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I also have quite a comprehensive archive of old family photographs, certificates and papers, but sadly I never took the opportunity to ask questions when it was still possible to do so. At the time I simply wasn't very interested or curious.
My mother and her grandfather, mid 1920s
As more and more information becomes available online, such as the 1911 Census, there are many more tools available than in the period when E.M.Forster published "Two Cheers for Democracy" (1951).
In an essay or article written in 1939, Forster asks:
"Can you give the names of your eight great grandparents?"
"The betting is at least eight to one against...We can often get six or seven, seldom the whole eight. And the human mind is so dishonest and so snobby, that we instinctively reject the eighth as not mattering, and as playing no part in our biological make-up. As each of us looks back into his or her past, doors open upon darkness. Two doors at first- the father and the mother- through each of these two more, then the eight great-grandparents, the sixteen great-greats, then thirty-two ancestors...sixty-four...one hundred and twenty-eight...until the researcher reels."
Forster predicted that "in a couple of hundred years millions will belong to Old Families", but he also points out that much of the past is unknown and unknowable: "It depends upon who went to bed with whom in the year 1400...and what historian will ever discover that?"
The age of the internet and genealogical web-sites has changed all that, perhaps. I'm not even sure if I have the names of all my eight great grandparents. I'd better get out the files and check.
Forster was really concerned with attacking the pernicious racist policies of dictators and Fascist/Totalitarian governments. The essay was called "Racial Exercise". "Europe is mongrel for ever, and so is America", he writes, with a sense of relief.
I did Passage to India for 'A' level when I was 16. At the end of the story the main characters - Indian and English - are riding together pondering friendship after what has happened but 'the horses didn't want it - they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, "No, not yet," and the sky said, "No, not there.'" The novel was written in 1924. I read it in 1957. My family were part of the government of India, served in the military and civl services of that country. Now nearly a century after that sublime novel I have enjoyed meetings across barriers that once seemed insurmountable. I have repeated the words at the end of that novel and known that this time - 'in a hundred voices' - 'the earth' and 'the sky' did want it and said so. Of course we who ruled have miles to go before we rest and there's no room for a millimetre of complacency, but in a few wonderful and enduring cases I have been immeasurably fortunate to hear and believe the words 'now' and 'here'. Dr. Johnson suggested it was impossible to “tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over ...” I am quite sure this has happened to you.
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