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

[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.