Family history and the New Forest

I found The Chimney Sweeper's Boy by Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell) on my daughter's bookshelves and its as compelling a novel about writing as I've read. I don't normally like writers naval gazing because it feels like a writer's run out of real life to explore. And it takes a while for the chimney sweep to come in but I was glad of him as an anchor, a job that's not as old as time, but that spans generations from the 19th century to present day. 

But what drew me in more was how my reading was in step with real life. I was continuing family history searches to make the most of a one month sub I bought to view online documents. I'd almost finished the novel when I decided to track down one of mum's uncles. 

Mum has little to go on, even the numbers of uncles and aunts she had, such was the chaos and poverty of her upbringing. But there was an uncle Eddie in her stories and a basic family tree on a family search site that other relatives (unknown to me) have put together. There was mum's mum with five older brothers and younger sister but no Eddie. 

I figured the gap between the youngest and their mother's death might have delivered another child and hit gold. School records for Emery Down at the end of the 19th century, turn of the 20th, gave me my grandma Ida, my great aunt Ethel and great uncle Eddie and led me to more of this family story - a child who died before he reached school, another dead at the end of WW1, one untraceable, without a death to his name, my great aunt later looked after by one grandma, Eddie by another, my grandmother by an aunt, their mother dead. 

At 1.30 am, when I found the school records and scrolled through lists of Whites and Veals (family surnames), I felt reassured somehow, by occupations in the school records: labourer, laundress, dairyman, charcoal burner, painter....going back generations in Emery Down and Lyndhurst. 

I felt it made sense of Mum's deep love of the New Forest, even though she knew nothing about her mother's connections with it until recently. 

Meanwhile Rendell as Vine concludes her own brilliant story about family history by embedding a story within it that makes sense of everything. 

I should be so lucky.