At some point, writing family history comes down to writing about yourself. Without that nothing unites this disparate collection of people. So I’ll start with me.
I was born in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago, the second of my parents three children. My German mother and Trinidadian father had met in London, gotten married in Canada, and after the birth of my sister, moved back to Trinidad.
My first years were spent surrounded by and connected to family. My grandparents, my father’s eight siblings and several of his cousins, and my own growing tribe of cousins. I was the eleventh grandchild of what would eventually be eighteen. More importantly, I was born in the middle of a cluster – there were four of us born in little over a year, nine of us in six years including both my older sister and younger brother.
When I was three we moved to Canada, where we lived for the next six years. Six years doesn’t sound all that long now, but it was a lifetime as a child. Canada played an important role in my development as a fan of family history because there was none (for me). There was history aplenty where we lived, but it wasn’t mine. Moving back to Trinidad at age 9 changed that – it connected me to family – not just my cousins, uncles, aunts and grandparents, but my father’s cousins and a few surviving uncles and aunts of his. Some were names I knew or even people I vague remembered, but others were completely new. Having lived without family for so long I wanted to know everything about them. I wanted to know who my ancestors were, to better understand where I came from.
My interest in family history grew with my interest in history. I don’t know where I got the idea of tree thinking from my mother, who showed me how to use it to understand family relationships, or if I got it first from my Kings and Queens of England books, which traced (most notably) the family history behind the War of the Roses. Regardless – one interest fed the other, and soon I was building trees of my grandparents siblings.
But my interest in family history was fed by my interest in history in other ways. My grandparents lived in a house that my great-grandparents had built “almost 100 years ago”. (I was later told “about 1890”; documents later cast doubt on that date.) It also helped that my great-grandparents had started from nothing (indentured labourers imported from India) but ended up very wealthy. (Unfortunately, that wealth didn’t make it down to my generation.) Stories of ancestors also made these people real.
Before returning to Trinidad, death was no more than an idea (and probably one I didn’t grasp very well), but that changed after we returned home. One of my great-uncles died shortly after I met him (by chance, after we prevailed on my father to visit the site where his grandfather had once lived). In Form 1 (6th grade) a teacher died only a short time after he replaced another teacher who quit. (Who we drove to quit.) While these were real enough, they evoked little more than curiosity. Things were to change in short order.
My grandmother died when I was 12. We have been back in Trinidad a little more than three years – a flash for me today, but still a significant amount to time to me then. I had always been close to her – even as a small child – and her death was to remain my most profound experience of death for the next 27 years. And yet, for the budding genealogist, her death was a revelation. Her funeral brought the family in – not just the immediate family, but all sorts of cousins of my father’s, and family friends. And when people gathered, people told stories about the past. And then we went to the corner of the cemetery filled with family plots and headstones of relatives close and distant.