A
s family historians, we spend much time researching how our ancestors fared during events of great moment, some dire and terrifying. From our relatively safe and stable late 20th and early 21st century perspectives, we look back and wonder how on earth they coped through devastating wars, harsh poverty and endemic and pandemic disease. We sympathise, try to empathise and almost comprehend how they must have felt about young lives cut short and longer lives ending in isolation and indignity. There can be few amongst us who haven’t cried, learning about forebears who have suffered through unimaginable privation, catastrophe or loss.
By the time you read this I’m not sure where we’ll all be, but as I write, I know beyond imagination or doubt we’re living through something so historic it will figure in family histories for centuries. The country, in fact much of the world, is in lockdown, Covid-19 is tearing families apart and people are dying. It is the stuff of scary novels, of old documents and disaster movies. And it is real. It will have touched and may be still touching many of our lives, perhaps irrevocably and my heart goes out to all of us. I tried to write a light piece this month, to take our minds off things, but I couldn’t. Not quite.
Instead, I’ll tell you about a photograph I have, and since this crisis began, a face I can’t get out of my mind. The photograph is of a family wedding in September 1920, and the original belongs to my second cousin John, whose parents are the bride and groom. In the photo are two more great-uncles, my great-grandparents, my grandparents and my father, a four-month-old blur struggling in the arms of his mother, who is trying to stop him from grabbing the nearby hat of my great-grandmother. Grandma looks weary and a little sad as well she might, having lost a brother in the Great War. He was one of six she brought up alone when her mother died.