I Heart My Dead People

I’ve been spending my post-dissertation time working on my genealogy. This is the first time I’ve had the chance to work on it since coming to England, which is kind of sad, since they’re a huge part of why I’m here in the first place. I had desperately hoped that my very first trip in York could be down to Chalgrave, the longtime home of the Bostford family, to see the medieval church where they worshipped and the churchyard where they are buried. Chalgrave is, unfortunately, so tiny that the nearest bus stop (after several trains) is about five miles away, and apparently it has a population of something like twenty people. I’ll need a car, and a weekend, and neither of these things have been possible heretofore.

Anyway, because of the Great Computer Crash of ’04, most of my work right now is just re-inputing the data that got lost. I had to transfer it off of hardcopy files, which are still in the States, into a database, and from there into my family-tree programme. Pain in the arse, but at least I know that my obsessive record-keeping on paper was both worth it and a functional system. In a way, it’s kind of nice, because it reacquaints me with my ancestors- a year and a half of grad school had kind of bumped their details out of the ready-access part of my brain.

I’m used to thinking of the majority of my ancestors as being people who lived and died “over there”. I don’t know if other people have a sort of constant relative geography in their brains, like a mental GPS where they always know where they are on the global scale, but I’m very used to seeing my ancestors as being very far away, across an ocean, on this little island of Britain. Since this is the first real work I’ve done with them since getting here, it suddenly whomped down on me: they aren’t those people far away anymore. They’re right bloody here. None of them are more than a four-hour train ride away. It’s a really strange feeling, that I’m in their midst.

Of course, I’ve had this thought periodically throughout the year- I live in York, and as a Plantagenet descendant, naturally many of those connections spent considerable time here in the northern capitol (back then). Cousins’ heads once hung on the bar that I walk through to get to the city centre every day. But then, those relatives are, while illustrious in history, somehow more distant for it. Or perhaps, more accurately, less my own. Naturally there are lots of people walking around who are also descended from the same people as I, but you only really know it with the Big Name Ancestors. (Which is still awesome, in its own way. Jon and I are cousins through the Mayflower families, for example, and our friend Chris is another Plantagenet cousin. Genuine family reunions would be about the size of New York City.) Those ancestors, therefore, belong to a lot of people, who know it. The lesser-known ancestors probably have just as many progeny, but fewer people are going to be aware of their connection, so, somehow, they feel more like mine. I don’t know any other way to explain it.

It gives me a very cosy feeling to think that they are all around, literally, geographically, in the same way that they are when I’m at home in Connecticut. England New and Old are the only places where I really feel that sort of… grounded comfort. I know who I am there, I know my place in the grand scheme of the universe, because I am where they were and are. These places are mine on some level I can’t quite put to words; I can find a sense of peace, hold my head high, and feel as if I belong. It makes me understand why people were so bizarrely clannish and attached to the town where I grew up- and it makes me understand why I felt so different, apart, and out of water there, among them. (Of course, the roots there only go back maybe five generations, tops. I just spent an afternoon typing up ancestors who were born in the 1360’s. This is why I study history: it’s really just autobiography. For me, it’s personal.)

I would really love to rent a car this summer and take maybe a two-week trip or so around the country, an ancestral pilgrimage to Chalgrave. And Bengeworth, and Blythe, and Canterbury, and Arundel, and Chard, and…. Well, you get the idea. In an ideal world, I’d have the money and the time to go beyond these borders and hit Leyden, or Valencienne, or Brandenburg, or Hamburg, or any of the other places where one or another ancestor began at some point. Such a trip will not likely be forthcoming, because much as I love genealogy and the Dead Ancestors, I love the theatre more, and I expect to be tied down to Lords in some fashion for most of the forseeable future.

Periodically, throughout the year, I’ve had the odd bought of something not quite homesickness, but missing New England, with its ancestral graves and homesteads. I wonder now if, in those moments, I would not have been wise to pull out my genealogy charts and start working. While, no, I can’t just go out to the cemetery and have a picnic surrounded by ancestors and cousins like I can at home in Newtown, where my family has lived and died for almost four hundred years, I still suspect that the visceral realisation of how close I was here, to my heritage and therefore my self, would have helped. After all, how can you be homesick when home is where you are?