Family Feelings

Yes, I KNOW this is my third post in succession and that I should be switching the computer off and going to bed, but if I don't post stuff when I think of it, then chances are it doesn't get posted at all ...

I've been doing a lot of thinking about family recently, brought on by my frantic forays back into the world of family tree tracing. I often wonder whether my ancestors ever thought for a minute that someone born 300 years after them would think about them and wonder who they were - I imagine that most likely they didn't, but what a cool way for them to live on.

It's no secret that I have lots of unanswered questions about my family history - I want to know so many things - like who my grandparents were before they became my grandparents (ie, they were somebody's child, then somebody's spouse, somebody's parent before they became grandparents), and it drives me mental that I'm never ever going to get the answers I want. I know it's fanciful, but while I've been concentrating on my maternal grandfather's line recently I can almost imagine that GranGran will come to me (a la Scrooge in A Christmas Carol) and take me back with him to show me the things I really want to know. Mum is convinced that the house they lived in in Hackney (which was a shop) was knocked down years ago - that's just something else to drive me barmy, because I want to be able to go there and put my hand on the brickwork and know that I'm touching something that he touched so many years ago. I found a picture of a property for sale on that street (actually on the towpath of the River Lea) a couple of weeks ago - which used to be a pub - and discovered that it was built in 1912, when GranGran would have been about 7 years old. My research suggests that they moved to the shop sometime around 1907/1908, so they were there when the pub was built. Is it daft to grasp at something so tenuous as GranGran having watched the pub being built?

Going back even further, I discovered that the Clark family hailed from Aylesbury originally - so why the hell did they move to London?? I found a picture on a website taken in about 1925 of Upper Hundreds in Aylesbury - where my greatgreatgrandfather, Harry (Henry) Clark was born in 1860. The picture shows a few houses and a Salvation Army Hall. Obviously I have no way of knowing whether one of the houses in the picture was the house that Harry was born and brought up in, but it's a fairly safe bet that the street hadn't changed all that much ... so I've been sat staring at this picture, seeing something that my greatgreatgrandfather saw well over a hundred years ago (the street was pulled down and replaced with a concrete jungle in the 1980s, I believe) ... but I have no bloody way of knowing anything other than that he lived on that street. He'd never in a million years have thought that his greatgreatgrandaughter would be interested in him, and in who he was, and even in what he looked like. Frustrated? You betcha! Why oh why oh why can't I go back in time and see all these people that are responsible ultimately for my existence today??? Why can't I go and find out what they thought, what they felt, how life was like?

This only makes me more determined to leave something behind for future generations of my family so that if they are interested they will have at least some information that might help them to know more about me.

If I don't go to bed now, there is no way that I will be able to get up in the morning ...