Re: Writing My Story with Inspiration from Notable Lives

Rohit Farmer writes reflecting on his autobiography, his ancestors, and his family history.

This got me thinking about my own relationship to family history.

For starters, I used to *work* for the family history industry, around the time of the release of the UK's 1911 census under the hundred-year rule. But I'm not particularly interested in my own. Quite a few of my relatives are/were, and my father would send me copies of his research in the post.

One of his quests was to find where the family (and its name) had come from two centuries ago. It was known that the male line is from County Armagh, and he and some cousins had narrowed it down to two or three localities. But the supposed placename that bore our surname sounded somewhat incongruous and fanciful.

He died recently, and a few months later I did a DNA test which showed up a bunch of fourth and fifth cousins with the right surname, many of whom seemed to hail from half a mile down the road from one of these candidate localities. And would you know it, the name of the place they're from is the Gaelic translation of that incongruous placename he spent his life tracking down. After reading Rohit's article, I went to my family history file and found that Dad and the cousins had actually worked out all this placename transliteration nonsense back in 2016, without help from DNA.

People should definitely write their stories; apart from my father's considerable autobiographical information, I have only the merest scraps of information about my forebears, and I think I would have liked to have known more. There's also something numinous about the written word passed down the generations.