So, it's New Year ... !?!

The New Year has arrived, but in many ways it's same old, same old.  And why, everywhere you look, does it have those pretentious capital letters?  Does it think it's special?  What has it done to deserve them?  No one says that it was a good Old Year, now, do they?  I suppose it all goes back to schooldays.  I mean, which of us doesn't remember coming to the end of an exercise book: writing with a sense of exhaustion rather than achievement on the final pages of a book that is now tatty and looking sorry for itself, after being humped in and out of the desk and carried around in a schoolbag for several terms?  We looked forward to the issue of a bright new one to replace it, with a shiny cover, and the clearly marked legend on the front.  And all that closely-packed virgin paper inside, with its sharp, just-cut edges; simply begging to be used.  How carefully we wrote on that first page!

So now we have a new year.  What will we do with it?  If you're anything like me that will depend on other people more than on your own efforts.  Just as a small example.  I've been paid already since January 1st, although I haven't done any work since Christmas Eve.  It's because someone was working in the office during the intervening week, processing paperwork and keeping the wheels of commerce turning.  At the next level, what I do will depend on whoever has need of stuff being moved from A to B.  It will depend on their coming to the firm to get this done, and on my being allocated the job.  And then, on a grander scale, there is the contribution of our economy, the very survival and continuation of business itself with all that implies for the many layers of the national workforce.  We say we're self-employed but, in reality, we're all very inter-dependent.

True self-employment is what I've been doing this week.  Just before Christmas, I responded to a sequence of messages on a family history mailing list concerning the Australian writer's quest to establish the identity of her great-great-great-grandfather, born in Suffolk in the dying years of the eighteenth century.  His son Henry Sturgeon, she knew, had been christened in 1822; and she knew too that Henry's father Thomas had been twice married - to wives who were both called Elizabeth.  However, the number of people in that tiny part of the world who were called Elizabeth Sturgeon at that time is mind-boggling - a mind-boggle only exceeded by the number of Henry Sturgeons that seem to have shared the village limelight with them!  I decided to throw my slight knowledge of the area and its people at the problem to try and help her.

Combining altruism with the search for personal satisfaction, I've spent the last four days almost entirely devoted to solving this problem, shuffling paper on my desk, engaging in incessant clicking from one window to another on my computer, and using a day looking at faded fiches on a record-office screen to get an unwanted headache on top of much-wanted answers to questions.  By yesterday afternoon I was convinced that, to do the matter justice would require many more days' work - days that I don't have at present to spend so intensely on it.  I'd obtained some clarity of the situation, that I could express in an e-mail to the lady, along with a few precise facts and references.  After compiling and sending the e-mail, I then tidied what I had gleaned from all the records, and packaged the whole lot up, ready to take them out when more time allows. 

I finished with a 'note to self' as to what (at present) I see as the best way to present the unfolding history over a period of some seventy years, of a dozen apparently un-related families who share the same surname and live in the same village.  As one fellow researcher told me a few years ago, "I'm sure they're all connected somewhere along the line, but we may never know just how, where or when!"

Hey Ho! Work tomorrow ..............