I think an understanding of the concepts in history is something that really sets humans aside from other species. I think science and technology and communication are really important too. But our ability to think and comprehend time, and our place within it, helps us make sense of life and the world around us. I’m fascinated with prehistory and the recent book from Alice Roberts, The Human Journey, covers how the planet was colonised by people and is a remarkable read. It presents as many questions as it answers and the motivations of our ancestors to move on is a thing that really fascinates me. One thing I’m sure of though is that people moved together and in groups, most likely based around family groups.
Some people have quite remarkable family backgrounds, although if we go back 1000 years nearly everyone in Europe has at least one common ancestor, so chances are we are all related to someone interesting, it is just that everyone knows who they have in their past. In my own recent family tree there isn’t much out of the ordinary, and over the previous hundred years I have very northern english family. From the last century my maternal grandfather is fairly interesting as he was a pretty good footballer and cricketer, apparently playing for the England team in the Deaf Olympics. But possibly the most interesting character, going back another generation, is one of my great grandfathers, this time on my paternal side. Thanks to the research carried out by my own father I know quite a bit about Charles Hansen who was Danish and worked, amongst other things, as a ship’s captain. What we don’t know is what motivated Charles to take to the sea and ultimately settle in Lincolnshire. Maybe it was just chance, the opportunity arose, and he had no grand plan. I think that a great thing about the period we live in now is that so much more is documented and anyone wanting to investigate their ancestors in another hundred years will be able to call on photos, video recordings, social media and even blog posts to see what people were doing and possibly even what we were thinking. And this may change considerably the way history is studied, and understood in future.
Hansen family tree. Charles, born 1866, was my grandmother Agnes’ father
Beyond my family history (which my dad has done a great job with) I’ve had a try at amateur research myself, looking into a couple of house histories, one which I lived in in Newcastle, and another belonging to some friends in Broughty Ferry near Dundee. The process of doing this was fascinating and I learned lots, including some useful transferable research skills, but also about the folk that inhabited these residences. In the case of the Broughty Ferry house a character by the name of John Chadwick, who was born in rural Derbyshire (near to where my father was born) in the mid-Victorian era. From what I could discover he lived a quite exciting life gradually moving north, via Manchester (near where I was born), before working as a confectionary salesperson for Cadburys and eventually retiring to Taunton in Devon. Having spent a great deal of time looking into the life of John Chadwick I felt I really got to know him. I would have loved to share what I’d found with his descendants but sadly I couldn’t trace anyone so if you know any Chadwicks in Dundee please get in touch!
Nowadays we think of people moving for work as a relatively new thing, but people have always travelled, be they Victorian salesman, Danish seaman, or prehistoric hunter gatherers. As I write this post there is much media debate about freedom of movement post-Brexit. And this brings me to a final thought. Maybe those involved in these decisions, about freedom of movement and international boundaries, could undertake some historical research themselves. It might give valuable perspective before they decide how much future generations are free to explore, discover new places, widen their horizons and create new lives for themselves.
(Yes I know it us yellow…)
