A succession of Willies

Margaret Thatcher famously once said that every prime minister needs a Willie.

I, too, have been searching for a Willie, but in my family history. And now, by a bit of good fortune, I have solved one of those little knots that come up in genealogical research.

I knew that William existed. He was my great-great-great-great grandfather. However, the transcribed records that I have managed to lay my hands on seemed to indicate that he had, in fact, died in childhood. This would have been a problem, and might have led to the tricky discovery that I was merely a figment of my own imagination.

My existence is secure, however.

Back then in the mid-1700s, it was not uncommon that, if a child died, one of the subsequent children would be given the same name. There are several cases of this on my books. In this case, however, the burial of the first William took place on the exact same date as the baptism of the second William. For some reason, only half of this information got into the transcribed records.

With my twenty-first century sensitivities, this seems a bit cold. I can almost imagine the gruff Yorkshire father: "Eeh, 'eck. Now 'e's gone, you'd better 'ave 'is name, lad!"

In this particular instance, it even seems likely that William One was still alive when William Two was born. So at what point was William Two's name decided? Was William One still warm?

It also makes me ponder on the psychological effect on someone of going through life bearing the name of a deceased sibling.

It can't have been too heavy a burden on William Two, however. When he grew up, he named his third child William. That's my great-great-great grandfather.

It all gives me the willies.

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.