There seems to be a current obsession, amongst quite a lot of people I know, with tracking down the details of their family tree. Perhaps it's been triggered by those television programmes where we see the likes of Jeremy Paxman reduced to tears on learning the plight of his great, great, great granny who had twenty nine children with only three shoes between them and nothing but the fever of consumption to keep them warm.
But I suspect that most of those who are out there, scouring the parish records or glued to their computers in the dark watches of the night, searching websites in the hope of finding clues to their origins, are just hoping to prove one thing. They want to verify that their suspicions have been right all along, and that, despite appearances to the contrary, blue blood courses threw their veins. Now, as the lower orders have always outnumbered the toffs by a pretty huge proportion the odds are very much against this being the case, but they live in hope. And sadly, even if they do come up with an aristocratic connection, it's most likely to be via Sir. Dastardly-Bastard, up at the big 'ouse, who had his wicked way with poor Nelly, the housemaid, and then cast her from his door when the proof of her shame became visible beneath her tear stained pinny.
No, I think that, by and large, we're wiser to remain ignorant of our ancestors, and I'm sure that most of them would just be a dreadful disappointment in their tedius ordinariness anyway. And if you do happen to unearth anything remarkable about them you could end up like an unfortunate friend of mine who now knows that, back down the line, she had a distant cousin, lots of times removed, who was eventually banged up for drowning every alternative child, born to him and his hapless wife, in the nearby brook and then burying them in his kitchen garden. As a method of birth control it's pretty extreme, even if he did have the best rhubarb in the village. It's not recorded if it was the poor little odds or evens that got dunked but my friend now frets that the homicidal gene still lurks within, just lying dormant. These days she's even reluctant to swat flies in case it triggers a killing spree. Best not to know that stuff in the first place is my advice.
I'm sure that every time I pass my wardrobe there's the sound of a few skeletons rattling away in there, just waiting to be dusted off and dragged into the light of day, but I'm leaving them where they are. I already know a bit about my origins, thanks to a relative who has taken it upon himself to do a spot of delving and, by and large, I'm happy with his findings. Donegal boot makers and a Lancashire mill girl feature in the mix and that suits me nicely. I've always been proud of my working-class roots and feel that, generally speaking, that ilk has behaved rather better than the aristocracy, though it might just be that everyone was too exhausted from working down t'pit, or exercising their whippet to get up to no good on a major scale. Inevitably, there'll be a few bad eggs lurking around, but I'm still content to be a pleb.
Even in the highly unlikely event that you did trace a direct line to royalty it's not going to make a blind bit of difference to your situation now. Don't go imagining that ER is going to welcome you through the palace gates with open arms just because a dodgy website says that in the seventeeth century some frisky female ancestor underwent a secret marriage with the heir apparent and bore him many fine offspring. It's probably not true and it's definitely not going to get you an invite to walk the corgis with Liz, so what's the use?
It would be nice, however, if a few harmless eccentrics showed up, dangling cheerily from the branches of the family tree. I'd be delighted to be told that one of my forbears cycled round his village with a rooster called Cuthbert perched on the handlebars, whilst singing selections from Gilbert and Sullivan. Or that I was descended from a much revered postmistress who offered sexual services behind the counter on half-closing day, drawing an even bigger queue than for pensions. I'd love to uncover something of that sort. And it would be especially nice to find someone who had subverted the usual model and was a high ranking member of the aristocracy who had fallen madly in love with some distant aunt of mine and abandoned wealth for passion, willingly taking on a coal delivery round in Burnley to support them in their back-to-back lovenest. That'd be nice, and might explain my innate love of an open fire.
But this is all idle conjecture as I have no plans to waste my time in pursuit of the past. The present is quite fascinating enough. So I shall ignore those skeletons. They can rattle all they like. I shall concentrate on the living. But I'll admit to a hatching a plan to do something really outrageous before I pop my size three and half clogs so that if, a couple of centuries from now, one of my descendants decides to do a spot of digging, I'll be unearthed as one of the more interesting specimens. Now, what should it be....?
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