'Old Mother McDonald?'

At the Christening last Sunday I spent some time talking to one of my Uncle's (Dad's brother) and he asked if I'd seen any of the recent 'Who Do You Think You Are?' series. He then asked if I'd done anymore of the family history lately.

I told him about what I'd discovered lately one of his great grandfathers and how the information stacked up with what my Grandmother (his Mother) had told me nearly twenty years ago. He wasn't aware of anything I told him, I explained that when my Nan became housebound, due to a disease of her spine, I spent hours talking with her about her family, her life and also my dead Grandfather's family. In addition to writing her life story I made copious notes about anything and everything she said on those Saturday afternoons.

Well, this weekend one of those notes - actually I'm not sure if it counts as a note as it's only three words 'old mother McDonald?' finally found relevance.

I was searching for my 2 x Great Grandfather in the 1901 census, having previously located him in the 1851,61,71,81 and 91 census returns, when I came across his name but the woman listed as his wife wasn't the same name as my Irish 2 x great grandmother. The point was that listed with the couple and their 13 year old daughter was a boarder with the surname McDonald. Somewhere deep in the back of my head a tiny bell rang and I took down a lever arch file off the shelf and began to flick through the notes I had made back during those conversations with my Nan.

My Nan believed that her grandfather had married twice and that an 'old mother McDonald' had some place in the family history, well twenty-one years after making that note in the margin of a notepad I found out, via the marriage index, that yes, our common ancestor did indeed marry again after his first wife had died aged 45 and that the woman he married in 1893 was a widow from the next street to where he lived, a widow named Jane McDonald and that in 1901 they were living in the house she'd shared with her late husband and children. She had obviously assumed the role of mother to his daughter from his first marriage, but her son, being 18, did not consider himself part of the family (as Lionel Bart wrote).

With so much information available on the internet that was previously only accessible through trips to London or Kew or Essex and Suffolk I am slowly being able to fill in some gaps and the various family trees are now bearing more fruit.

The point is that without talking to my Nan all those years ago, finding a name identical to that of our common ancestor living with a woman called Jane not Julia and with a boarder called McDonald would have meant nothing to me.

The importance of oral history was brought home not only by that discovery and by my Uncle's lack of knowledge but also by a colleague whose wife has been spurred on by the BBC programme. She knows nothing about her mother's family other than they came from Leeds, what makes the fact that she knows nothing even more poignant is that her mother lived with her and my colleague for twenty years until last summer which is an awful long time without venturing beyond a simple question like 'Mum, where did your parents come from?'

I know that Family history, genealogy, is not for everyone but I've met distant relatives through it, learnt a lot about social history and spent many happy hours untying and tying bits of pink string in record offices. If you don't fancy the research but have some older relatives around, spend some time talking to them about what they know, who knows one day you might be intrigued enough to want to know more or your children might ask you.