Open Features: Half-Page Histories - (or should that be Half-Baked?)
Mary Basham muses on family history, and family secrets.
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Profile columns seem to be the new vogue amongst the features in most of our weekly papers. These half-page potted histories of some local dignitary or public figure, reveal such details as where they were born, their educational background and what they do for a living.
On top of that we are also treated to a run-down of items like their favourite film, best loved book and what four people they would invite to dinner if they could? Sir Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, and Bill Clinton are way out in the lead, closely followed by William Shakespeare, Napoleon Bonaparte and Queen Elizabeth I. Age and era are not a bar, although to be frank, I think I would prefer not to witness the meeting of minds between Bonaparte and the Virgin Queen!
Occasionally the guest list includes someone’s great grandparent in order that over dessert, they can be quizzed on the past and some skeleton in the cupboard or family mystery can be resolved straight from the horse’s mouth.
This need to fully know our roots is becoming something of a hot topic and true to form; the media has got the measure of current interest and jumped on the bandwagon. Television slots are filling up with famous – and not so famous, in fact nobody has ever heard of them – celebrities tracing their ancestors, whether through records in this country or visiting foreign parts, where miraculously someone knows where to look for the vital evidence. Strangely hardly anybody appears to come from humble origins! By the time the programme reaches its finale, inevitably a long lost ‘significant’ figure has emerged to grace the branches of a family tree.
My dear old dad was one such who had the feeling we were better than we appeared. Family whispers about great grandfather being born the wrong side of the blanket and brought up by the village postman were met by wisely nodding heads. ‘Never short of money’ my Aunt Eva would say, almost but not quite, tapping the side of her nose to hint at a dark secret best kept that way. She was well past eighty and already knocking on the door of heaven when she was finally persuaded to tell it like it was! Great grandfather was perfectly legitimate (and I have the papers to prove it); the money had been ‘found’ inside a feather bed acquired at auction. A Victorian version of striking lucky.
Then there was the scandal of Barbara, not a name you come across a lot in the early 1800s. She was quite a girl and had a fling with a comedian who happened to be visiting the town at the time, visiting being the operative word.
What happened to Barbara? After paying a prolonged ‘visit’ herself to relatives many miles away for reasons I can only surmise, she returned to the town to marry a very respectable gentleman and to all intents and purposes, live happily ever after.
Barbara’s father it turns out, was no stranger to his own bit of scandal and it is possible he was ousted from the family’s comfortable nest somewhere in deepest Sussex around the late 1700s to redeem himself collecting taxes for the Exchequer in Newmarket. As the town was, and remains, the horseracing capital, I can only hope his scandal did not involve gambling, because if so, the Exchequer could be a few bob short.
Now let me see, all this talk of family trees, who would I invite to dinner? I wonder if Great grandfather is free?
