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

[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.