In Reflective Mode

Should that heading say 'mode' or mood'?  I'm not sure, although I'm not much given to moods these days.  I tend to think of the year, even life itself, passing through different stages, each with its own range of experiences and reactions to them.  As the temperature has crawled up to the dizzy heights of 10°C, the sweatshirt spends more time folded on the seat beside me, spring is in the air, and the year enters what I think of as an outward-looking season.

Plans are being made for summer holidays, and it's often now that dreams of moving house regain the momentum they had before someone suggested 'don't worry about it now, during the winter'.  Not that I'm planning to move, but my neighbour is considering such a step, and it's a good illustration of the way thoughts and ideas apply themselves to a broader canvas at this time of year.

Today it was late morning when I made a quite regular delivery to a factory in Haverhill, and it was somehow emotive to gaze around the deserted workroom as I waited for my documents to be signed.  In contrast to the time I worked in manufacturing in the '70s and '80s, many such businesses now stop work for the weekend at Friday lunchtime, and the chat I fondly remember about 'what are you doing this weekend?' has shifted forward a few hours, and is already being put into practice by Friday afternoon.

Once the general thought of my past had taken root, it wasn't a great leap to find myself pondering on the time I spend researching my family history.  It's the sort of hobby to which there is never an end.  There just isn't a point where you can say, "there, I've finished it!" because, wherever you draw your metaphorical 'fence', there's always someone at the periphery whose parents, or spouse, or children have fallen beyond the present boundary, and could be the excuse for shifting the fence outward one more place ... and so on.

I tell myself that, one day, I'm going to write it all up - the Great Family Story - and I do believe that that day will come: at the moment, I just can't see when that will be.  Apart from work, and the minutiae of daily life, there's always some project to soak up the 'spare' time.  At the start of last year, I found myself embroiled in a mammoth study of half a dozen families that bore my mother's maiden name.  They all lived, married and died in the same couple of Suffolk villages, but seemed to have few if any links to each other, as they would if they were all part of one great 'clan'.  I thought that would be over by the spring, but eventually it took until June or July to complete it to my satisfaction.

At the start of this year, another project has taken hold, prompted by an autumn e-mail out of the blue, as it were, from a fourth cousin in the USA. Suddenly, a line that had been quite minor and had long been 'dormant' in terms of research, has become the prime focus of my attention, as I follow up and extend the family tree that this cousin has generously made available to me.  Again, I thought this might take until about January, but it now seems likely that last year's precedent will be followed pretty closely.

Another line that my musings took today, was the fact that my researches into my mother's family seem to have far outweighed both in extent and in intensity those on my father's side.  I wondered why this should be, and I came up with a couple of fairly sound theories.  One concerns what, for want of any other term, I call the 'growing era' of each family.  My father was just over ten years older than his wife, and while she was the second child of her parents, he had nine elder siblings, seven of whom were still alive when he was born.  I have inherited a host of family photographs, the bulk of which were of mum's family.  Her parents were married in 1912, and by the time that she and her siblings were growing up, the box camera was there to record some of the events.  In dad's case, by contrast, his parents were married in 1892, and as well as the 20-year 'growing era' difference, raising a family of nine (for he wasn't the youngest!) would have left precious little either time or funds for an extensive pictorial record!

The second theory to explain this basic disparity in my researches is simply that, with dad out at work all day - and a five-and-a-half day week was the norm - he had less opportunity to impart family stories to me than mum did. Consequently, before ever I started research, I knew far more about her personal history than about his.  Hence there was already quite a firm 'mum-base' upon which to build, whereas on dad's side it's all been pretty much from scratch.

Enough of this rumination.  Work still continues apace, and I've already loaded my first job for Monday morning.  There will be more about that next week!