Recently, I spent some time going through old documents and photos, putting together a rough family tree. I was prompted by many questions from my child which collided with my mother’s desire to clear away old boxes of photos and documents and with my sister’s findings of our dad’s old family tree project.
In his last years, he was going through old records and managed to find some old birth, graduation and wedding certificates.
There is something very solid about old black-and-white photos from days when you had your picture taken in an atelier on special occasions, wore your best clothes, and cherished these mementoes forever. The same can be said about those carefully hand-written documents, where people’s lives were marked by hand with no digital backup and no available copies.
I grew up in the end of the black-and-white era when not many people had cameras at home and photos were developed from films, often at home, in a makeshift dark room. Then we got better cameras, colour films, easier development, and moved on to digital and mobiles. I still like to carry my digital camera around to take pictures instead of my phone and I do get some strange looks for it.
Years ago, I lived in Japan. Once, on a quiet street, I passed a very old woman. She was small and frail-looking but with lively eyes and a smile on her face. She was bent forward and walked with a stick. As I approached her, she was hardly reaching my waist, but she looked me in the face and seemed delighted to see a tall stranger wandering in her neighbourhood. I was thinking about how many changes she had seen in her long life, how different her country had become, and how happy she seemed, curious to see and witness everything. Meeting this woman, however fleetingly, was one of the moments in life that I can recall, even though it wasn’t significant, didn’t last long, and didn’t perhaps mean much. In a way, it did. Two different generations of women and two different cultures had passed by on the day, offering smiles to one another. Maybe she remembered me, too. Maybe she had talked about meeting me with someone. Who knows?
I have not forgotten about this woman and sifting through the old documents, to which were added all of my school reports, I was thinking that although I am about half of that old woman’s age now, I am also a relic of the past, a witness to many changes. The other day, I had to explain what a telegram was to my daughter and remind her once again that people couldn’t have sent a text in the past. Not even a phone had been in every home back then. Telegrams were the best way to send important news to people.
The old certificates and photos are witnesses to the old times that matter only to a few of us. I was surprised how little photos we have of our older relatives. I remember my grandfather but don’t have any photos to show to my daughter. I was happy to see documents that told me where my grandparents and my great-grandmother had come from but I realized that I hadn’t heard much about it. My great-grandmother had a few stories about the past that she had told us repeatedly. There were also many stories that she didn’t want to bring up. She was an illegitimate child, born to a young girl who was a helping hand at a farm. Most likely, the owner – her boss – had taken an advantage. My great-grandmother had grown up with the shame of ‘father unknown’ written on her birth certificate. Her son had committed suicide. She had had a stillbirth. She wouldn’t go into details about it, apart from telling us that she didn’t want to see the baby or know much about it. It was to be taken away and it was normal back then. I recall a little, old, black-and-white photo of her first son displayed in her room. That photo is now gone and I was thinking that it would have been nice to have it and add it to my mosaic, reunite it with other images. From my other side, I have a little bit more images – one of my grandfathers was a keen photographer - but fewer documents. My mother wasn’t as keen to explore the past as my father had been. Even so, thanks to some family stories I have discovered, there might not have been a blank on the father’s side of my maternal grandmother’s birth certificate, but it doesn’t have the biological father’s name either.
Mine is just an average family. Even so, there had been affairs, scandals, and – for both sides of my grandfathers and grandmothers – divorces. My family tree had been a little bit simplified to keep it simple. For now. Perhaps I will go deeper and work on the more present generations. I have no idea what happened to most of my cousins. We are spread far and wide, and there has been very little effort to keep in touch. But I had been reminded how easy it is to be forgotten forever. It only takes two generations and you are unknown, gone, a mystery on an old, hand-written document.
So perhaps I should try and connect. Make my daughter’s tree a little bit more colourful and green.
