Digging...

I've written previously about how working class families don't have 'histories' in the same sense that the 'upper crust' do. Ninety-plus-odd percent of the population of this archipelago have little stake in the centuries of history that led to who they are presently, which is, in itself, largely due to accidents of fate deep in their family's past. Never mind the salient fact that they have created through their labours and sacrifices, the histories of the privileged. Given that we are all descended from a very small cohort of individuals, one can't help thinking that those of us not sitting on storied histories and vast family assets today, might just have been royally - literally - shafted at some time in our past. Digging through my family tree has been instructive and enlightening, despite the plain fact that I am largely descended from poor people who frankly had infinitely harder lives than I could ever imagine.

I'm simply saying that I am only two generations away from the poverty that, certainly on my father's side, is well within living memory, and I am by no means well off in the wider scheme of things, myself, except relatively. This fact does not diminish my family or its history in any way, but rather it strengthens my resolve to get as much of it recorded as possible, to pass on to my descendants. They deserve to have the knowledge of the people that have made them who they are today, and the knowledge that one's family has struggled against all the odds and prevailed, can only give one a better perspective on life at present, and hopefully for the future. We need to pass on to our descendants that our current relative prosperity is so terribly paper thin, and that our history - history, as always - demonstrates it thus.