Last bank holiday found me on my knees, clearing out the cupboards in the kitchen dresser, a ritual to which I return every five years or so. It's mostly old junk—some family photographs, a bundle of school reports describing me as unladylike and tone deaf, and a silver egg cup and spoon in a presentation box with the inscription “To Patricia Mary on your Christening Day, Easter Sunday 1960.”
The egg cup was from a great aunt who died recently just short of her century. The last of six daughters, she was given the name chosen for a long awaited son, and encouraged to wear trousers and take up sport. This policy served her well—she pursued a successful career, travelled widely (mostly by bicycle), and outlived her more conventional sisters by a generation.
Auntie Jack's parents had fallen on hard times and lived modestly in Margate, but her grandparents, according to my mother, were well to do and possibly descended from German aristocracy. They were certainly able to afford being expensively photographed in the 1860s. Their sepia images—she a handsome, haughty woman with high cheekbones and a pert bustle; he a dandy with pencil moustache leaning ostentatiously on a cane—spent a century wrapped in a blanket in my grandmother's loft before being added to my own trunk of mementos.
The fact that I do not know their names bothers me more than I can explain, as does the missing generation, about whom I know even less. Roddy Doyle observed that the family trees of the poor never grew to any great height—but that was before modern informatics. These days, you can in theory trace your genealogy via the internet, though when searches of the 1901 census were offered recently as an online service, the website was swamped with inquiries and had to close within days. A new searchable genealogy database (http://freecen.rootsweb.com/dataseek.htm) will be up and running in autumn 2002 and its authors are already bracing themselves for the demand.
If you believe the rhetoric of the family tree software companies, knowing (and caring) about one's roots is a basic human instinct. More likely, adding to one's infinitely spreading family jigsaw puzzle is the latest fashionable parlour game among the technophilic classes. Perhaps, after all, I'll refocus on the day job and shove the memory fragments back in the dresser.