent of the Internet has made this so much easier . No more trekking to city libraries or writing letters to the National Archives. Instead, information available at the click of a button, and so much of it.
I decided to start with my Father because the stories he told me as a child had always fascinated me. His own father, he said, was illegitimate, but because his very young parents were from rich families, possibly even nobility, his birth had been hushed up and he had been fostered by a Mr and Mrs Leigh, and educated until he was 14. This was at a time when most boys left school at 12 or even earlier. He was then apprenticed to a haberdasher, where he had to sleep under the shop counter at night. Of course my main aim was to find out who his parents were, and then I was going to try to track down the Leigh family. Well, what a surprise that turned out to be!
For a start I discovered that instead of being the Yorkshireman I had always thought he was, he was from Norfolk in East Anglia. So instead of my Father's northern vowels he would have spoken with what, to untuned ears, would have sounded like a rural accent. The dialect of rural Norfolk is closely related to the accent of Eastern New England in the US, as many of the first settlers there were from Norfolk, whereas the Yorkshire accent is the closest we have to the Old Saxon language of the UK, with a good bit of Viking thrown in thanks to the Scandinavians who invaded England a very long time ago. To give you a flavour:
Standard English: 'How are you?'
Norfolk Dialect: 'Ar ya reet bor? How you gewin?'
Yorkshire Dialect: 'How do?'
English dialects are not only fascinating but they change every twenty miles or so. Where I live on the north west coast I am assailed by up to half a dozen dialects on a daily basis, and if I travel just a few miles more I can up the count to about twenty. That, however, is a whole other story. Back to my grandfather.
Having recovered from the shock of discovering that he was Norfolk born in the wonderfully named Little Snoring, a tiny hamlet of just a few houses, I then found out that he was brought up in Fakenham, a small town just a few miles away...by his grandparents! Not by foster parents. And although his mother (my great-grandmother) didn't live with him because she was in service as a domestic servant, she saw him regularly. He had a brother too, older by 4 years, and also illegitimate. There is a whole other story there. Did she have a longstanding affair with a member of the local nobility? is that where part of the story came from? Was money made available for her children? I'll never know.
What I do know, however, is that not only did my great-great grandparents bring him up but they educated him too because they could afford to on their own merits. I discovered that my great-great-grandfather owned a brick yard, and if you ever visit Norfolk and see how many old houses are built with red brick, you'll understand that he was quite well off. I've since seen the house and adjoining yard with its huge double gates, wide enough for a horse and cart laded with bricks to drive through.
Neither my grandfather's nor his brother's birth certificates named their father and despite a visit to Fakenham and to the Records Office in Norwich I failed to find any clues that might have led me to him. Nor did the Parish Chest (a repository for all sorts of documents relating to apprenticeships and other financial transactions) have anything of interest. I discovered, however, that a Drapers Apprenticeship was for 7 years and was only available to boys who could afford it, so I like to think that my great-great-grandfather stumped up the money for that too.
I then discovered that, aged 21, my grandfather left Norfolk and travelled to London where, as a full member of the Draper's Guild, he worked in the city, and shared lodgings with a young man who worked with him. So far, so good, but the best bit was still to come. I don't know when he met my grandmother but I do know they were married in Saint Margaret's Church, Westminster. This is in the grounds of Westminster Abbey on Parliament Square, London, and was, until the 1970s, the Anglican parish church of the British House of Commons.
I have no idea whether you had to have important connections to be married in such an auspicious church, but I have since discovered that my Grandmother's father was a Professor of Music who had originally been in the Royal Hussars as a Band Master, so maybe it was a fancy wedding. What was more important though was the marriage certificate. By this time my great-great-grandparents were dead, as was my great-grandmother and two of her brothers, one of whom had never married. Whether he lived with his parents all his life I don't know, but I do know that he helped run the brick yard, so my grandfather would have probably seen this uncle almost daily. So what was he to do when asked to fill in his wedding certificate with the relevant details...certainly not own up to being illegitimate in front of his future father-in-law. Instead he put his uncle's name against father and next to it deceased. And under occupation owner brick yard. After all some of it was true, and everyone who knew the full truth was either dead or lived miles away, so no-one was ever going to discover his little lie.
And then the Internet came along, and an inquisitive granddaughter! He died 15 years before I was born, but how I would love to know what made him tick. Why this stern and authoritarian Edwardian gentleman disowned his grandparents and mother, at least on paper. And how I would love to be able to tell my Father the true story too. Instead, one day I might use it as the basis of a book. In the meantime my book Remembering Rose has a different sort of hidden history...or as my writing colleague Susan Calder might say...near history.
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