The forest ancestors again

Thomas Whitehorn - I think a New Forest ancestor.
His christening is recorded in a beautiful hand.

In the bright frosty days when rain paused I remembered how sparrows spring clean as nesting time approaches - sweep sticks and feathers from hiding places in the eaves. Foxes are mating and calling. Something of that fever got to me in the last couple of weeks. I've spent hours online rooting through names on my mother's side of the family.

There are few narratives attached to these names, other than the streets they lived in, the churchyard they're buried in (masses of them in the same one) and occupations on census forms - agricultural labourer, laundress, unpaid domestic duties. Interrupting these, a house painter, groom, a charcoal burner, gardener. Unsurprising handholds in the story that kept mum's family in the New Forest for generations, mainly around one village. For a while they lived in Silver Street, which the New Forest Explorers' Guide reckons is a corruption of Silva, meaning road to the woods. Whether or not that's true, I'll take the beauty in that name as truth. Just as I was delighted to find a female ancestor called Martha Candy. But as more and more uncles, aunts, cousins several times removed populate the tree, I feel lost again and wonder if I need to accept I'll know nothing but names and places, that mum knew nothing, not even her own mother whose photo hangs in my kitchen. And her mother's mother died young too, scattering her children, separating my grandmother from her siblings. So this is why I've done a DNA test - results due in a week. I suspect searching names is about biding time until I see whether there's more to the story I've been writing on the lines between me and the Whites, Veals, Blakes, Tinsleys, Broomfields and now the Whitehorns.