No Room in the Inn

It's a phrase that won't be unfamiliar today and many readers will know that it comes from Luke's Gospel.  As a doctor, Luke was meticulous in his research and probably got this straight from Mary, along with some description of the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem when heavily pregnant.  It was census time and hoards of people were flocking to Bethlehem, taking up all available accommodation, and they had to make do with a stable as the place for Jesus to be born.

'Couldn't God have planned a more suitable place?' we might ask.  But the Almighty knew what He was doing.  After all, Jesus wasn't born a King (despite what the carol might say), but born to be King.  If he was going to be accepted as their King, he had to live a human life, to know the ins and outs of the lives of His lowliest subjects.  Just consider recent news bulletins for a moment.  How much fuss has there been about the removal of the £20 enhancement to Universal Credit ('let them try to live on what we've got left after paying for rent and heat!') and now last year's Christmas parties during lockdown ('one law for them and one for the rest of us!')  

What respect is there for a ruler who doesn't know how his people live?  That's one reason we fight for proportional representation: so that we can be represented by someone who's like us, rather than an outsider 'parachuted in' to scoop up enough votes to get elected, and then isn't seen again until the next election ... but I digress.

We know why it was a stable, then.  But I want to suggest symbolic understanding of that phrase, 'no room in the inn'.  If we have no respect for our representatives in parliament, we have no time for them.  We aren't interested in what they say, and resent any effect their actions might have on our lives.  We have no room in our lives to give them consideration: 'no room in our inn', so to speak.  It was the same for the people of Judea two thousand years ago.

Their land was under Roman occupation.  Their lives were governed by a combination of Roman law, enforced by the Governor and his underlings, and the Jewish hierarchy led by the High Priest.  Now, the priests had developed their own set of rules over the centuries, gradually corrupting the Law introduced by Moses to regulate the behaviour of the Chosen People for the benefit of all.  The result was a system that favoured the ruling class at the cost of the rest.  

As Jesus' ministry developed and became popular, the Pharisees (the party of the High Priest) resented the way this 'upstart son-of-a-carpenter' was undermining a society that they had moulded for their own benefit.  The common people, though, loved Him because He had grown up among them; He knew the problems they faced and used His power to heal them and help them.  Meanwhile, He taught them about God's love for them, showing them many ways in which the Priests (whose job that should have been) weren't doing what they were there for.

The difference between Jesus and this 'Robin Hood' characterisation that I may have portrayed here, was that He was the Son of God and, when the inevitable happened and He was killed, that wasn't the end of the story.  In fact it was just the end of the prologue.  Just as God's power had brought about His birth in that stable, so it also brought about His resurrection.  Jesus overcame a very real and certain death and, after being seen sufficiently to give evidence of this defeat of the power of death to frighten people, He was taken back into Heaven, where he reigns still.

So, what about us, as we go about the busyness of our lives.  It's Christmas ... there are decorations, presents, families to meet and greet and people to feed.  There are many anxieties brought about by this wretched Covid, anxieties that almost supercede those about the 'arrangements', whether everything will go smoothly, family members get on with each other, and so on ......................  

What about us?  

Where does that stable fit into our lives?  Do we have time to remember the babe-lying-in-a-manger all those years ago, who He was, why He came and why He was born in a stable?

Is there room in the 'Inn of our Heart' for Him?

Cousins or Not?

In a hypothetical encounter between a genealogist and someone who isn't one, the most likely question of the latter to the former would be along the lines of 'What's all this about different grades of cousins and their removal?'  Let's face it, it's confusing enough for those of us who know about these things.  One definition would be the relationship between two people who share a common ancestor two or more generations older than them.

There are all manner of charts that attempt to explain the 'grades and removals'.  For my part, I prefer to find that common ancestor and work forward.  I'd probably do this on the back of the proverbial envelope (once I've removed the Christmas card, of course).  I work down the generations counting, 'Siblings, first cousins, second cousins, third, fourth fifth ...' and so on, until I arrive at one of the candidates, which will define the 'grade'.  I then carry on, now counting, 'Once, twice, three times ...' until I get to the other candidate, at which point I've determined how many 'times removed'.

To get the 'feel' of the relationship once I've defined it, I try and think of people I know, or have known in the past.  When I was very young, for example, if I were not at school on market day when the buses came into town from the surrounding villages, we might be visited by 'Cousin Emma', sometimes accompanied by her widowed sister, 'Cousin Mary'.  These venerable ladies, who looked terribly old to me, but were in fact less than 70 years my senior, had come for a chat and a cuppa (and no doubt a toilet break) before catching their respective buses home.  My relationship to either of these would be first cousin, twice removed, for they were, in common parlance, my grandmother's cousins, and our common ancestor was one William Brickham (1806-1889), who was their grandfather and my great-great-grandfather.

Another personal example features someone whom I knew long before I discovered we were related.  This lady, Elaine, was a skilled musician, and took over from my wife as the church organist when my daughter was born.  Occasionally, she would bring with her a wizened older woman who was her mother, and sometimes referred to as 'the princess'.  I gave her no thought at all until, many years later, I discovered that Elaine and I were related, and I found that her mother really was a princess: that old lady's father was the last Crown Prince of Burma, when it became a British colony in the 19th century.

The common ancestor who relates me to Elaine is one William Bootman (1768-1848), my great-great-great-grandfather, and we are fourth cousins, once removed.  What tickles me most about this discovery is that, in addition to being the church organist, she later became a teacher at the local high school, and my daughter, who was her fifth cousin, was one of her pupils!

This brings me to another whole dimension of this subject of cousins.  If, for example two sisters marry, each would regard the husband of the other her brother-in-law; she would have no blood relationship or common ancestor with him, but he would be related solely by the legal connection of marriage to her sister.  And it's quite possible that, particularly if they lived in the same community, the two men would consider themselves to be brothers-in-law, although only related by two independent marriages.  So far as I'm aware, there is no such link, either formal or informal, between cousins and their cousins' spouses.  I can't therefore claim any personal connection to royalty as a result of this cousin-ship, for Elaine's father (my fourth cousin) had married the Princess Alexandrina Victoria Evelyn MOWNG LAT in Burma in 1931.  The very most I could claim - and it would be so pretentious as to be embarrassing were I do to so - would be that the late princess was 'my fourth cousin by marriage'.

Next, let me introduce another musical connection.  One of the consequences of large families is a noticeable difference in age between the two ends of the next generation.  I have a second cousin - whom I have never met in the flesh - who is a prominent brass player.  Our common ancestor is our great-grandfather, who had a total of 11 children, born between 1884 and 1907.  My grandfather was the eldest of these; his was the youngest.  Strangely enough, he was in my daughter's class at school, and may well have been taught by Elaine as well!  One day, I had the great good fortune to be in the audience of a concert at which one of the performers was introduced in terms from which I understood that she was his fiancée.  Afterwards, I announced my connection to him and we have shared correspondence and personal interest ever since.  She is my second cousin by marriage; we consider ourselves to be cousins.  Do we have that right?

During the autumn I received advice from Lost Cousins of a connection that I'm now in the process of following up.  It transpires that my first cousin, three times removed (the niece of my great-great-grandmother), born in 1860, married the brother of this woman's great-great-grandfather.  We have another, equally tenuous link, in that the uncle of these two brothers became the second husband of that same great-great-grandmother's sister-in-law after her brother's death in 1874.  I think the nearest I can calculate our relationship is fourth cousins once removed, by marriage.

I challenge you, dear reader, if you want a Boxing Day puzzle, to work that one out!  In the meantime, I ask once more, are we cousins?

A Much-Blessed Survivor!

You know how it is when you're doing something repetitive.  You wonder if perhaps there might be a better way of doing it that would save time or effort ... or both and, depending on the circumstances, possibly a whole lot of money, too!  I found myself in just such a situation some years ago, tried doing it a different way and realised that this wasn't the first time that week that I'd changed my method and improved the technique.  Observing that that particular task, once finished, was unlikely to recur, I coined the mantra: "By the time I've finished this job, I'll have refined to the utmost a skill that I'll never need again."

Once it was into my head, I've been astonished just how often this has proved to be true.  The latest example of this truism came this week.  Early this year, I joined an organisation whose aim is the provision of ancillary services to Christian missionaries, one of whose activities is the conversion of printed scriptures into a digital format for more modern and wider use in teaching people whose first language might be in common use by only a few thousand people across the world.

Apart from the basic typing operation, which I started with, there are other standard processes that lead to the completion of each project, and I've now progressed to the second level of this sequence that carries the label 'Editing'.  In addition to these standard processes, the same bespoke software we use is also able to tackle a number of 'one-off' tasks that particular projects require ... I expect you can already see where this line is going.  One such task came my way this week, a case of basic data manipulation within a series of  digital documents, each of which was a book of the Bible in the client language.

Along with a small number of fellow-editors, I was asked to perform this job using the program in whatever way we found it convenient to achieve the specified object, so long as the result still adhered to the printed original.  Needless to say, by the end of the task I'd tried several different approaches, at the end of which the same 'By the time I've finished ...' axiom had been proven yet again.

Some eight years ago, in my family history studies, I devised a check-list to make sure that all the various records that I keep had been completed.  The form itself has passed through seven or eight iterations, reaching what - for the present, at least - is the most useful document for the purpose.  Much of my spare time over the last year and more has been devoted to one particular branch of my family, about which I've occasionally written here.  My basic intention when I set out last autumn was to fill in some of the blanks in earlier data that more recent use of my document had revealed.

The 'Bullingham Project', as it became known, proved to be many times bigger than I first thought and, the longer it dragged on, the more I bemoaned the fact that I hadn't devised my checklist earlier.  I can relate the story of one particular young lady, whose family had fallen victim to just the degree of glossing over and oversight that the project was intended to overcome.  I might add in mitigation that more information has become available since original research announced her existence, but my checklist might have avoided some of the problems had it been in use at the time. 

This particular woman delighted in the distinctive forenames 'Alice Octavia'.  Alice was the youngest of a family of eight (as you might guess).  In 1901, her family appears in as correct a form as possible: father, mother, two sons and five daughters, listed in sequence, of whom Alice was the last-named.  With that name, Octavia, she had to be the eighth child, though.  Usually in these circumstances, my next step would be to look at the 1911 census, where the so-called 'fertility' questions would provide the precise boundaries for the research.  In this instance this facility was denied me, however, since the mother of these children died in 1903.  (This resource isn't always as helpful as it might seem, either.  I remember looking at one family where the woman claimed to have had twelve children, of whom seven were still living.  However, apart from the seven living ones, I was able to trace only one more child who had been born and died between censuses, and therefore never been recorded.)

At the time of my original research, I had found one instance of a birth and death in the same quarter, and had included this child as the eighth one I had been looking for.  As I now looked at the page with fresh eyes, though, I was suspicious.  My cousin, Alice's daughter, had provided me with the precise birth dates of her mother and the six aunts and uncles she knew.  Her mother was born in November 1900, and her youngest aunt in July 1898.  The birth of the infant I'd found, who had died in the same quarter as she was born, had also been registered in the September quarter of 1898.  Although there was no note to that effect, I think I had previously thought of these two as twins, one of whom had died, and the other survived.

I felt I ought to check.  If this were the case, then their birth registrations would be identical (or would differ by one, if one child were the last entry on one page and the other the first entry on the next page).  In this case, Alice's known sister was registered with the number 974; the infant who died appeared under the reference 970 ... unlikely if they were twins.  Since that initial research, the Registration Office has released the new facility, where the mother's maiden name of each birth registration can be looked up on line.  This makes research of this nature much simpler.  I checked all seven of the 'known' children and found that the name applied to each registration was Bailey, confirming the family link.  The name for the child under reference 970 was ... Parsons.  She was clearly not the girl - or boy - I sought.

Next, I checked each year around the times these known children were born, right back to the time of their parents' marriage (and a little before 'just in case'), both in the Suffolk area where the family were living and also where the marriage took place, which was in London, Miss Bailey having been born in Kent.  Eventually, I came up with just one additional birth with the mother's maiden name shown as Bailey, and a quick check revealed that she, too, had died within weeks of her birth, and so missed any census record.  'Annie, born and died 1898' was quickly changed to 'Mary Jane, born and died 1890', and I noted with some satisfaction that this infant had also been given two forenames as had all of her siblings, except for two who had enjoyed the luxury of three! 

One of these - the firstborn of the eight - had his own distinctive name, George, to which had been appended both of his father's, Allen James, while the daughter born in the jubilee year of 1897 was called by the names of three generations of royalty, Victoria Alexandra May, these last two being the spouses of the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and the Duke of York (later George V).

My wonderful checklist (now identified as version 3.2), though tedious, is one I now use constantly, and has long surpassed its original inclusion in the 'when I've finished' category described above.

Am I My Brother's Keeper?

I've just bought a new pair of curtains.  I'm sure you all wanted to know that.  (In case you are interested, the colour is described - unnecessarily alcoholically, in my opinion - as 'champagne', and there's a picture below).  There's nothing unusual about that, of course, particularly with a new home to fit them into.  As it happens, it was one of three significant purchases this week.  Having done my research beforehand, I found I had to go to a second store for the curtains, but it was at a price that enabled me to make my two other purchases and still have 'change' from the price my research had indicated.

When it comes to things like that, things I could really make do without, I always feel under some obligation to justify myself.  After all, I've been living behind temporary window coverings for the last few months ... what was preventing my continuing to do so?  It's just that they were quite thin and I felt that something more substantial would make the room feel warmer for the winter ... and possibly reduce the (as yet unquantified) heating bills!

As I go through my post I put aside begging letters from charities with whose aims I agree.  Then, once a month, I go through these and decide whether to give them some money or, if not, whether the letter is recycled or left in the basket for another time.  Justifying the expenditure on curtains is part of that same agony over charitable giving.  

I'm not wealthy, but I can be comfortable ... within the general scenario that I have a finite amount of money that will have to keep me in whatever state I choose for as long as I have left on this earth.  It's all a matter of responsibility.  If I decide to splash out on a luxury cruise, for example, I know that it will reduce the amount of time I can spend in comparative comfort before I have to get out the begging bowl; if I make an elaborate gift to a charity, it will ultimately reduce what a handful of chosen institutions will share as the residue of my estate.

I've been reminded that 'Christmas is coming'.  I'm heartened to hear that increasing numbers of people are boycotting the annual expensive and meaningless exchange of presents: 'using money they don't have, to buy gifts that won't last, for people who neither need nor will appreciate them', as someone neatly put it.  If this process is stripped back to its essentials, it is fundamentally to satisfy the need of the giver to give ... or maybe, less altruistically, to be seen to give.  A pressure comes from outside of ourselves - some would call it God's hand, others would not - to respond to benefits we have received in the past year, maybe faithful service rendered, maybe some tangible gift received.

I spend very little on my festive celebrations - just a few luxuries I wouldn't have during the rest of the year - and allocate an additional amount to the 'charity basket'.  Ten or fifteen years ago, when I was a fan of Sir Terry Wogan, part of my Christmas giving went to Children in Need; other charities I've supported at this time of year are Crisis, Shelter and the excellent work of the Salvation Army.  This year, I'm thinking of pushing something in the direction of organisations trying to alleviate the suffering of starving people in Yemen, Ethiopia or Afghanistan, always remembering that, within months of His birth, our Saviour was a refugee.

It's not that my humble contribution to whichever charity receives it will achieve their aims overnight.  In the overall scheme of things, it might not make much difference at all.  A few weeks ago, I wrote here at the end of what I described as a 'political rant', referring to the wise saying of a friend on this matter.  It's not a question of how much good I'm doing, rather one of making a worthwhile response to that external pressure to give.

With Christmas in the air, it seems that the media have taken up cudgels on behalf of those who feel inadequately advised about Christmas parties.  There is much about our present government and its doings with which I would take issue; however, on this matter I'm with them.  The situation is clear.  While legislation only requires mask-wearing in shops and on public transport, it does not ban gatherings and parties (as it did last year).  Alongside this legislation is abundant advice about hand-washing and distance keeping; there is strong encouragement about being vaccinated and nothing to stop people wearing a mask in situations where they are not legally obliged to do so if they feel it to the advantage of others or themselves.  One politician even suggested refraining from 'snogging under the mistletoe'.

In the face of all this, I have to ask, "Have we forgotten how to make up our own minds?"  There are aspects of this advice to apply to the various features of most parties.  Surely we are capable of making sensible arrangements for our guests; if invited to join with our friends and families, to consider whether we are comfortable with the suggested entertainment; and if matters are not to our feelings of personal safety, to politely refrain and be understood in that?

And finally, for the curtain-curious: