THE ANCESTOR WORSHIP PROJECT
(this article was first published in the Shropshire Family History Society Journal, December 2005)
I wrote poetry long before I became interested in genealogy. When I married, I continued writing under my maiden name – Kitson – but didn’t think much about the history of my name until the 1901 census became available online. The bug bit me hard, but soon I realised that I lacked a historical perspective. I had a collection of names and dates, but that was all.
Would it be possible to write a sequence of genealogy poems? At first the idea sounded mad. If one’s own ancestry is interesting only to relatives and fellow genealogists, would anyone else be interested in the poems?
When I started writing, I saw that a fantastic store of raw poetic material lay at my fingertips. Envisioning those lost lives brought to life my bare facts. Using available records and snippets of family history I remembered hearing from my grandparents, I tried to piece together a picture of their circumstances. What was it like to be a lead miner in Shropshire in 1870? Could I really put myself in the shoes of a woman with ten children who lived in a two up, two down?
As I wrote the poems, I fell more and more in love with my ancestors, and with my Shropshire heritage. My surname was no longer just a name. It represented a very real connection with the past. Of course, I couldn’t really know what it felt like to live through the English Civil War or the Industrial Revolution, but through genealogy I have a much better understanding of history. It isn’t all about wars and kings, it’s about ordinary people getting on with their lives, remote from power and influence.
My first poem was inspired by a dog-eared sepia postcard showing the 1909 marriage of my great-aunt Emily Bunting to Walter Mercer. A snapshot, a moment in time. Stiff, posed people. What had they been doing in the moments before the photographer called them together? What did they do when the photographer told them to relax? Wonderful though it is to have the postcard, I longed to see beyond the frame of the picture – something I could only invent, never know for certain :-
The bridesmaids giggle at each other.
The groom kisses the bride. The women in hats walk away
in a dignified manner, the hems of their skirts brushing the grass.
One thing that struck me was the great number of illegitimate children born in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I suppose we think of ‘single mothers’ as a modern phenomenon, but of course this isn’t the case.
What must it have been like to be an unmarried girl from a poor family, pregnant, in the 1800s? It was a subject to which I kept returning. I wrote about Violetta Cooper, born in Abdon in 1751, the mother of three illegitimate children. I pictured a feisty young woman – head held high/as her firstborn fatherless child is baptised. How did she feel, having her child described as ‘base’ in the parish register?
In my search to find the reason why my ancestor Mary Wright was in prison at the time of the 1891 census, I came across an Inquisition regarding a Mary Wright, whose ‘unnamed illegitimate child’ had been found dead in a pigsty. Whether or not this referred to ‘my’ Mary Wright became almost irrelevant. The copy of the Inquisition – the copperplate handwriting, the emotionless legal jargon – began to haunt me. I imagined a desperate young woman, a servant girl –
Later, when the sun sets, she stares out
Towards the pig sty, as though by effort of will
She can make the child vanish,
Pretend it never was.
My ancestor Annie Bunting (b.1869) married a year after the birth of her first, illegitimate, child. She went on to be the mother of fourteen children, including a set of twins and one of triplets! I see her as a rather harassed but cheerful soul, just getting on with life. Her first child was born in a workhouse where, I discovered, unmarried mothers were sometimes forced to wear yellow, to distinguish them from the ‘ordinary’ poor. Was she ashamed or indignant? I decided a mixture of both, with the anger coming out on top – When I get out of here I’ll never wear yellow.
Perhaps even more striking than the extent of illegitimacy, are the depths of poverty in which many of my ancestors found themselves. The names of members of the Bradney family, from Pontesbury, feature heavily in the Poor Law records. They clearly relied on parish relief to keep body and soul together during times of unemployment.
Many of the Bradneys seem to have decided that one way to escape the poverty trap was to emigrate to America. Whilst still in the UK, some of them converted to Mormonism. In 1872 the family sailed from Liverpool. They settled in the aptly-named Paradise, in Utah, where they seem to have enjoyed a higher standard of living and made a modest success of their lives. I considered what it must have been like to leave a homeland for a country of unknowns (no television or Internet in those days!).
Her last glance takes in the dirty dock,
The muscly knots of people pushing.
Then I wondered what it was like when they arrived – were they homesick? Did their accents mark them as ‘different’? How long did it take before they felt they belonged?
Most of the poems are written from the point of view of women. I could find no trace of the maiden names for many of the women in my family tree. They seemed to have no existence prior to marriage. I felt it important to acknowledge their contribution to their families and to society. No one could deny the grindingly hard life of a miner, but what about the women who brought up large families, or found menial employment to supplement the meagre family income? Two of my great-great-aunts never married, and earned a small income as dressmakers -
They sew late into the night, almost blindly,
By instinct, their sensitive hands aware
Of the bump of each exquisite stitch.
One of my ancestors, a schoolmaster, employed a blind housekeeper, who appears to have stayed with him for many years, even when she was quite elderly. I visualize a resourceful woman (on one census record she gives her occupation as ‘Knitting’), and I like to think my ancestor appreciated her worth, this gentle man who saw beyond/Her affliction.
Sometimes it was a name that sparked an idea for a new poem. Amongst the many Johns and Williams, Marys and Annes, there was the occasional unusual name. One of my favourites is Mellonia Blakeway, b.1784 in the Church Stretton area. I wondered who had decided to give her such a pretty first name. Where had it originated? I learnt that Mellonia was the Roman goddess of bees. Was my Mellonia’s father perhaps a beekeeper? At any rate, the name inspired one of my most joy-filled poems, informed by my own childhood love for Church Stretton –
The sky is pure heaven, blue and gold.
On her tongue, the taste of honey, rich and smooth.
Perhaps I romanticise. My ancestors’ lives were tough, no doubt about it, and many of them couldn’t write their own names, let alone read poetry. However historically inaccurate these poems are, through them I have come to love these people. I am proud to be one of them, which is why I called the sequence of poems ‘Ancestor Worship’. Worship is perhaps not quite the right word, though. Respect is nearer the mark. I take my hat off to them, these very ordinary people: my ancestors, my kin.