SEARCHING FOR KATHLEEN
My mother and older sister recently did some work on investigating the family tree, with the help of a very knowledgeable lady they met whilst walking the dog in the charming, English village where my mother lives. Such is the way with English villages – you never know who you are going to bump into exercising your canine pal. Having been brought up in a charming, English village myself, I am pleased to report, that the rate of grisly murder is, in my experience, much, much less than many BBC series would have us believe. No need to worry about being bumped off whilst walking the dog. More chance of being accosted by a neighbour you are trying to avoid. Or meeting someone qualified to research your family tree.
My sister was particularly interested in my mother’s paternal grandmother. This is because, I suspect, she has always been a rather mysterious and romanticized figure in family lore. She was called, the story went, Kathleen and she came from Dublin in Ireland. This was the reason, family lore reasoned, for various traits in her ancestors (aka us), ranging from musicality to a certain leaning towards the fey in some family members. My grandfather was estranged from his mother, and therefore my mother had never met her. The only person who could shed any light on this mysterious woman was my grandmother. She had met my grandfather because Kathleen had worked as the washer woman at the big house she worked in as a scullery maid. Sounds like Downtown Abbey, doesn’t it? Washer woman was a very lowly position, and I always assumed she must have had to take this job because her husband (my great grandfather) left her, the scoundrel. The only other piece of information we managed to garner from my grandmother was that ‘she drank’. This was said in a very particular manner, which imparted not only judgement on my grandmother’s part, but also a rather risqué element. On hearing this as a child, I had visions of my grandmother in a Dickensian style tavern, regaling the regulars with amusing songs, like Nancy from the musical version of Oliver Twist.
But, dear reader, this vision was totally erroneous. The helpful lady my mother and sister met on their walk couldn’t find any trace of this interesting Irish colleen anywhere. She did however find a lady of the same age and address, married to my great grandfather. She was called Kate. She was born and grew up in a small village in Somerset. She had never, as far as could be discovered, set foot in Ireland. The family tale was not accurate, and a new truth had to be incorporated into family lore. My sister was disappointed and immediately lost interest in poor Kate. My mother however, found a new interest in Kate. She loves the West Country and was enchanted to find out that her paternal grandmother came from Somerset. She already knew that her maternal grandmother came from Devon, so for her the attraction to this part of the world made perfect sense. An unexpected and moving consequence of this new information came to light one lazy morning whilst I was visiting my mother, over a cup of coffee and a conversation about the family tree. My mother was feeling a deep sense of sadness about the fact that she had never met Kate due to the estrangement between her father and his mother. Not only that, but he was also estranged from his brothers and sisters, so there was no connection there either. My mother felt that she had missed out on a huge part of her family, through no fault of her own, and therefore had missed out on those potential relationships and information about who she was and where she came from.
Recently I had reason to compile a genogram as part of the course I am following to be trained as a coach and counsellor. The task in itself was interesting, apart from figuring out how to fit my sprawling family onto one sheet of paper (blended family from my mother and stepfather, and blended family from myself and my husband). My conclusion was I couldn’t fit it onto one sheet of paper. I divided it over three sheets and then discussed, during class, the emotional meaning of this need to split my genogram. But I digress. The point of my mentioning this is that it made me realise (I have borrowed this phrase from my tutor) that we are never really just us. We carry around with us, fanning out like a peacock tail behind us, our ancestors. And we not only carry their biological DNA but also their emotional DNA. Several interesting books have been written on this subject, including It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn.
On searching my genogram for any cross generational patterns, I discovered two that really stood out for me. The first was absent fathers. On my mother’s side of the family this pattern was apparent in all five generations included on the genogram. My grandmother’s father died, and eventually my grandmother had to live in a children’s home as her mother couldn’t support her and her siblings. My grandfather’s father left as previously discussed, though the relationship was taken up again when my grandfather was an adult. He himself was absent for large periods of my mother’s adolescence due to hospitalization. He was also quite a taciturn man, and though lovely to me as a child, I suspect he was quite difficult to be married to. My own father was in and out of the house working, doing dodgy deals, doing bloke stuff, so his physical presence was ephemeral, and his emotional presence (for me) was almost non-existent. He and my mother separated when I was 8, and so his physical presence was even more ephemeral, and his emotional presence even more non-existent. My daughter’s father was out of the country working almost continuously from when she was 3, and when at home he was jet lagged and grumpy. When he and I split when she was 16 their contact was often combatative (from him) and emotionally distant. This emotional distance continues.
So how did that happen? How did continuous generations of fathers in my family become absent in their children’s lives? I don’t think it was/is coincidence. It is probable that the absence of fathers as a pattern in my family goes back more generations than I know about. I have found it in five generations consecutively, so I would say it is a strong probability. The women in generations of my family had fathers of their own who were absent either physically, emotionally or both. Their own sense of self and their development will have been formed by these fathers. When they came to make their own relationships as adult women, it is likely they chose partners based on their experience of masculinity, shaped by their interactions with their fathers. Also from their mother’s, who from necessity presumably had to manage without men. So they often, so it seems, chose men who would go on to repeat the pattern of absence (albeit unconsciously). Patterns in families go on until someone not only sees the pattern, but is also able to break it. Unfortunately, this someone is not me. As previously mentioned, I unintentionally managed to reproduce the pattern of absent father for my own daughter. I am not ‘blaming’ the fathers or trying to suggest they were all ‘bad’ men. They had their own childhoods, their own experiences which formed their sense of self and their characters. And this led them to choose the partners they did. Women, perhaps, who they knew (again unconsciously) would be able to cope without them. I hope that since I have found the pattern, future generations are able to break it. Having a fractured relationship with my own father has caused me much sadness, pain and difficulty in my life, and I hope future generations do not carry all this forward. Hard work, but I am hopeful I am the first link in the chain.
So, we did not find Irish Kathleen. But we did find Kate. And I found some insight into our family dynamics and how they can be changed. We are visiting the village in Somerset where Kate was born later this year. My mother will hopefully be able to fill in a piece of the family puzzle, and one of the women standing at her back will become clearer and stand taller for her.
The lady from the dog walk in the small English village also found out two other surprising pieces of information. My grandmother’s maiden name was Bond. Her father was called James. My great grandfather was James Bond. I cannot tell you how thrilled I was to find that out. The second piece of information I was less thrilled about. My paternal great grandfather came from Lancashire. Lancashire in the North of England. Any English person from the South will understand the distress this piece of information has caused me. I am taking this as a cautionary tale that if you dig around in your ancestor’s lives you might not like what you find. But perhaps the dog lady was mistaken, perhaps he was Irish and from Dublin …
Tracy Lamers Parke