I had never been interested in family history. Or rather, I had always steered clear of it. In my family the stories seemed so sad. The great uncle who was dropped from the boat race at the last minute; the second cousin who was almost a bishop. There was a constant sense of just missing out on being rich, smart, important or successful. In our family you had to dance with an awful lot of people before you got to the Prince of Wales.
Later, when my life had not gone as well as it should have-when small failures had taken the gloss off what was supposed to be a charmed existence-I fell to thinking that it might actually have been damaging, this sense of myself as coming from a long line of people who never quite got what they wanted. It seemed to inform the things I chose to write about. My first book, which had been brewing for years, was a study of Victorian governesses, a class of marginal women if ever there was one. With their noses pressed against the goings-on of grander people, their touchy pride in their status and their unconvincing insistence that it was inner qualities that mattered-my identification with them, I see now, could be traced back to my inverted family romance.
All this was unconscious. In my thinking life, I took scrupulous care to avoid ancestor worship, even of the upside-down kind. I had grown up in the home counties, where people had a habit of putting up their family trees in the lavatory. Indeed, in mid-Sussex bloodlines were so important that animals had them as well. The dogs in these self-assured homes usually had pictures of their parents and even grandparents in the downstairs cloakroom. In my more uncertain home, we made a point of getting our animals from rescue centres, where they arrived without pedigree or personal history. I assumed that this was because, since my parents were both only children, we needed our pets to match the fact that we had no cousins. Now I think it was simply because, without a flourishing family tree and pictures of doggy ancestors, there was more room to make up stories about who we almost could have been.
So when I started my new book 18 months ago, a biography of Mrs Beeton, the Victorian cook and teacher of etiquette, I had not thought about family history-mine or anyone else's-for a long time. For someone who seemed to embody not only a particular tradition but Tradition in general, Mrs Beeton turned out to be a surprisingly slight character. Not much was known about her. All there was to go on were a couple of bad pictures and a sketchy chronology. No one could say exactly when or where she was born. She may have had four children, or five. Her mother's name was uncertain. Her grandfather died either in the 1820s or the 1840s. This obscurity will come as no surprise to anyone who has tried to track down a middle-class woman in the days before proper public record keeping, but it still sat oddly with the received image of Mrs Beeton as a rooted and conspicuous presence in Victorian domestic history.
As I went on with my research, this slipperiness started to make a kind of sense. For instead of the middle-aged household authority of popular imagining, Mrs Beeton was actually a 25-year-old journalist who knew how to ventriloquise the voice of an older, expert woman. Her public persona was so untethered to biographical fact that it could be tugged and pulled in any way that made commercial sense. Although she died in 1865 at the age of 28, "Mrs Beeton" soon became a lucrative brand name that was used to sell a range of products over the next 150 years. Even today her name shifts indifferent supermarket pasties. My job as her biographer would be to strip away the layers of myth and hype that had wrapped themselves around "Mrs Beeton" until there was nothing left but the modest, proven chronology of the girl who was born Isabella Mary Mayson.
This wasn't as reductive as it sounds. By getting back to basics, I could begin to build a richer picture. By tracking Mrs Beeton through census returns, spotting her in parish registers, confirming her death in the civil register, I would not merely start to make sense of the emotional patterns of her life-the trauma that came from losing a father at the age of four and the misery of two dead babies by the age of 25-I would also be able to place her in the volatile social world of early Victorian Britain. I could hunt down the occupations of her grandfathers (as it turns out, an odd pairing of vicar and groom), look at wills, work out bank balances, find out how many servants she and her husband, the publisher Samuel Beeton, employed. I could trace her trajectory from its wobbly start to its untimely end. I would be doing family history, but with a difference. It was not mine, but someone else's and it would be done in the service of public narrative rather than personal fantasy.
But I had not bargained for the sheer power of genealogy, the capacity it has to suck you in to its neverending stories. When I first visited the Family Records Centre (FRC) in Islington 18 months ago, I should have spotted the telltale signs of a cult straight away. There was the bookshop with its specialist literature, from My Ancestors Were Merchant Seamen to the darkly Gothic Disused Cemeteries of Outer London. The assistants, too, were oddly knowledgeable and engaged for public service staff: instead of having to strain to catch their attention, it was hard to shake them off. And then there were the punters who started to fill the place from 11 am (though they look like early risers, amateur genealogists are thrifty and always travel off-peak).
Over the following weeks, I got to know the rhythms of this group of men, women and adolescents who arrived each day to track down their great-great aunts and long lost cousins. They stow their macs in lockers, come prepared with pencils (being caught in possession of a biro in a public record office is shaming), and know exactly who they want to find each day. On the first floor, where all births, marriages and deaths since 1837 are stored, they heave and swing the giant registers around with practised ease, like porters in a meat market. Whisking through pages with an expert index finger, they scan the lists of copperplated names, searching for a second cousin who was born during the war, a great uncle who turns out to have been married after all.
At first I could not understand the stifled whoops of pleasure-an intake of breath, a hissy y-e-e-s-that accompanied a "hit." But within a few days I had my own repertoire of victory signals, the most explicit of which was "got you, you bugger!" It is very satisfying tracking down someone who has been eluding you, scampering out of sight, falling between the cracks of the paper record. Isabella Beeton was like that. She was born a year before civil registration began; she was absent from the 1841 census when the rest of her family was present and correct. Wherever she should have been, she was not. When I found her-born on the other side of London from where anecdote had placed her, lodging in Cumberland when she should have been in Cheapside-I did a little dance of joy. Anywhere else it would look mad; in the FRC no one batted an eyelid.
Upstairs at the centre is where you go to consult the census. It is a tricky business, especially if you are trying to locate a household between 1841 and 1871. There are indexes and conversion tables to puzzle out, reels of microfilm to spool through, impossible Victorian handwriting to untangle. It is grinding work but, for constructing family trees, invaluable. The census doesn't just tell you where your ancestors were living one random summer night each decade, but provides you with their ages, occupations and family relationships. They may have fibbed to the authorities, but that is half the point: the stories people concoct about jobs, lovers, children and birthdates send you to the places where you need to dig for deeper truths.
So useful is this information to family historians that the authorities were caught off-guard at the beginning of this year when the 1901 census went online. It lasted only a few hours. Over-burdened by 1.2m hits, the system collapsed and has stayed in a doddery on-off state ever since.
The Public Record Office was wrong-footed over the 1901 census because it hadn't realised what most people already knew: that genealogy is now Britain and America's biggest hobby. To be accurate, it is family history and not genealogy that pulls so many people to the FRC every day. Aside from the professional historian, it is hard to see who could possibly be interested in the story of a family other than their own. Indeed, there is nothing more tedious than going down to the refreshment room in the FRC and finding yourself corralled into a discussion with a stranger about whether their great uncle emigrated to Canada in 1892 or 1895.
Initially I had other, more high-minded excuses for avoiding these conversations. I remained convinced that most visitors to the FRC were frittering their time away on ancestor worship, when they could be thinking constructively about the future. I had a fantasy-wrong and snobbish, I now see-that they were returning to the local Rotary club to bore people with accounts of how grand or special their family had once been. A little of that may go on-there are several websites dedicated to helping you discover whether you are descended from royalty. But by forcing myself to attend carefully to snack break conversations, I began to realise that what people were hoping to find in their family tree was not so much grandeur as difference. They were reacting, I think, to a sense that, these days, it is hard to tell ourselves apart. Thanks to social and economic changes-welcome, mostly-in post-war Britain, we increasingly look and sound the same. We have the same jobs, eat the same food, have the same expectations. What family history can do is put you in touch with something that feels rougher and more real. An illegitimate grandfather is just as acceptable as a duke. Ideal is a grandfather who was the illegitimate son of a duke. Things that used to matter even as recently as 20 years ago-a great aunt in the workhouse, an uncle with syphilis-now seem positively sparky. Having a cousin who went Awol from the army is something to boast about. Shame, thank God, is not what it used to be.
Yet there remains a tension in these stories exchanged over the sandwiches. Whichever way you slice it, genealogy generates a fatalistic narrative that makes you the passive recipient of whatever your ancestors happened to hand down. It is chillingly determinist. But the people I spoke to, people like Bill from Maidstone and Jo from Tottenham, seemed to be doing creative things with the ancestors they had found. They were using them to generate new stories, ones that opened up rather than closed down the future. Bill said he had found a great uncle who, according to the 1861 census, was a wax-flower maker and wondered what it meant. Was that why his eldest lad worked as a florist, something which had always, well, surprised him? Jo, who had herself down as a north London Irish Catholic, "so boring it wasn't true," had come up with an ?migr? step-grandfather and a clutch of step-cousins, presumably still living in Lithuania, "it's so exciting, I keep wondering what they're doing right this minute."
Thanks to the internet Jo will probably soon be able to find out. For every person who visits the FRC on an off-peak train ticket, there are ten people at home logging on to the huge number of websites dedicated to helping them trace their family trees. Indeed, genealogical sites now get more daily hits than those offering pornography. The sites range from those of the various branches of the Public Record Office through to big American commercial outfits such as Ancestry.com which, once they have got hold of you, refuse to let go. (Only this morning I received an e-mail beseeching me "Kathryn, why not let us help you find your Hughes ancestors?")
It was through the internet that I met Isobel Beeton. Not Isabella Beeton, but her great-great niece. Isobel is a social services clerk from Chichester who has been researching her family for the past year. She is not especially interested in Isabella who, after all, is no Beeton but only married to one. Still, Isobel was named after Isabella and wanted to learn more. I found her fingerprints all over the web. She was on the message boards of various genealogical sites, sharing information with family historians, asking for leads about the Beetons, passing on material which might be useful to others. I e-mailed her, she e-mailed back. Soon we were doing it every day, attaching scanned images of wills, certificates, photographs, not to mention hypotheses, speculations and frustrations about various Beetons and their ability to slip through our fingers. Isobel was a dab hand at the technical side and told me how to do all kinds of tricks, including setting out a professional-looking family tree using Word, instead of improvising with pencil and ruler.
The moment just before we finally met on Arundel station, I wanted to run away. Surely the advantage of doing genealogy on the web was that you never actually had to meet the other people involved? Why had I stepped from the virtual world into the flesh-and-blood one? Isobel, however, was comfortable with it because, as she explained, she had spent the last few months meeting up with various Beetons. Second cousins, third cousins, steps, halves and even adopted, anyone who was within a day's travel. Mostly they were lovely. Isobel, a middle-aged woman who had run the gamut of life's usual difficulties and disappointments, told me over lunch that it was only at this stage in her life that she had developed a desire to reconstitute her extended family. Her teenage children weren't interested, her partner only half-so, but for her it had become a quest to fill out the picture of where, and who, she had come from.
Genealogy is a sneaky business, though. Just when you have reconciled yourself to it as a harmless, even honourable activity, followed by people of humbling good sense and skill, along comes something new to trip you up. Here's the thing. The practice of family history, in Britain and in the US, is almost entirely dependent on the Mormon Church. Anyone who has located their great-great grandfather in Newcastle has probably done so by using something called the International Genealogical Index (IGI). It is an extraordinary resource containing the births, marriages and some deaths of 725m dead people. The data is culled from church and state records drawn from 110 countries. Britain is particularly well- covered, but even parts of the Samoan Islands have been inputted-useful if your great uncle was a stranded seaman who went native.
The IGI is managed by the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City as a way of keeping tabs on possible converts to their idiosyncratic faith. Their crazy logic goes like this: anyone who died without having the opportunity to become a Mormon needs to be given the chance to put things right. Otherwise they face the prospect of an eternity spent sitting forlornly outside the gates of Paradise, unable to get in. Mass post-mortem conversion won't do, for some reason. In order for the mechanism to work, each dead individual has to be identified by name and then presented personally with the Mormon message by way of a "covenanting ceremony." Since the Mormons are scrupulously polite, they do not bully the dead-who may well have been Jewish or Muslim in their earthly existence-into accepting the covenant. It is left up to each individual soul to decide.
In their keenness to identify as many potential post-mortem converts as possible, the Mormons do sometimes get careless about details. Enthusiastic volunteers are apt to send information culled from sloppy secondary reading. Once it is in the system it is hard to weed out. Thus someone has entered George Eliot, under her real name of Mary Ann Evans, as being born in London, whereas it should be Warwickshire. As a result she is presumably still languishing in the spirit world 120 years after her death, waiting for a correctly addressed covenant.
Until recently I had withstood the temptation to tap in the names of my ancestors to the IGI to see what happened. It seemed important to keep the boundaries clear. I was a historian researching another person's life, not someone who needed to concoct sentimental stories about her own. Then, one day, I couldn't resist it. But there was nothing. No hits at all. At first I thought it must be because my family's name is so common: if you have a father from Wales called John Hughes then you can't expect results first time. So I tried my mother's family-a bit fancier, well-known in a little England duffery sort of way. Nothing. Everyone else who was consulting the Index at the FRC had been hissing and punching the air as their ancestors rolled up the screen in mocking profusion. I couldn't locate a single one. For months I had avoided trying because it seemed elitist. Then I hadn't because I feared that my family might turn out to be dull and dreary, more puritans than cavaliers. But now, it transpired, it was worse than that. My family was so insignificant that they didn't show up at all. The Mormons, who make a point of extending their invitation to everyone, had decided that my family weren't worth bothering with. We had missed out on heaven, just as we had missed out on everything else.
