Lock-down - the Epilogue

As I come to the end of my second (two-day) week back at (voluntary) work, it seems right to look back over the last five months.  Many, no doubt, will have found the isolation and restrictions tiresome and uncomfortable in one way or another.  For my part, once I'd sorted out a 'food-stream', it was quite nice to be able to spend seemingly limitless days working on family history.  That's not to say I didn't look over the horizon, but with concern, and with no feelings of desperation.  I quickly realised that the holiday I'd booked for June wouldn't be happening and, rather than take up the offer of a 12-month delay, I cancelled it completely and am free to do whatever takes my fancy next year.

On the genealogy front, one 'project' followed another.  In March, I was already working on a 'distant twig' in my father's tree and most of April was spent exploring the possibility of a link between my great-grandfather's family and that of my cousin's husband ... the same comparatively unusual surname in a small area providing an intriguing, but in the end negative, possibility.  Then, in May, I remembered that, some years ago, I had started writing a history of my mother's direct ancestors with a view to completing a biography.

This absorbed my attention for many weeks, as I formed my earlier work into chapters, set out pages and styles and re-wrote paragraph after paragraph, incorporating many stories and links I had discovered since my original efforts had been put together.  It was also at about this time that I enjoyed the diversion of preparing some graphs for a political group.  Did you realise that, over the last twenty years, 70.1% of votes cast have had no effect on the outcome of the elections? ... But that's a script for another stage.

By the time I'd got to the point of my grandparents' marriage and the establishment of what became my mother's early home, the general lock-down had come to an end.  It was a convenient point at which to park that project - but perhaps not for so many years this time - and to turn my attention to the resumption of 'normal' life.

Normal life for me, however, proved still to be some weeks away and, as a 'filler', I decided to dig into one of the spreadsheets in which I store the original findings of my research.  I knew that many entries in my record of Civil Registration Births and Deaths were lacking reference numbers, so I determined to begin correcting these omissions.  There were many reasons for these gaps; for one thing, the record itself pre-dated the decision to include the references.  At times I was working with such enthusiasm that I hadn't given myself time to complete all sequences before following up new discoveries ... and there are, too, many entries that were collected 'on the off-chance' that they might be connected one day.

This is a job that can be dropped at any point, so it was ideal to begin it with the view to probe gently any entry that seemed to ask a question as to its relevance.  So it was that, yesterday, I came across two possible entries for the death of the father-in-law of one of my dad's sisters.  Did he die in 1914 or 1941?  In establishing that the former was the case, I examined the first census entry following his birth in 1855 and hence have now begun the sequence of adding the man's parents and eight siblings to my database and, subsequently, to the family tree itself.

These days of triumphant success and achievement are not without a grain of sadness, however.  I was reminded this week that the coming weekend will mark the second anniversary of the death of my former manager's wife in a road traffic accident outside their home.  This tragic event occurred just as I was making arrangements to begin this present job so, unsurprisingly, that is where some of my thoughts will be at the moment.