This is the start of my story....I'm following phantoms people whose details have dwindled away. I'm trying to fill in traces, outlines, of other people's lives, most of them strangers to me. A presumptuous quest, but I have become enmeshed in it. What am I interested in? Memory - How a society was formed from an isolated settlement. The start of my story. It isn't so easy to dredge up the mess of these family links; faint traces, the remembered highlights no longer part of any lexicon I understand. Foreign names and evasions first made me interested in the family I have sprung from.My mother's family.I am without the focus required of a genealogist: interested in too much that sits on the sides of the births, deaths, marriages, and property records. I am easily distracted, not obsessed enough with the one thing.And there isn't much to find in the records anyway. Is there anything to prove? I don't think so, no hard and fast facts or theories of oppression.This is a project of narrative; it will yield its own lessons. Walk past any heraldry shop or centre, anywhere, and smell the excitement, the anticipation of connecting with origins, an authentic conjunction of modern life lived right now and ancestors who made a mark in their own world. That is not what I'm interested in. Not even sure now what it is I want but it feels like a striving towards simple remembrance, a redressing of what has gone missing.A set of maps that can be referred to in the future, by family who come after me. A chance to break the crippling silences that cause damage, don't allow us to learn from mistakes. A certifiable curse,a run of bad luck, is always easier
to dramatise. But in a quieter way, my family has suffered a curse. The
ordinary curse of fertility and the suffering
that comes from pregnancies unwanted or unplanned.
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