25/30: taking on the role of family memory keeper and searching for research breadcrumb trails
On excavating hidden family stories, examining what we choose to remember and forget, and finding ways to fill in the gaps
Over the course of this month, I’ve started to compile a list of research topics related to my memoir project - an ever-expanding list of people, places and events I want to find out more about. I think a trip to Liverpool to visit various record offices and archives may be required at some point, though it’s not really feasible at the moment. For now, I’m making do with internet research; it’s been enough to pad out the pieces I’ve written this month that explore my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ lives in early and mid twentieth century Liverpool.
I’m building on a wealth of family history research carried out over the years, first by my aunt’s husband and then by me. I have a list of names and dates of birth, marriage and death going back to my great-great-grandparents to build from. Both physical and digital folders full of photocopies and pdf files of census returns and birth, marriage and death certificates. What I want to do now is put some flesh on those bones, move beyond a dry list of names and dates and try to get a sense of my ancestors’ lived experiences.
Recent pleasurable internet rabbit holes I have fallen down include findagrave.com, newspapers.com (a searchable database of national and local newspapers dating back to the 1700s) and the comprehensive set of online historical maps available from the National Library of Scotland. I’ve found out where my great-grandmother Lily’s sister is buried, and found a photograph of the shared gravestone of Lily’s parents and paternal grandparents. I’m slowly tracking down the addresses listed in the census returns, finding out which houses and streets still exist and which have since been demolished.
Perhaps best of all has been the unexpected glimpses of my ancestors’ lives that I’ve discovered through searching for their names on newspapers.com. I’ve found my grandfather Eric aged 13, winning a prize for the best colouring in the Children’s Corner section of the Liverpool Evening Express in December 1933. I’ve found what I’m reasonably sure is my great-grandfather Sydney, witnessing the suspicious death of a man who burned to death at the wheel of his car in November 1929, only a month before Sydney himself died of heart disease aged 30.
I know very few stories about my maternal grandparents’ early lives and effectively zero about their parents’ lives. I want to fill in the gaps, to try to get a sense of who they were as people. These newspaper articles, and others like them, have been the one of the most effective ways I’ve found to do so. However, it’s an inexact science: I got no hits when I searched for my grandmother’s name, or my mother’s. I don’t know whether this is because they lived their entire lives without having their names mentioned in a newspaper, or because I’m searching in a non-comprehensive archive. Both are possible. I did however get a hit when I searched for my own name: being highly commended for my painted lettering in a children’s art competition in the early 1990s. It’s a pleasing piece of symmetry with Eric, sixty years earlier.
There are still lots of gaps in the narrative(s), some of which I’m fairly confident I can fill with further research, some of which I may never know the answers to. I know my maternal grandparents’ ashes are interred in a garden of remembrance in a crematorium in Liverpool, but I don’t know exactly where. That mystery can probably be solved by contacting my aunt. I’d love to know where my grandparents worked, but I don’t know whether there are any publicly available historical employment records.
The 1931 census records were destroyed by fire in 1942. No census took place in 1941 due to World War Two (although the National Registration Act 1939 provides a similar snapshot of names, addresses, ages and occupations). The 1951 census isn’t due to be released until 2052, when I’ll be in my early 70s. It’s a long time to wait, and a twenty year gap covering the period in the mid-twentieth century in which my grandparents grew up, married, and started a family. If I’m going to trying to excavate or recreate my grandparents’ lives and those of their parents’, I’ll need to look for alternative routes.
I have fragments and hints: my grandfather Eric is listed in the 1939 Register as an apprentice toolmaker. Mum has told me that he worked at the Meccano toy factory and later, during World War Two, at another factory that produced the metal mechanisms and ball bearings required to power the inner workings of machine guns. From census records, I know that my grandmother Edith’s maternal aunt was working at the Meccano toy factory in 1921. I wonder if that connection is how my grandparents first met?
From my mum’s stories, I know that Edith worked in the Liver Building during World War Two. Both she and her widowed mother Lily are listed as shorthand typists in the 1939 Register, and I assume that they were employed at the same place, but have no way of confirming this. I know the name of the grammar school Mum went to and, if I visit the National Archives in London, I could read an inspection report from around 4 years before she went there.
Turning my focus outwards, I’m itching to read a social history of motherhood in the UK in the twentieth century, particularly working class motherhood. I’ve started putting a reading list together and can feel my long dormant academic research muscles twitching with excitement. The trick I think will be in finding the line between research that informs the writing of this memoir, and research that swallows me whole and spits me out months or years later with a detailed knowledge of the topic but no words written.
By chance, this afternoon I happened to read a piece by the British-Turkish writer Elif Shafak (linked below). Several lines she wrote in that piece really grabbed my attention as they articulate what it is I’m hoping to do through my own writing.
“Unless we remember we cannot repair and what we cannot repair will keep resurfacing and coming back, again and again.”
I’m not writing about any large, communal traumas like the Armenian genocide or the partition of Cyprus, as Shafak does in some of her novels. My focus is very much on inherited pain at the level of the individual and the family. But I do want to write about family stories and family silences; what we remember and what we forget, both individually and as a group, and the reasons why.
I want to be the family archaeologist, to uncover and examine my maternal ancestors’ stories, to understand how these experiences shaped their lives and my own. Shafak describes third generation immigrants as becoming “sincerely curious about ancestral memories and family silences”. I’m not a third generation immigrant, I’m not writing about collective displacement and exile. But I do belong to the third generation removed from the event I think of as the inciting incident in this narrative: the death of my grandmother Edith’s father when she was 8 years old.
Edith was the first generation, the one who directly experienced this trauma. In the same way as Shafak describes the first generation of immigrant families in her recent piece, Edith had “not forgotten the past; how could they forget it? Yet, they do not speak of it. It resides within them, locked behind their rib ages, all those unspoken words, unshared truths and unforgotten memories”. In contrast her daughter, my mum Carole, belonged to the second generation, who Shafak describes as being “more “forward-looking, focused on the future. They must start from scratch, building a new life - tabula rasa - for themselves and their children”. I’m in the third generation, for whom perhaps the traumatic event has become distant enough in time that they can start to ask the hard questions, to excavate the hidden stories.
“In every family there is at least one memory keeper.”
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