the way we were
Sep. 12th, 2007 02:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
llywelaWent with my Mum at lunchtime today to see the Bats, Boots and Balls Exhibition, which is currently on at the Old Library in town. It isn't a big exhibition - mostly just information about the history of sport in the city, with illustrative images - but Mum wanted to go because of the picture below, used in the advertising and featured in the exhibition. The picture is of the Grange Gasworks Womens Baseball Team of 1918.
Standing at the left hand end of the back row is Mum's great-aunt Rose, who was then a member of the team, but later went on to become a back street abortionist and ended up in jail. Illegitimate and raised mostly in an orphanage, rather than by the family, although they always kept up contact with her, she went through some pretty rough times before finally managing to make a good marriage and settle down in comfort. There she was, displayed proudly in this exhibition. She never could have imagined that, way back then.
There's always something quite poignant about coming face to face with public evidence of relatives long gone. I felt the same way when Mum and I found John Melean's name - her great-grandfather, my great-great-grandfather - on a World War I memorial at the start of the summer. We'd always known that he'd died in that war - the story in the family goes that his wife, Nana Lena, miscarried twins when she heard the news - but we didn't know any details, and didn't have enough information to find out more. And there he is on the war memorial, Tank Regiment, the clue we needed to be able to trace him properly for family tree research. Having that evidence there in front of you makes them seem more real, somehow. Drives it home that he was a real person: the son of a Norwegian sailor who settled in the city and married an Irish immigrant, his daughter Beatrice was my great-grandmother, still alive when I was born.
Rose Fludder in the picture above was a real person, too, who lived and struggled to get by, just like we do today - not just a story told in the family. That photograph in the exhibition captures such a tiny snapshot of an amazingly colourful life. Her little half-sister Clara became another of my great-grandmothers.
Funny how many strands there are to a family, when you start looking. How many different directions you can look in, all those branches eventually coming together in your own family.
Standing at the left hand end of the back row is Mum's great-aunt Rose, who was then a member of the team, but later went on to become a back street abortionist and ended up in jail. Illegitimate and raised mostly in an orphanage, rather than by the family, although they always kept up contact with her, she went through some pretty rough times before finally managing to make a good marriage and settle down in comfort. There she was, displayed proudly in this exhibition. She never could have imagined that, way back then.
There's always something quite poignant about coming face to face with public evidence of relatives long gone. I felt the same way when Mum and I found John Melean's name - her great-grandfather, my great-great-grandfather - on a World War I memorial at the start of the summer. We'd always known that he'd died in that war - the story in the family goes that his wife, Nana Lena, miscarried twins when she heard the news - but we didn't know any details, and didn't have enough information to find out more. And there he is on the war memorial, Tank Regiment, the clue we needed to be able to trace him properly for family tree research. Having that evidence there in front of you makes them seem more real, somehow. Drives it home that he was a real person: the son of a Norwegian sailor who settled in the city and married an Irish immigrant, his daughter Beatrice was my great-grandmother, still alive when I was born.
Rose Fludder in the picture above was a real person, too, who lived and struggled to get by, just like we do today - not just a story told in the family. That photograph in the exhibition captures such a tiny snapshot of an amazingly colourful life. Her little half-sister Clara became another of my great-grandmothers.
Funny how many strands there are to a family, when you start looking. How many different directions you can look in, all those branches eventually coming together in your own family.
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Date: 2007-09-12 01:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-12 02:11 pm (UTC)Apparently so. Nothing to do with us, though - our guy is John Melean, not Mclean.
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Date: 2007-09-12 02:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-12 02:19 pm (UTC)Your great-great aunt Rose has a very nice smile, and it's so strange to think she's gone and she had was just at the beginning of a whole life.
I love this kind of history: the personal kind, where it's about real people.
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Date: 2007-09-12 06:22 pm (UTC)I once found myself looking at an old Sunday School photograph taken in the village I grew up in and feeling puzzled because there were so many familiar faces but no-one that I actually knew - there couldn't be, the photograph had been taken eighty years before. And then it dawned on me that they were familiar faces because I saw those same faces, the same shaped heads, the same poses and smiles in my primary school classroom in the same village all through my childhood - so they must have been the ancestors of my friends. It really brought home to me how completely the genes for appearance can pass down the generations.
We, our family, are off to Belgium in October to lay a wreath for my great uncle on the 90th anniversary of his death at Passchendaele. Like you with your great-great-grandfather, I started out knowing nothing about him and and now know a lot more and what made him a special and real human being. Thank you for sharing this with us.
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Date: 2007-09-13 08:32 pm (UTC)I love Family History. I have been tracing mine and Charlie's families for over 10 years and it is fascinating and so easy to get hooked.