My five grandchildren are blessed to have their grandparents around them and also two great grandparents. My Mother in law celebrated her 92nd birthday today and my Mum celebrated her 94th birthday last August. These two wonderful women have lived through almost a century of history and have memories of their parents and grandparents. Our grandparents and other elderly relatives are a link to our past and our family history, it is also one of the first things that I advise people who are beginning with their family history to do, to ask their elderly relatives for information about their past.
My Dad's parents died when he was a teenager and my Mum's father passed away two years before I was born, so I grew up with only one grandparent. Thankfully when I first became interested in family history at the age of 16, I was living close enough to my Nana to be able to talk to her regularly about her past and listen to her stories about her Edwardian childhood growing up in the seaside town of Bridlington.
I was also able to talk to my Dad's elder sisters, auntie Alice and auntie Lily who were teenagers when my Dad was born and were able to share stories of my grandparents and their childhood during the 1920's as well as my grandfather's experiences in the First World War.
Genealogy isn't just a list of names and dates but should become a patchwork full of stories of our family which brings the backdrop of history to life.
When I think of my auntie Alice I recall her story of my grandmother Charlotte, wrapping Alice and her sister in blankets and taking them out into a field on a cold winters day during a First World War air raid from zeppelins. Also stories of my Grandad who served in the Royal Garrison Artillery in Flanders and was hit by shrapnel at Hell Fire Corner and was for a time declared missing and presumed dead. Eventually after applying for a widow's pension my Grandmother received a notification that my Grandfather was alive and in a hospital in New Castle. Auntie Alice told me about the huge scar across his back and the problems with his lungs preventing him from being able to hold a full time job.
My Nana told me that her grandmother Eliza Challis had long black hair, and she gave me a perfume bottle that belonged to her mother which still carries her scent.
My Mum told me stories of her childhood, growing up in the 1930's and 40's, of sleeping in their air raid shelter during the Second World War and listening to the buzz bombs passing overhead, and her new pink coat being covered in plaster after a bomb dropped at the end of their road.
My Dad had stories about working on the dogem cars at Hull Fair, and how he learnt to drive whilst driving a laundry delivery truck. He told me about the death of his father when he was 13 and then the death of his mother a year later, and that he was sent to live with his aunt in SouthShields. Of his many jobs, even working for Billy Butlin, and where he was when the end of the war was announced.
All these stories paint a colourful picture of their lives and are so integral in helping us to understand who they where and who we are.
We need to record these stories and pass them down through the generations along with our own personal stories.
Sometimes stories can be remembered for several generations, my husband heard a story from his uncle Freek, who was also a Miller about a young Miller's assistant who almost fell into the machinery. The Miller was able to catch him by his collar and saved him from a painful death, the saying was that the young boy laughed but the Miller was white from fright. When my husband visited the windmill where this happened he discovered that the Miller who was "white from fright" had been a Miller there in the 1700's, whilst he had always thought that the story happened during his uncle's lifetime he realised that it was a story that had been passed down from generation to generation.
This is the power of stories, whether good, bad, happy, funny or sad our stories can help and inspire future generations.
