When History Meets the Present

Last weekend I was rejoicing because I'd managed to complete a 'major project' ... which I can now reveal was a twin family-tree presentation as a gift on my cousin's golden wedding.  In order to get it finished on time, as I said last week, I had revised my procedures.  That wonderfully professional expression really means that I had cut corners.  In many areas, I had made notes instead of proper records and now, in the leisurely aftermath of the project's completion, I'm spending some time 'doing the job properly'.

My mind goes back to my professional career when, in order to get a budget completed on time, some degree of estimation was necessitated, and round figures were included for some aspects which would certainly be acceptable at board level.  Then came the task - delegated to more junior staff like me - to prepare detailed schedules that could be used to measure actual performance in the coming year.  Inevitably, figures wouldn't add up, or wouldn't divide equitably into the many components that, in practice, comprised those elements of the operation for which single amounts had been estimated.

Far more time was required for that stage of the exercise than had been taken for the preparation of the original budget; the same is my experience now.  I'm finding it difficult to determine just where I got some dates from and, in some instances, I'm having to repeat the whole bit of research to identify and document the sources.

Another phrase has been thrown up from my past: "Nearest the church, farthest from God!"  The grocer's shop where I spent many Saturdays and holidays before leaving school was right next door to the church ... in fact, its rear entrance was from the churchyard.  While I couldn't explain its theology, I remember that this saying was coined by one of the managers in reference to a particular customer whose habit was to enter the shop with a large list at five to six on a Saturday evening ... just as the doors were about to be closed for the weekend.

In this 'sweeping up exercise', I've discovered about some of my closest relatives a number of pre-existing details for which no source has been recorded.  Because they were 'known facts' - things that I'd grown up with - I suppose it was excusable, although not justified, to ignore the uniform requirements of disciplined research.  An example this morning concerned a death in 1969, for which I had recorded the precise date although I have never obtained a death certificate for this particular great-uncle.  Where had that date come from?  The source related to it was a birth registration, with the annotation, 'date from mum's birthday book': a need for further investigation if ever there was one!

I discovered that the birth registration was correct, but recorded in the wrong place; that I'd never recorded the actual death registration at all; and that there was no mention of this date in the computer transcript that I'd made of the birthday book soon after my mother's death.  My only recourse was to look at the original.

First I struggled to find the book amongst other amassed and carefully preserved family impedimenta, and then an emotional hour - or more - ensued as examined it in detail.  It had been presented to my mother on her fourteenth birthday by her aunt and, as I slowly turned the pages, I marvelled at the difference in the entries.  There was the juvenile hand in which had been quickly recorded the names of her - now former - school friends; there were more mature entries of the rites of passage of family members: their marriages, the births of their children, or their deaths one by one; and then the observations of older age, as she had noted the marriages of neighbours up and down the street.

An interesting paleographic feature was the incidence of the two ways of writing an 'r', sometimes both within the same entry, seemingly dependent on the combination of adjacent letters.  But nowhere was there a record of the death of her uncle Tom, which had started the adventure.  I had no alternative but to remove a detail that I am unable to verify.