Where to Stop!

When you've worked on certain projects for a extended time, you just have to draw the line somewhere, and retire gracefully from the field, before the whole process slides into degenerative forms of obsessional neurosis. In our age of informational overflow, there is always more data to be accumulated, always an error to be corrected, always an alternative interpretation to be considered, and always yet another family branch to be explored. But there are also more human considerations, since once you move beyond the data and into the lives of long since departed relatives, you find that you are entering into a most peculiar dialogue with the dead, who cannot answer back, or correct or contradict the essence of the tale you are telling.

In structuring my own family history research, I decided to divide it into four parts, with each part to be devoted to my four grandparents, and for each part to conclude with their passing on to a better place. Through various sources, and particularly with the promiscuous power of the Internet, it is definitely possible to track down and investigate all kinds of detail and information about our relatives, both close and distant. This creates a moral and ethical dilemma, which I have tried to mitigate by not proceeding with family trees and information regarding later and current branches of the family.

For sure, it is frustrating that our 'one-hundred-year rule' in the UK means that we cannot access 1921 census information until 2021. This seemed to me for a long time to be rather ridiculous. But one bit of information, as dry, and as factual, and as dull as it may be, opens up avenues of exploration that can reveal much, much more. Anyway, without going into this further, the basic principle of this work has been to avoid intruding into the sensitivities of the living.

In any case, I am very happy to remove or alter content that correspondents feel - or can demonstrate -  is inaccurate,  offensive, intrusive, or in breach of copyright law.