The Project.

Touching Hannah

One

“Touching Hannah “ is a project to find out who my forebears were, particularly my great grandmother, Hannah Maria, and how they lived in the context of the place and time.

The tracing of one’s family tree seems to be a self -indulgent navel picking exercise. Apart from listening to accounts of other people’s dreams, there can be little more boring than other people’s dead relatives.

Why do people do it? Why am I doing it? Why am I writing about it in a public blog?

“Who do you think you are? “ Operative word being ‘think’ , as many a sleb has found out they are not, and been non too pleased to have done so.

I have found this to be an apt title for ancestral research. It is not just the ‘not’ one must be prepared to find out, but the realities of the ‘is’. Or in this case ‘was’. Was becomes is.

We are told of , or assimilate various family legends, add our own imagination to anecdotes, mishear, misunderstand, or let’s face it, we are downright lied to, and the lies are passed down, gaining impetus as they travel. Children are not told the full facts of any events or occurrences as they happen and often pass down strange interpretations of things they were actually around to witness. Witnesses to an event all see different things, and report different things. There are scandals from years back that in later years become causes celebres, things of which to be proud – they gain and lose things in the telling. These things may turn out to be important indicators of historical zeitgeist ; even, in rare circumstances with the benefit of hindsight, important historical events .

“Tell me about when you were a little girl Mummy!”

“Tell me about when you were a soldier Daddy!”

People become heroes and villains, or knew people who knew heroes and villains, the famous, the infamous, the notorious, the lionised. Everyone wants to be someone or something more exciting, more important, perhaps wishing to lay claim to Royal genes or military genes, artistic genes or any genes that justify what they want to be or excuse what they are and would rather not be. What is important to me is how ordinary people got through, how they lived their lives, how they felt about things in the context of their times, not in the context of ours, what they hoped for, their aspirations.

Some even might want to prove title to land or money, or lament that which was enjoyed by past generations but lost on the gaming tables or by the forces and vagaries of history.

Everything has to have an excuse or a reason. It has to be in the blood, and now with information and resources literally at our fingertips on the internet, we can prove it more easily than at any time since the people of the other village were foreigners.

So what are my reasons for wanting to know who I am? Basic insecurity, a need to belong, a need to understand some of the more conflicting histories, most of all a need to see myself in the context of history. One must be prepared for shocks when one turns stones that have guarded their secrets, lain over the tomb of the past. One must be prepared to see things as they were seen from the perspective of society at the time in order to understand actions and motives. One must be prepared not to be who and what one thought one was.

Having wanted to find a cousin, the only cousin on my father’s side , for many years, tried to track down on various internet sites, eventually she found a message and got in touch with me.

She had been a lot closer to my paternal grandparents and had photographs, including one of a beautiful girl with her hair loose, hanging about her shoulders like a cape, reaching to her waist.

Her face is serene, her hands dainty. Who is this woman? She has been told it is our Great Grandmother , Hannah Maria, the mother of our Guernsiaise Grandfather, Harold.

Who is Hannah? Who were our forebears in the island of Guernsey? Cousin Leah had done some research in pre internet days when it was an expensive and time consuming task to trace family records. She had Hannah’s death certificate and Grandfather Harold’s birth certificate.

The reason for wanting to know about my ‘Family Tree’?

I wanted to touch Hannah.

This was the starting point.