Like so many others in recent years, my wife and I have been attempting to trace our family’s histories with varying degrees of success. In the early stages of this research it is the older members of the family who should be primary sources of information but we have a problem. We ARE the older members of the family now and I have come to realise that I should have been more curious about my ancestors many years ago.
If our daughter or grandchildren embark on a bit of amateur genealogy when we are long gone they will have the results of our research to start with, plus all the rapidly improving resources on the Internet. To ensure that they have more than just names and dates we have both been writing autobiographies, my wife’s being a substantial work of well over 50,000 words thanks to the fact that she was better informed than me and has a good memory. Mine, by contrast, is a mere 10,000 words in note form (written more or less in chronological order as various recollections came to mind) and both have been dormant for over a year and need more work.
Actually I have been pleasantly surprised by how much I have remembered in general and disappointed by how much I have forgotten of those episodes that I regard as high points in my life.
One of the most wonderful, albeit brief, episodes in my life took place in about 1947 or’48, when my mother and I went on holiday to Ireland. I was seven or eight years old at the time and the holiday lasted four weeks. We lived in West Wickham, in Kent, which was (and remains) a very pleasant residential area but already, in effect, a suburb of London on the southern edge of the Greater London area.
The destination for our holiday was my grandmother’s home in Ballina, County Mayo. According to my mother’s Travel Permit Card we had been there on holiday previously, for four weeks, in 1941. I don’t remember. Perhaps I should have paid more attention but then I was only sixteen months old at the time.
St Patrick’s Terrace was on the edge of Ballina and led from the town to open country. Number three was a small house of which I have only a hazy memory. There was no pavement (sidewalk) or front garden so the front door was at the side of the road and opened directly into the front room which had a single window, to the left of the door, looking on to the road. As you entered the house the party-wall was on your right and against this wall was a large piece of furniture rather like a Welsh dresser, a combination of cupboards and shelves. Various shelves and compartments housed the stock for my grandmother’s small business as a retailer of confectionery and tobacco. I can remember still the boxes full of Cadbury’s chocolate and the open-ended paper packets containing four Woodbines.
Looking back now, day to day life seems to have been much simpler than it is for us today with all our wondrous gadgets etc. but it was also more demanding physically. There were open fires burning peat which had been cut locally. There was no piped water. Instead water was collected in buckets from a well a couple of hundred yards along the road. Milk was delivered on a donkey cart carrying a large churn from which the milk was transferred to jug or can supplied by the householder. One of my daily treats while on holiday, was to ride the milk cart to the end of the terrace - only a short distance but a great adventure all the same.
Our milk suppliers, the local dairy herd, ambled by the front door four times daily on their way to and from their morning and afternoon milkings and I would rush out to follow them until they passed the well, which was some distance beyond the last of the houses where the countryside began. At seven or eight years of age this was living!
Then there were the trips to the centre of Ballina, which was no more than about half a mile away. My mother had spent most of her life in Ballina prior to moving to England in her early thirties, so on the rare occasions that she returned complete with her young son there were visits to be made to family and friends, many of whom had known her since she was herself only seven or eight. ”Ah! Sure! He’s a Shannon!” (this being my mother’s maiden name) would be the reaction of so many of the folks in each shop in turn as we stopped at almost every one, or so it seemed to me, on our travels.
To a small boy, some shops were more interesting than others. In particular, there was Slater’s the photographers. The business is there still, so far as I know. The resulting photographs show that there was at least one more holiday in Ireland while I was at primary school, probably in 1950. The photography was not the main attraction to me in those days. It was the big ice cream cone that came afterwards – also from Slater’s.
I remember being taken to a local peat bog where the peat was being cut and stacked. The sight, and especially the smell, has remained with me ever since together with the happiest associations.
Then there was the more formal courtesy visit to the convent at which my mother had spent her schooldays. For this I was briefed, no, “drilled” would be a better description, in advance. Things were different in those days. Children were expected to be seen but not heard, to speak only when spoken to and to be clean and tidy and immaculately turned out on formal visits to the convent and elsewhere. We were expected to know how to behave – for example, to stand when adults entered the room and not sit again until instructed to do so. There were all sorts of finer points of behaviour which came naturally after a while and which did us no harm at all.
It really was a different world.
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Preserving the records
Recent discussions about the decline in handwriting have highlighted a disturbing thought, namely, can digital equipment and media provide a reliable means of long-term storage for our written records, photographs and music? If my experiences have been anything to go by then the answer is no.
My first computers were Amstrad PCWs which stored everything on removable floppy discs. Just to be awkward, these were not the same discs as used in “IBM-compatible PCs” so that when I upgraded eventually to a Dell PC it was necessary to use a special cable and software to transfer all my text discs from PCW to Dell, and then import them into Microsoft Word. Those were the days when “state of the art” so far as the general public were concerned amounted to 100mb hard drives, Windows 3.1 and the WWW was for a small minority of “anoraks”.
Now, apparently, PC floppies are obsolete though I have still a couple of dozen unused. Anticipating this, I put all my back-up storage on to CDs. Then the trouble began. Despite careful storage some CDs later proved unreadable (even in the machine on which they had been recorded). Later CD drives failed to read CDs made on earlier drives and so on. Add to this major computer/hard drive breakdowns (three in 20 years) – precisely the reasons for making back-up discs in the first place – and, one way or another I lost hundreds of digital photos a few years ago and still more files in 2006.
Fortunately, most of the really important photos and text files pre-dated the advent of home computers and are safe still in their original paper form. Now, I use a one-year-old laptop and have everything important backed up on CDs and on a less than one-year-old USB hard drive. I am reasonably confident that I will not suffer major losses of computer content during the next few years but that is not the point.
The point is that I have family photos and other documents (for example) dating back into the 19th Century mostly in their original form. They, at least, could well last for another couple of centuries or more. However, in view of the ever more widespread use of digital equipment and storage media, how can today’s text documents, photos (and music files) be stored securely for the benefit of the next four or five (or more) generations? Or are we expected to become a society which is happy to discard anything that is more than a year or two old, including all traces of our own day to day history?
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