Lewis, Son Of Lewis

A couple of months ago, I was contacted by a complete stranger via Genes Reunited, the sister site to Friends Reunited that deals with family history. GR is a cool site: a brilliant example of the power of focused social networking. You upload your family tree, in as much or little detail as you’re comfortable with, and it matches you up with other people whose trees contain similar ancestors (based on name, date of birth and location of birth if provided).
Being contacted by a complete stranger isn’t exactly a surprise: in fact, it’s usually what you’re aiming for. Assuming that you’re still in touch with your immediate family, it’s the strangers who can provide the most useful information. They’re generally descended from several generations back – either by blood or marriage – and so you’re able to make connections to the people who are your great-grandparents siblings’ descendants, for example.
I’ve made contact with a handful of people in this way and thereby been able to trace specific branches of the family tree back to the 1600s. It’s been fascinating. However, this particular contact was slightly different. Jean lives in a small village in Bedfordshire, the place where her husband’s family was from. While he was tracing his own ancestry, she became interested in the village’s families as a whole and researched them as her own pet project.
I had discovered only a few months beforehand that my great-great grandfather came from this village. Prior to coming across that specific nugget of information in a census return, we’d always assumed that my great-grandmother’s family were Nottingham born and bred. It turned out that this wasn’t the case; she was the first generation of that particular surname to be born in Nottingham. Her father was from Bedfordshire and her mother from Staffordshire.
Jean was organising a reunion of all the “old” families of the village. She provided copious documentation from her research, covering the village’s history as a whole and my own ancestors’ history in particular. They lived hard lives. Although the gentry controlling most of the village’s land seem to have been unusually benevolent and enlightened, nevertheless poverty was rife and many families ended up leaving the village to seek a living elsewhere.
My ancestors lived in and around the village for much of the nineteenth century, though they had originally come from another village slightly further south. However, by the 1870s they clearly felt their lives there to be unsustainable. I discovered via my research that my great-great-grandfather, a farm labourer, had travelled north to Nottingham with one of his brothers. He met his future wife shortly thereafter; they married in 1878 and raised six children.
Elsewhere, I discovered that one of his brothers had ended up in Derby. The story passed down that branch of the family was that he had walked there from Bedfordshire. I wonder whether this other brother was the same one who accompanied him, according to my own family’s collective memory? It’s slightly humbling to think of the two of them making their way a hundred miles north on foot. (Of course, this could just be a myth that developed over the years.)
My mum says that when she was growing up, she and her parents never saw a great deal of my great-grandmother, my grandpa’s mum. This Bedfordshire connection was news to her when I first discovered it. My great-grandma lived until I was six years old and apparently I met her several times, though I don’t remember her. I remember the house though: small, dark, claustrophobic, with the same grandfather clock in the corner that now stands in my parents’ hallway.
At this “family reunion” last Saturday, I finally met one of my distant relatives in the flesh: my sixth cousin once removed. Which basically means that his great-gt-gt-gt-gt-grandfather (born 1729, died 1789) was my great-gt-gt-gt-gt-gt-grandfather. A link so tenuous as to be almost unworthy of mention, yet a link nevertheless. A Bedfordshire farmer whose children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s descendants had met again.
What would Lewis, son of Lewis, have thought of us? Firstly, he would probably have noticed that neither of us was called Lewis. (This name ran for at least seven generations in the family, but the last Lewis I’m aware of was my great-grandma’s brother and I haven’t yet traced his hypothetical descendants.) He would also have spotted that neither of us look particularly like sons of the soil and would have had no understanding of how I make a living.
In this sense, “family” is an abstract, theoretical concept. Yes, we undoubtedly share DNA and there’s the nice poetic concept of “blood” that fires up my imagination. Yet I’m under no illusions; your family are the people who immediately surround you, related or not. I have far more in common with my brothers-in-law than with my distant cousin (clearly of a very different generation and mindset to me), or with our even more distant ancestor.
However, it’s fun to make the connections and fascinating to think back to the lives of the people who ultimately made us and paved the way for us. It’s also great to go to an event like this and talk to other people about what they’ve discovered about their own ancestry. The diversity is an eye-opener (one attendee was descended from one of the Norman soldiers who travelled to Britain with William the Conqueror) and the commonality of experience is rewarding.
The most tangible experiences of my visit to the village were the relics left behind from the period when my family still lived there. The “new” church clock, to which all the villagers subscribed (I saw the paperwork, detailing individual families’ contributions). The church itself, with the family name on several headstones in the graveyard. The old blacksmith’s building. The village hall in the former school they would have attended. The house where they lived.
I’m still absorbing it all. I think maybe the most significant impact this will have on me is to send me back to the village in Nottinghamshire next to the one where I grew up, where both of my dad’s parents came from and where their ancestors lived for several hundred years. I’ve taken that proximity for granted for far too long and now it’s time to start seeing the place with fresh eyes as the most significant source – of many possibilities – of where I’m “from”.
Further reading

• Remembrance
• Roots That No Storm Can Dislodge
• The Big I Am