Seeking John Thomas

Five weeks of sick leave gives one time to fiddle. To do some of those things that have been at the back of one's mind for a while.

Oh, stop it. You know what I mean.

My current project is genealogy. In the last few years, a good number of Internet search engines and databases have sprung up to make this easier than, say, ten years ago. With such assistance, so far I have been relatively successful [sic!], and in one case have got back as far as the 16th Century.

The good dude keltanen asked me yesterday what I get out of it. One thing, I said, was a sense of identity.

Let me reconsider that. What I mean, I think, is a sense of connection: with people, with history, with a culture.

For example, Charles Dickens published Nicholas Nickleby in 1838-1839. I now know with a high degree of probability that, at that time, my great-great grandfather James was a teenage woolsorter in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The genealogy gives me a personal context to a whole set of historical and literary images and allusions that I have accumulated over the years. I can now do this to some extent all the way back to Shakespeare.

Another bonus is being able to see how a cultural identity has developed over time, and to be able to get a personal reference point in that as well. For example, although I haven't yet found an actual John Thomas among my ancestors, it is certain that Thomas begat John and John begat Thomas. And with the amount of begetting that went on in those times, it becomes easy to see how certain expressions arose.