This piece was written nine years ago, just a few weeks after the death of my father. It marks a beginning of sorts, the point when my explorations into the lives of my ancestors became my own ‘journey’. Since then the quest for ancestors and stories has spread and deepened and there will be much more to share with whoever has an interest ……..
November 2008
“Who do I think I am? A story maker?
I have become the family story maker. A few weeks ago my father died and as my mother died five years ago and I am their only child it is now down to me to keep the family story going. Some people have said to me that you don’t really grow up until your parents die and you are no longer someone’s child. I guess that for an only child that is even more the case. I lived, happily, in an intense threesome as a child and I have never really been free of the closeness, the in jokes, the unspoken assumptions, the joint protection that such a family life provides.
The intensity was compounded by the fact that my parents came from different parts of the country, both were from large families and my father was a Methodist Minister which meant that as a threesome we moved every few years to yet another new place. The freedom I experienced on the death of my father, aged eighty eight and having suffered with dementia for some years, was both exhilarating and scary.
Both parents were story tellers and I knew my aunts and uncles and grandparents more as characters in a story than in real life for we saw them perhaps once a year. My mother had a particularly devious way of telling stories that my children found both intriguing and, at times, tedious. She always knew where her story was going but took the opportunity to take as many detours as possible to include stories that we had heard many times before. Unfortunately, as we realised after her death, we hadn’t always been concentrating as we should and some of the stories now need to be pieced together from the fragments we occasionally recall.
My father’s approach was different. He came from what he would describe as a humble background in a small village in Holderness. He viewed his childhood and personal journey within a social historical perspective and his unfinished attempt to write about his life focused on the social conditions of his childhood village and family.
These stories were their stories and given our itinerant life and their continuing attachment to their roots they were strands and themes which ran through my family experience with them even when I had gone on to build a family of my own. It was not though until my mother died and my father’s stories became confused and sometimes surprising through dementia that I began to make direct relationships and connections between myself and my family story.
Genes Reunited got me going on this. One of my uncles had started on my grandfather’s family tree, so I started by entering that into Genes Reunited. I discovered that there were quite a few other people out there who shared part of my story – hardly surprising as my father was the youngest of twelve and his father was one of ten as was his mother. I began to do the multiplication and was soon into the hundreds! My grandfather’s great grandmother, Sarah Sudderby, born in 1774, featured in a number of other family trees and I was already being contacted for more information and exchanging ‘trees’. Another connection brought me more about my paternal grandmother, Emily Lickiss, including a pamphlet from someone who had traced the Lickisses all the way back to 1551 in the person of Guidonus Lickas, residing in York.
I was finding all this hard to believe and wanted to check out the information for myself and signed up for internet access to census and other data. This marked the point when, at least for a time, the fleeting interest became addictive. It was so important to know every possible person who may have even a tenuous relationship. I can now tell you who my grandson’s second cousin three times removed is as well as trace some of the lines way, way back. And of course there was my mother’s family to trace too.
So if I was going onto the BBC programme – Who do you think you are? – what might be those nuggets that would really get people interested. So far I have five possibilities.
First of all those Lickases. They lived in York in the 1500s and I’ve been reading C. Sansome’s novel ‘Sovereign’ and it’s all about York and the Progress to the North of King Henry XIII. Could someone related to me really have been there, perhaps seen the King? Would they be conspirators or reformists? Scared for their lives? Did they provide food or labour for the thousands of people who travelled with the King?
Then later in the early 1800s one of those Lickisses, Matthew, travelled to Hedon with his brother William. He was young and seems to have fallen on his feet because he soon married an Alderman’s only daughter, Rebecca Dring. Was Matthew a bit of a lad? Was he talented? Were the Drings looking for some new blood? The Drings owned property and had been mariners – their family story is yet to be explored but Rebecca inherited property and land and seems to be the only person with any wealth in any of my stories. This could explain the existence of the silver candlesticks.
My father left me very little money and two rather battered silver candlesticks. He encouraged me to keep them in the family by passing them on to my elder daughter. The story goes that the candlesticks were implicated in some way in a murder in a pub. This always seemed odd to me as my parents did not drink alcohol and never went to a pub. I had assumed that the family who were good ‘Chapel people’ would not have been drinkers. However the 1891 census reveals that my great aunt – my grandmother’s sister and her husband ran one of the Hedon pubs and other members of the family lived next door. So perhaps there is something in the story – and a search of local newspapers, historical accounts may turn something up.
Then there is the story behind the 1881 census. My grandmother was the youngest of ten children and in 1881 she would have been seven. Strangely the census tells me that her family – which had been, happily perhaps, living together in 1871, is now split across a number of households and the parents are living in different places. By 1891 her parents are living together again. What happened – why was the family living apart – were they too poor? Was there an accident or a fire?”
Most of these questioned remain unanswered although there are now many more additions to the Tong and Lickess trees. In part this is because I developed an interest in my mother’s ancestors and have gone on to find many Pringles and Pattersons living in close proximity in the C19 slums of Carlisle, discovered ‘cousins’ in New Zealand and pondered just how many people in Carlisle I am related to! And every now and then I return to dabble in the Tong and Lickess trees – much to do…..