My family is small, and in an odd way, I’m grateful for that. I have a grand total of three first cousins, two aunts (one of whom I’ve never met), two uncles and no siblings. And while my extended family are both lovely and intelligent – actually frightening how clever the cousins are – so often I hear tales from my friends that makes me grateful that they are also limited in scope.
Take, for example, Christmas. A time of festive cheer and relaxation? Not so, it seems, if you have a large extended family. For on Christmas Eve it is your duty to drive to Small Piddle to see your paternal Grandparents, your disgraceful Uncle, (for every family has a disgraceful uncle) your friendly Aunt, your two cousins with their mewling children whose relationship to yourself you can’t really solve, particularly while they’re dribbling on you. After five hours of driving and more tea and biscuits than you can conceive, you struggle home in time for Christmas Day, where more relatives await your attention. Parents bicker in the kitchen, while a mother-in-law dismisses the effort of whichever parent isn’t her offspring, and a father-in-law reads the Times and grumbles about how hungry he’s getting; and no sooner have you finished digesting than you swing over to the home of brother/sister/cousin who’ve been snowed in or are have produced yet more infants that you’re supposed to buy presents for every year, just in time to fail to watch the Queen’s speech.
But! Even if your desire, after all this, is a nice sit down on a thermonuclear device, wait! For Boxing Day comes round and should you be rash enough to be in a relationship, then Boxing Day is when you go to see the extended family of whichever partner hasn’t yet done the rounds with their side of the equation. Cue – more uncles, more aunts, more cousins, more brothers, sisters, children who’s relationship you can’t quite solve and inexplicably, more time stuck in traffic on the M25 as you wonder where your life went and why Dotty Great Aunt Doris decided she had to live in a lighthouse.
I am therefore grateful – so grateful – that my family is contained. There for me, should I need them, but there is a handy, south-of-Northampton, not-too-demanding kinda way.
That said, there are some interesting tales in my family. For example, I am not really a Webb. (For anyone wondering, I’m DEFINITELY not a Griffin, but even more importantly, I’m not a Webb.) My great grandmother was, by all accounts, a formidable woman. Finding herself pregnant in the 1920s – a decade when it wasn’t good to do anything out of wedlock, let alone give birth – she sent out telegrams to four of her most promising admirers. ‘I’m ready to marry you now,’ it said, or words to that affect. ‘Come at once.’ The four gents raced to claim her not-so lily white hand, and the first to make it was a man by the name of Webb. She took his name; he took responsibility for the child that was born, right up until the moment he decided that the hugely tall, dark-haired child growing up before him really didn’t fit with the neat, short stature of his family, and the marriage ended. Thus, I am a Webb by name… but definitely not by DNA.
On the same side of the family, the genealogy becomes even more shady when you look at my grandmother. She is a German-Jewish refugee, who came over to England on the kindertransport – a train organised by the British government in the late 1930s that evacuated Jewish children from Berlin, just before the outbreak of war. Aged 13 years old she said goodbye to her family on the platform of Berlin station, and none of them – not sister, parents or grandparents – were ever seen again. Decades later, and I’ve been in touch with the Holocaust Memorial Museum, trying to track down information, and what few bits we can find are heart-breaking in their simplicity. A list of names, a tick by each one; there, my great grandfather on his way to Auschwitz. A deportation document for my great grandmother; a couple of numbers, a name, a tick saying that yes, this deed – it is done. These are the few traces that still remain of an entire family, struck off from the face of Europe.
Thankfully, my mother’s side of the family offers in its own way, a little light relief. From my Mum I’ve inherited good eyesight, blond hair (with a genetic inclination towards ginger that keeps re-surfacing generation by generation) and the dubious privilege of being my own great aunt. By marriage, I hasten to add. The story goes like this:
My grandfather, Frank, had a sister, Doris. Doris married a man who’s name I genuinely don’t know – so we’ll call him Bob. Bob had been married before, and was much older than Doris. By his previous marriage he had a daughter, Zoe. By marrying into the family, my grandfather became Zoe’s uncle-in-law, and Bob became his brother-in-law.
However, Frank then fell in love with Zoe, and the two married. Now Frank was in the interesting position of his brother-in-law, also being his father-in-law, and his wife, also being his niece-in-law. And since that union, any children born of it are also destined to be related to themselves, since Frank’s offspring were both his children, and his great nieces and nephews; and so it shall continue unto the nth generation.
I suspect this complexity, more than anything else, is something which has, ironically, steered me away from investigating my own family too seriously. I fear it’d just give me a headache. Never-the-less, the stories which run through both sides of my family are both exciting tales in themselves, and an inherent part of how I came to be, and thus I shall preserve them, cherish them, and as now, maybe even go so far as to write them down.
5 comments
Tim S says:
February 19, 2013 at 3:29 pm (UTC 1 )
I only have one sibling which therefore makes me the disgraceful uncle for my niece and nephew… this cheers me up no end – probably proving that I really am disgraceful
Random says:
February 20, 2013 at 12:09 am (UTC 1 )
I know of a bigamist in the family history, which was nearly uncovered due to bankruptcy. And I can personally advise against step-families. I liked having just one sibling – far less fuss and politics. Although, given how active my “nuclear” family is, I appreciate how relatively calm and contained the extended family acts.
Lorraine Robson says:
February 21, 2013 at 9:02 pm (UTC 1 )
Mum had 4 brothers(one deceased) and 4 sisters. All but one married. I have 30 cousins, and 23 great cousins and 12 great great cousins that I know of.
My dad has two sisters and one brother-in-law.I have 5 cousins and 2 great cousins.
I have one sister and two nephews.
Needless to say when my maternal grandad died two years ago, it was a BIG funeral. But not one of my Aunts or Uncles had to face that loss alone. They all had the support of their own families as well as each other.
When my Aunt was diagnosed with cancer, we rallied around her when her own children basically dumped her. When my Uncle died, my mum put aside her grief at the loss of her beloved brother to help his widow, my Aunt (infact, whenever I had a spare minute, I was making tea or coffee for a stream of visitors at my aunts house).
When my paternal grandparents died, my mums side called to express their grief and to share memories of my gran and grandad, and offer support.
But I like just having a small family myself. Christmas cards are thankfully only shared between my aunts and uncles, as Facebook allows me to send eCards. (the cost of postage was enough to make you weep at the loss of a months wages)
I do know that my dad has, somewhere out there, two half sisters from my grans first marraige which ended badly when she ran away from her abusive husband, and being the 1950′s, was classed as an unfit mother and lost all rights to her twin daughters ten years before my father was born!
My oldest uncle married the sister of my eldest aunts husband, which is as close to incest as my family came to, which means that two sets of my cousin share cousins on both sides of their family, which is complicated sometimes. Especially since one set of these cousins are somewhat slovenly, and the other set hard working and decent. I forget sometimes when talking to them, and have been known to say the wrong thing about them when my Aunt is in earshot… Oopps!
All-in-all, I’d say that large families are fun, as there is always something happening, whether good or criminal, and many ideas are born from this. But the small, intimate family I share with my parents and my sister and nephews is even better.
Jeanne says:
February 22, 2013 at 5:05 pm (UTC 1 )
When you add divorce and re-marriage to this already complex algorithm, it is overwhelming. When I was little, our family was very spread out and so we were either on our own in some remote location or at a single relative’s place. Now my daughter (who is an only child), has a half-sister, two parents and our respective blended families (we separated when she was 10) and the family of her beau – all in a 50 mile square area and expecting to see her at some time during the two days of Christmas Eve and Christmas day.. And we have a small family!
AdrianH says:
February 24, 2013 at 11:31 pm (UTC 1 )
My family tree has, so far, turned up one genuine hero, who survived Portugese slavers who escaped while imprisoned on their own ship and nearly killed him, (he was part of the prize crew, as a Royal Marine), he survived the worst shipwreck of the age, the Birkenhead, off the coast of South Africa, and the Crimea War, living to 82, and leaving a whole bunch of children. His name was John Drake, and was a hell of a man. At the other end, a more recent relative, Annie Drake, (one of John’s decendants) shamefully left her husband, my Great grandfather, IIRC, ran back to London, had a new family, one of whom subsequently becoming a Great Train Robber!