Who do I think I am?

Back in 1986, I’d thought about spending a summer researching my family history, criss-crossing England, peering at grave stones, delving into parish records. I even mentioned it in the Just Seventeen yearbook. Instead, I met Ian and we expanded our family trees by having triplets by year end. Any thought of the genealogy project was shelved.

Here I am forty years later, peering at historic family photo albums full of the uncannily familiar features of ancestors. (I spot my son Milo’s heart-shaped face and the set of his eyes in my great grandfather, Frederick Clarke.) And now I have online ancestry tools to help me decipher who all these people are. Why didn’t I think of it sooner?

Curiosity piqued after writing my piece, Made In Sheffield a few weeks ago, it took ten minutes on ancestry.co.uk to find full details of my grandmother’s family who worked in the Sheffield trades. In the 1911 Census of England and Wales, her father, Frederick Clarke (49), is listed an ivory cutter at a button factory. His wife, Clara (45), is simply “wife”.

Twelve of them are living at the same five-room house, 112 Valley Road, Sheffield.1 (That’s five rooms total, not five bedrooms.) I’d forgotten that Grandma Varley, née Annie Clarke, was the eldest of eight siblings. Several of them had died by the time I was born.

In 1911, Annie (22) is listed as “manageress in mechanical warehouse”. Florence, 20 (Spitfire pilot Gordon’s mum), is “bookkeeper in toy manufactory”. (That would have been the Finbat Works, owned by her future father-in-law, Ebenezer Richardson.) Frederick (junior), 18, is a “Saw piercer in a silver workshop”. Albert, 15, is a greengrocery worker, and Ethel, 13, a burnisher at a “silver manufactory”. The three youngest, Jessie (11), Connie (9) and Frank (4) are at school.

Clara’s widowed brother, George (50), and his son, Bert (18) are also living with them. Both iron foundry workers.

That is one crowded house. Five under-18s and seven adults.

I realise I have photos of the terraced property in 1915 in one of the albums. There’s my grandma, Annie, seated in the top right image. Her mother, Clara, is bottom right.

I’ve already pieced together some of my family’s stories through inherited artefacts, but others are complete strangers. (Why so many Samuel Hignetts in Weaverham, Cheshire? My mum said that branch of her family were persecuted Huguenots who changed their surname to Hignett when they fled from France to England.) Why so many Thomases, Adas and Fredericks? Why did people name their children after themselves? Didn’t it get confusing? I think of the amusing Dr Seuss story, Too Many Daves, about the woman who came to regret calling all of her many children the same name.

But with the hints and tips and instantly accessible records pinged my way now I’ve started my family tree, I can see which Frederick is which. How this face in the album fits that branch of the family. And there is great aunt Connie, who I remember dad told me died of consumption at age 33, long before I was born. I have yet to sort out the Samuels.

I’ve been warned that it can be hard to extricate yourself once you’ve gone down the online ancestry rabbit hole, and just a few days in, I can feel it. The two weeks free trial will soon be over and I’m already wondering whether to commit to the £69 per six months or whatever it is to carry on. I’m interested in personal histories, not completing the tree for its own sake. But the hints are tantalising. “We think we have found Frederick’s father,” it tells me. I’m compelled to check out whether the record they’re pointing me to – one Abraham Clarke – stands up, or whether it’s a dead end.

The draw to research my roots gets stronger as I get older. It seems to offer some stability in a world that feels discombobulating. These people went through crises, wars, joys and tragedies.

“Who ARE you?!” I shouted out in my sleep, after watching two stressful movies on two consecutive nights: Die My Love, in which Jennifer Lawrence plays a woman suffering postnatal psychosis; and the horror film, Obsession, about a young man who wishes the girl he lusts after would love him more than anyone. His wish comes true, with drastic consequences. I can’t recall what monster was chasing me, but for once, the words I dreamed I was saying came out clearly. Ian nudged me awake, for which I was grateful.

I talked in my sleep once on the Paris choir trip, too. My lovely room-mate, Christine, said it sounded like I was whinnying, or maybe practising Duolingo Arabic. In the dream, I was doing some filming with my choir friends, nipped to the toilet in a hotel, realised too late it was actually the laundry chute and shot down it, Alice in Wonderland style, landing in a mound of washing miles away, worried only that I would let my choir colleagues down.

Hello, Doctor Freud.

Back home, our ancient but still gorgeous lurcher, Popeye, has had a tummy upset and I’m researching ‘best carpet cleaners’ before family visitors arrive for the August bank holiday.

Some good news, though: in my spot of southern England, it is raining. The first drenching in months. The green woodpecker I spotted searching for grubs (or ants?) in the parched earth a few days ago will now have more to eat. Its line will hopefully continue.

Please comment if anything here strikes a chord. I love to know your thoughts.

Thanks so much for all the engagement with last week’s piece about singing with choir in Paris, already one of my most-read.

Until next time!