Memories from my mother: a bit of history

[sollers]

To begin at the beginning.

It helps to develop a sense of history if you come from long female generations. Mam (it feels too odd to keep referring to her as "my mother"), like her own mother, did not believe in using bogeymen to instill good behaviour, but she did tell me what my grandmother had told her: that my great-grandmother used to use the threat "Boney would get you!"

The arithmetic is interesting. My grandmother was born around 1880, the youngest of 13 children all of whom reached adulthood. My mother's first cousin Dilla (Cordelia), the eldest child of the eldest child, was my grandmother's contemporary, which takes my great-grandmother's marriage back to about 1860 at the latest so her birth to somewhere round 1840. She would have done what was done to her, and her own mother was probably born around 1820 at the latest.

With hindsight we know that Napoleon Bonaparte was safely out of things on St Helena, but at the time people had thought he was safely out of things on Elba and he turned out not to be, so it wasn't entirely unrealistic for a small child in 1820 to be threatened with him.

This has been useful in assessing the reliability of writers in the past dealing with events leading up to their own time: good for their own time, a bit hazy for events in their parents' time, some useful information, though usually not much, from their grandparents', and only really significant events from earlier. It's an interesting exercise to see how much one knows about historic events simply from family stories, but I think I'll leave that till another time.

Comments

[chickenfeet]

I used to have a Dutch colleague who was/is a few years younger than me. His wife would sometimes scold the children and threaten that "the Duke of Alva would get them".

[sollers]

Now, that's what one is used to coming across: someone gets so deeply entrenched that the effect is permanent. When I was first learning German I was taught a little rhyme (I can still even sing it):

Bet, Kindlein, bet:
Morgen kommt der Schwed;
Morgen kommt der Oxenstiern'
Der wird dem Kindlein beten lern'

(Apologies for any dodgy spelling or grammar - this was 50 years ago).

However, the thing about my grandmother's experience was that it was within family memory. For all I know it was her grandmother who frightened my grandmother with it; and my grandmother was the other person who scrupulously avoided frightening me with it. It wasn't just history; it was quite possibly just two degrees of separation.

[tree_and_leaf]

I know the other version to the same tune, also from the Thirty Years War:

Maikäfer flieg!
Der Vater ist im Krieg,
Die Mutter ist im Pommerland,
Und Pommerland ist abgebrannt.
Maikäfer flieg!

I wonder what it is about ladybirds?

[annmcn]

My family has widely spaced generations, too. My mother's mother was born in the early 1880's, and the US Civil War would have been in her parents' memory. My father was the caboose of a large family, and his oldest brother was killed in action in WWI, making that war only one generation from me. His oldest sister was born in the 1880s's. Their grandmother was from Ireland, and when I was doing some research, it dawned on me that she was probably here from the Potato Famine. History, and the effects on opinions, are so much more immediate.

[mildred_of_midgard]

I've definitely observed the effects of hazy oral memory more than a generation or two past. Since the arrival of the internet in our house, my mother's been doing the family history through written records, and she was shocked at how many of the stories she'd been passing on contained demonstrably false elements. I was...less surprised.

You're right, it is interesting to consider what events you know about from family stories. The two world wars come to mind, and the American Civil War. In all three cases, we were passed down misinformation. Not so surprising was my grandmother, as a small child in America during WWII, being told by her grandmother that the family was from the Netherlands and England. Internet research revealed they were almost entirely of German extraction.

You've now made me curious to give some thought to what else I know about from family stories.

Question, since your nineteenth-century history is much better than mine: how likely is it that two emigrants from Ireland in the 1850s would not have known a word of English and needed an Irish speaker's help in reading a menu when they arrived?

[sollers]

Very high indeed if they came. like most emigrants, from a rural area. English was imposed taught in the National Schools in towns,starting a generation earlier, but the actual impact in the countryside was minimal. "Flann O'Brien" satirises the standard of teaching in one of his stories but I can't remember which. I suggest you have a look at Brian Friel's play "Translations".

[sollers]

On reflection it might have been a story he wrote as "Myles na gCopaleen" as I have a feeling it had been translated into English.

[sunnyskywalker]

My grandmother's parents were Germans who fled Russia in the 1920s, so our boogeymen were the Bolsheviks. (Bad men with beards, I hear.) But a lot of the details are hazy. Most of my family history I know is on my dad's side, and that because my great-grandfather spent decades tracking down family letters and photos and writing it all down. It's really odd to read the letters from mid-19th century about relatives involved in major historical events, telling each other which of their friends from home just died in battle and complaining about drunken officers. It suddenly moves out of that realm of Grand List of Distant Historical Events Carved in Marble.