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The Dash
The Dash
There’s two dates in time that they’ll carve on your stone and everyone knows what they mean, what’s more important is the time that is known, in that little dash there in between.
What do you know about the time between your ancestors dates? I know a lot about my parents, or think I do, I’ve learnt a lot about my 4 grandparents. Family rumour and legend fills in the gaps for me with the generations that came before.
On our family trees we aim to find those 2 key dates, the ones we see on the stone, the ones we are sure of, the birth and the death, but what about that dash in between, what do we know from the facts we find and what can we learn from a more detailed look at their lives?
The family history needs to be filled out to include not just occupation, but what was the actual job? Where might they have worked, what would their daily employment be like? A little research would help to identify the trades and manufacturing industries that have been lost to the past and to progress.
Looking at town maps we can identify potential employers, most industrial towns had specific types of manufacturing, we can investigate working conditions and wages by researching contemporary social enquiries, especially during the later Victorian period when there was a developing social conscience and an emerging benevolent movement.
Not all fathers were reliable, not all mothers coped with the poverty and conditions of a working class existence, we encounter abandonment, illegitimacy and acts of low criminal activity that unless investigated and set against the social background our ancestors were living through, we cannot possibly understand, sympathise with or feel a sense of pride about, yet many families fought to survive all the desperate situations life had thrust on them and we can begin to realise that there were people surviving and living in such difficult conditions that today seem alien to us.
It’s not enough to just race through as many generations as we can find, these people were a lot more than just a set of 2 dates, their dashes in between were real lives which we have relied upon unknowingly to get us here, the very least we should be working towards is filling in that gap between their dates, to make that dash more important than just a line on out tree or the mark on their stone,
There’s two dates in time that they’ll carve on your stone and everyone knows what they mean, what’s more important is the time that is known, in that little dash there in between.
What do you know about the time between your ancestors dates? I know a lot about my parents, or think I do, I’ve learnt a lot about my 4 grandparents. Family rumour and legend fills in the gaps for me with the generations that came before.
On our family trees we aim to find those 2 key dates, the ones we see on the stone, the ones we are sure of, the birth and the death, but what about that dash in between, what do we know from the facts we find and what can we learn from a more detailed look at their lives?
The family history needs to be filled out to include not just occupation, but what was the actual job? Where might they have worked, what would their daily employment be like? A little research would help to identify the trades and manufacturing industries that have been lost to the past and to progress.
Looking at town maps we can identify potential employers, most industrial towns had specific types of manufacturing, we can investigate working conditions and wages by researching contemporary social enquiries, especially during the later Victorian period when there was a developing social conscience and an emerging benevolent movement.
Not all fathers were reliable, not all mothers coped with the poverty and conditions of a working class existence, we encounter abandonment, illegitimacy and acts of low criminal activity that unless investigated and set against the social background our ancestors were living through, we cannot possibly understand, sympathise with or feel a sense of pride about, yet many families fought to survive all the desperate situations life had thrust on them and we can begin to realise that there were people surviving and living in such difficult conditions that today seem alien to us.
It’s not enough to just race through as many generations as we can find, these people were a lot more than just a set of 2 dates, their dashes in between were real lives which we have relied upon unknowingly to get us here, the very least we should be working towards is filling in that gap between their dates, to make that dash more important than just a line on out tree or the mark on their stone,
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