My interpretation of this week’s
theme of ‘Broken Branch’ is that of losing contact with relatives over time
which can of course be for a myriad or reasons.
People move away from the hub of the family for work or for the hope of
a better life, in the same country or to Australia, Canada or the United
States, or to Africa, India or the East.
Family members can lose touch through family circumstances like divorce,
bereavement or a ‘falling out’. In my own family it is noticeable that once the
older generation of grandparents, aunts and uncles have passed on the ‘glue’ in
a family weakens and it becomes more difficult to keep in regular contact with
cousins, especially when they are a lot older than you with their own families. Today I keep in touch with my cousins and their
children at Christmas via a card, by occasional emails and via social media such
as Facebook. Of course, there are the
occasional family gatherings for weddings or increasingly funerals, as my
cousins are starting to pass away.
A ‘big birthday’ was the catalyst
for one of the Tunesi family to organise a ‘family reunion’ to coincide with
her father’s 90th birthday. Members
of the family met up, some for the first time, at the party. We had done some work on the family tree,
which was displayed on the wall, with another relation bringing in a framed photograph
of the Patriarch, Felippo. Just about everyone with the Tunesi surname in
the UK is descended from Felippo. The
tree was a talking point and a conversation starter where relations pointed to
themselves on the tree and then tried to work out how they were related to the person
they were talking to. With 16 children,
most of whom had children, the family is huge and sprawling with the epicentre
in London UK and branches in Lancashire and Kent and further afield. We have a One-Name Study for the name – we know
the UK family from research and are actively in touch with others bearing the
same last name in Switzerland, France, Argentina and of course Northern Italy where
Felippo came from. He first appears in London
in the 1861 census. My husband was brought up with his cousins,
they are all of a similar age, but over the years, with job moves, he’d lost
touch with two of them, but at the party he met up with them again, as well as his
Uncles and Aunt, and lots of more distant relations. Who’s got Felippo’s nose? Ooh, you look alike! Where do you fit in? Overall everyone got on well, brought
together by the birthday boy’s daughter.
We still keep in touch with most of the new-found relations, although it
is usually by social media!
In my husband’s family a family
tragedy made it difficult and upsetting to keep in touch with his mother’s
family in Scotland. When his mother died
from leukaemia when he was under a year old it hit his dad hard – he never
really got over the loss. Contact with
her siblings was kept up for some years but the constant reminders of what
could have been were too much, and the contact was gradually stopped, apart from the
occasional letter, and an annual arrangement for roses to be placed on the grave in the local kirkyard where she is buried.
When my husband’s father died, we decided, after a lot of thought, that
now was the time to try and build bridges.
We decided to place a notice in the local newspaper that covered the
area where his mother came from, with contact details in case any of the family
wished to contact him. The usual day of
delivery of the newspaper, a Thursday, dawned and we did wonder if we would
hear from anyone. In the afternoon the
phone rang - it was my husband’s Uncle John.
Later on, the same day, a phone call from his Aunt Margaret. Although
sad to hear the news of the death of his father, they were overjoyed to hear from
their ‘lost nephew’. With the help of
the Scottish family arrangements were made to bury Dad’s ashes in the grave
with his wife, a grave that had been maintained and kept tidy by the family for
nearly 40 years.
With a bit of trepidation it must be acknowledged, we made the trip by plane to Edinburgh, with Dad’s ashes in hand luggage, and hired a car to drive to the southwest of Scotland. My husband could not remember going to the village, but he had as a small baby. We had postcards of the village in the family collection, and we did wonder if it would have changed at all. As we arrived over the crest of a hill, we saw the sea, and arrived in the Square. It hadn’t changed at all! We parked up in front of the hotel where we were staying and got out of the car to be hailed by a chap, about my husband’s age, who introduced himself as his cousin Shaun. We had a lovely welcome from the family, there are a lot of them! My husband met again, or for the first time, his uncles and aunts, cousins and mother’s cousins who lived in the village on the first evening and we met up at their homes whilst we were there and looked at family photographs. At the wake following the committal in the kirkyard there was a gathering of the wider family at the hotel. We spent several holidays in the village, researching the Scottish side of the family, visiting the sites where they lived in SW Scotland. In many cases the houses and farms where the ancestors lived still survive and there are multi-generational family graves at Stoneykirk and Kirkmadrine 1. And meeting yet more members of the extended family!
Kirkmadrine - the tallest stone in the photo is a family grave
Villagers also had valuable
memories of my husband’s mother that they were keen to share with him and one
lady remembered holding him as a small baby on his mother’s last visit home. Valuable memories of a lovely lady my husband
has no memory of and of whom his dad found it too painful to talk much about
until his later years. A contingent from
Scotland came down for our wedding, with two of my husband’s cousin’s daughters
being amongst our bridesmaids. We had a
houseful! Two aunties, two cousins, two
bridesmaids and his mother’s cousin all staying with us over the wedding
weekend. Our house has never been so
full! A lovely memory. We haven’t been to Scotland for a few years,
but we keep in touch at Christmas.
Although traditional ways of keeping in touch with relatives
has changed from the physical visit and regular letters to the more modern
email, genealogy websites or social media, with the occasional physical meet up
for family events. With family history
research, the advances in DNA have opened doors to what once would have
remained a mystery, or conjecture.
Can such sites a www.genesreunited.co.uk
and DNA test results reunite long lost relations, or can it open a ‘can of
worms’? We have been lucky in our
reunions, we have hit it off with our wider family, but this is not always the
case.
Notes
1. Dumfries & Galloway Family History Society Stoneykirk and Kirkmadrine Memorial Inscriptions. Dumfries & Galloway Family History Society,
2001. ISBN 1 873977 73 5
No comments:
Post a Comment