Week 3 - What This Story Means to Me

The distance between here and there

Ever since I started my genealogy journey back in the 1990s, I have always wanted to know more about my English family. My parents, brother and I left England in the 1970s to journey to Mum's birth country, Australia. I knew my relatives in Australia – grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins – however, I had no recollection of my English family. They had become lost in time to me. They were an enigma to me. I was fortunate in the 1990s that we were able to rekindle our relationship with my Auntie Eileen, Dad's older sister, who we had lost contact with in the many moves we made across Australia. She was able to regale me with stories of people I had only ever heard in Dad's stories. She was also able to give me some dirt on Dad! One of my biggest regrets is not going and doing the traditional rite of passage and spending a couple of years living and working in the UK. I missed opportunities to meet relatives and learn about our shared heritage. In 2018 my children and I were able to take a month-long trip to the UK, where we spent ten days in Staffordshire exploring some of the areas where Dad grew up and my ancestors had lived for generations. We also got to meet cousins, some of whom had grown up with Dad. We travelled over 16,500 kilometres to experience a place that generations of our family had lived.

The Paradox of Distance

My family history is one of opposites. My mum was from Western Australia and descended from Scottish and English immigrants. They had travelled vast distances from the Scottish Highlands, Perthshire, Stirlingshire, Kent, Essex, London, Surrey, Bristol, Warwickshire, New South Wales, and Victoria to finally make their lives in Western Australia. Dad's family, on the other hand, was far less adventurous, having lived in the Staffordshire and northern Warwickshire regions for generations. The only direct outlier is Thomas Richardson, who came up from Bedfordshire as a teenager. Why do some people stay and move mere streets from their childhood home, and others travel to the opposite side of the world? Why were Mum's family more adventurous than Dad's? Mum is descended from a Scottish ancestor on her maternal grandfather's side, so he didn't have much say in his transportation; however, why were the others so eager to come? I have one family, my second great-grandparents Ellen Johnson and Samuel Bridges, who were extraordinarily adventurous. Samuel was born in Kirby-le-Soken, Essex, in 1862 and moved to Sittingbourne, Kent, sometime between 1871 and 1881 when he married Ellen Johnson. They made the trip to Australia separately, as on 19 December 1887 Ellen departed from Plymouth aboard the "Oroya" with their four young children to join Samuel in Australia. They first lived in Melbourne, Victoria, before moving to Sydney, New South Wales, before their move to Perth, Western Australia, and their final move to Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. Many of us would think twice before moving such vast distances, yet between 1887 and 1900 they had travelled extraordinary distances. In contrast, Dad's family stayed put as generation after generation lived in Bloxwich, Willenhall, Short Heath, and New Invention – places I have become very familiar with through the records. These are industrial towns built on coal mines, metal works, and locksmithing, occupations I see in my ancestors' time and time again. When we moved to Australia so Mum could return home, we severed the generational connection with Dad's family and lands. Genealogy, for me, is therefore a way of bridging that distance through the exploration of the documents and the occasional trip to their stomping grounds.

Walking Towards Them

People often ask me about my fascination with genealogy, with old documents, archives, and cemeteries. I honestly feel like it is a calling. That I am being called by my ancestors to remember them and tell their stories. Much of my research into them has been done from my loungeroom in Australia, yet, these records are building up a narrative of their lives. Visiting many of these places in 2018 was a lifetime dream...one I hope to replicate in the coming years. I want to stand once again where they stood. Look at the buildings they would have seen. Find other places that I missed in the short time I had there previously. I remember going to Coltham Road in Short Heath (read about it here), a road that has so many family connections. Holy Trinity Church sits on Coltham Road and saw many of my ancestor's happiest and saddest events – baptisms, marriages, and funerals. My second great-grandparents, Susannah Appleby and Thomas Richardson, lived down the road and Thomas served as a deacon at the church. My grandfather lived just across the road from their home many years after their death. He lived there until he died with his sister living next door. There is a cousin who lives in the road to this day! I know rationally that they are long gone, but their stories live on and I feel a pull to tell their stories as I discover them.

The Weight of Being the One Who Remembers

There's something else, too. Something harder to articulate. I think about Thomas Richardson, a young boy who, at fifteen years old, was sent from his birthplace in Bedfordshire to work as an apprentice in Staffordshire while his mother and siblings moved to America. I think about how he must have wondered if they remembered him, if they thought about him, if they told their children and grandchildren about the brother and son they'd left behind. You can read more of his story in An Ancestor I Admire. I think about Samuel Ernest Stokes, dying on his way to a friend's funeral, and how his story could have been lost except for newspaper articles I found 90 years later. Read about his story in A Record That Adds Colour.I think about all my ancestors. The families who had thirteen children. The families who lost child after child to illness, accidents, and poverty. The women who worked hard , up at dawn and working long into the night running a home. The men who went down the mines, the ones who went to war, the ones who just no longer could face the struggles of life and made decisions that permanently impacted their families. I wonder if they ever thought that someone hundreds of years later would be eager to discover their stories. Being the family historian means I am carrying the weight of their stories. It means being the keeper of memories that would otherwise fade completely. I feel a huge responsibility in this role, in telling their stories,  and getting them right. I want to do them proud.  

The Gift of Distance

When I started researching my family history, I wanted to find out where I belonged. We only spent three years in Western Australia near Mum's family. We lived in Sydney for a few years before settling in Brisbane. I never felt a connection with my family. I never felt I belonged in a place. However, somewhere along the line it became something deeper. I learned that you can inherit a sense of belonging to a place you've never called home. I never lived in Staffordshire.  That genealogy isn't just about collecting facts, it is about creating a bridge across time and space. That sometimes the most important thing you can do for your ancestors is simply to show up. To stand where they stood, to acknowledge that their lives happened, to refuse to let distance or time erase them. I believe the gift of being the descendant who moved away is I get to see them more clearly. It made me curious. It allows me to see that their ordinary lives were extraordinary. Staying required courage, and leaving too. If I had grown up in Staffordshire, if I lived on those streets, would I have taken the time to research their stories? Or would they have been too familiar, too ordinary, too much a part of the everyday landscape to seem remarkable? Visiting locations my ancestors lived in England and in Western Australia, I have learned so much about who I am and where I fit in the world. They're with me. Their stories are my stories. That's what their stories mean to me. They're the invisible thread that connects them to me. The proof that distance in kilometres or years can be bridged when you walk towards each other.