I’m a bit behind with this #52ancestors challenge, partly because of being very busy at my day job, and partly because the prompt had me stumped for a little while.
Identity - What angle should I take? My husband and I haven’t as yet done a DNA
test. Mine would be boring, all my ancestors
come from the UK, mostly England with a very small 32nd in Wales and
Ireland, so I guess there would be no surprises for me. My husband’s ancestry is more varied, with being
half Scots, with 1/16th Italian, the rest English. We both identify as being British.
The family documents we have in our
archive which could cover the ‘Identity’ theme are old passports, for ourselves
and our parents, dating from the 1940s onwards.
It is interesting to look at the photographs and also the description of
the person, and also where the ‘stamps’ were from, so a timeline of travel can
be made.
It is clear from my parents’
passports that they enjoyed the first ‘package holidays’ to Spain in the
1950s-1960s, with me included in the latter years. There is also the occasional
trip further afield for my Dad, to Italy, to see an England football match. These are of course the old blue passports
from before the UK went into the EU. Our
current passports are the claret EU passports, with any new ones returning to
blue now the UK has come out of the EU. Maybe
there will be a return to a ‘stamp’ when you travel?
Then there are also National
Health Medical Cards, Driving Licences, and for us, rather than our parents, photo
IDs for Libraries and Record Repositories such as the National Archives and The
British Library. Similarly, Membership
Cards for Societies to which we belong, or belonged. My husband has his Services ID card and we
both have photo driving licences. All of
which are means by which we are identified.
How many of these have you got in
your own family archives?
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