Back when I first moved to this part of the world, sometimes when in Woodville I would be cornered and lectured on the finer points of my adopted family’s illustrious history by Mrs. Lallie Owens. A lifelong Woodvillian, amateur local historian, and somehow a relative (more on that later), Mrs. Lallie was a walking genealogical encyclopedia, whose command of the tangled thicket of Wilkinson County kinships was legendary. In a rural town like Woodville where people didn’t move around much, you can see why a talent like Mrs. Lallie’s would have been a vital resource, since before marrying the good-looking farmer’s son or daughter from down the road it would have been good to know how closely related he or she might be. Not that there was much risk of interbreeding in my wife’s case, since she had chosen to marry someone from nine thousand miles away (I sometimes wonder whether I was imported to diversify the Woods family gene pool). But still, I was a foreigner with an unknowable background who had married in without the faintest idea who was related to whom, and Mrs. Lallie clearly felt it her duty to educate me. By the buffet at someone’s wedding or in the produce aisle at Treppendahl’s, she would sidle up and, in the conspiratorial manner of one imparting crucial state secrets, begin enumerating in impenetrable detail the ways in which the Woodses were related to just about everyone, from Lee Harvey Oswald to the Queen. I would nod thoughtfully, but as someone who struggles to remember names, let alone the difference between a second cousin and a first cousin once-removed, few of the details stuck. The Lee Harvey Oswald thing did, though. According to Mrs. Lallie the connection was relatively easy to make. While counting an infamous figure at the center of multiple conspiracy theories as family might sound eccentric, it’s also very Woodvillian. I guess every family has stories it tells about itself.
In my family there wasn’t much curiosity about genealogy. I put this down to having come of age in Australia—a former British colony explicitly established for the purpose of sending anyone poor, annoying, or even slightly inclined towards criminality, as far away as possible. As a result, for white Australians at least, research into one’s ancestry was likely to reveal nothing more auspicious than the fact that you are descended from failed English cattle thieves. Although I grew up in Australia I was born in Britain; my family emigrated to Australia (voluntarily) in the early seventies. So, despite not being obviously related to English cattle rustlers, we adopted the Australian suspicion towards genealogical research as a form of self-preservation. Being a skinny kid with an English accent in an Australian public school was hard enough anyway. Why stir the pot by asking questions about your classmates’ criminal forebears?
An aversion to genealogy doesn’t rob a family of stories to tell about itself. My own family’s set piece was that Great Aunt Addie burned down the Crystal Palace. My grandfather’s mother’s sister, Aunt Addie was one of twelve children, seven of them girls. She was a spinster—one of the multitude of English girls born around the turn of last century left with no-one to marry after their generation’s men left for World War I and didn’t come back. Aunt Addie worked at Crystal Palace, a massive steel and glass structure built for the Great Exposition of 1851 and one of London’s most famous tourist attractions. She was a chain-smoker notorious for absent-mindedly leaving burning cigarettes lying around. On the night of the Crystal Palace fire, November 29, 1936, Aunt Addie was said to be the last person to leave the building. The rest, as they say, is history.
Is this true? I have no idea. In the end it really doesn’t matter, because the story that we’re related to an eccentric, chain-smoking, pyromaniac, Jazz Age flapper is just kind of cool. The point is that every family has stories it tells about itself. Whether those are stories that explain, obscure, justify, celebrate, or simply entertain, they are the glue that holds families together, marks them as distinct, and helps us identify ourselves within society. Told enough times, a story gains a life of its own that doesn’t need a genealogical record to resonate. Shared belief is enough for that. And wouldn’t life be boring without them?
