Older and Wiser

"Jehoram rested with his fathers ..." - 2 Kings 8:24

It's unusual for me to begin with a quotation, but this one, which crossed my reading 'path' this week, seemed fitting for some of the thoughts I was going to share.  Let me say at the outset, though, that my mortal coil is still vibrating strongly and I have no intention of shuffling off it for the time being.  However, the older I get, the concept of 'resting with my fathers' takes a more positive place in my experience.

For one thing, I find that passing into or through years that correspond to my parents' ages as I was growing into adulthood has helped me appreciate some of the pressures and concerns that they may have been going through - either individually or together - but which they may have either seen no point in, or had realised it would be impossible to, share with me at the time.  The prime example is coming to terms with children who are far more concerned with their own lives than having anything to do with their parents!

Naturally, I cannot imagine what either of my parents was like in their younger years vis-a-vis their own parents.  However, given that the general pattern of life has arguably changed more between the 1970s and the end of the twentieth century than probably any comparable period in our history, I suspect that my grandparents' experience of children growing up would have been vastly different to that of my parents or myself.

Another contributory factor to this ageing topic has been my dream life.  Many have been the mornings when I've surfaced into the real world with a lingering memory of a dream that included strange incomplete, yet identifiable, characters from a varied selection of my past experiences: different workplaces miles apart in distance or time; my present friends associating with me in the house where I grew up, and so on.  It's as if my relaxing mind has flicked through the library of my memory, plucking a page from here and a page from there, and stitching them together in random sequence into a temporary collage for my nocturnal delectation.

And the obvious extension to this line of thought is my fascination with family history and the habit I've found of putting together a story (even if not the real one!) that fits behind some of the family groups as I discover more about them and gather their true history census by census.  I see yet another decade's crop of new children, and wonder what a mother's life must have been like, and how long her body would cope with the strain.  The older ones grow up, perhaps moving to new surroundings near and far in search of work, making new acquaintances, starting families of their own.

Very rarely do I see someone's occupation labelled 'unemployed'.  Unlike today, it seems there was always something to turn to in order to make a living of some kind in the absence of a welfare state.  I do wonder sometimes just what some of the jobs actually involved ... given the one- or two-word descriptions on the census returns.  

One of my on-line friends, a professional genealogist, recently posted a section of a census page, illustrating the way that some industries had - perhaps still have - their own language: terms that meant something specific to them, totally different from what we might understand, albeit the words might be the same.  I this case it was the weaving trade, where a brother and sister were described as a 'scrutcher' and a 'cheeser'.  Fortunately the post was accompanied by a link to a glossary of weaving terms, so I was able to translate.  

I have a few weavers in my own database, mainly ancestors of my cousin's husband, whose tree I explored for a golden wedding presentation a few years ago, and I'm now minded to retrace some of those steps and see what peculiarities I can illuminate from this resource.