Threads - A Stitch In Time

 

My paternal grandmother was a professional tailoress. She objected to being referred to as a dressmaker as she made clothes for everyone. Most of my childhood clothes were made by her and also, a beautiful, pink satin eiderdown for my first ‘big girl’ bed. It was beautiful and I wish I still had it. My mum and I had summer dresses in matching fabric. My dad and granddad always had smart trousers. It is sad that Nanna Hetty passed away when I was only eight years old, but from being about four or five, she’d taught me a few skills. I could thread a needle, sew a neat running stitch and sew buttons on to a piece of spare fabric. These small things sowed the seed for my future sewing abilities. At secondary school, I excelled in needlework. Over the years I’ve made clothes for myself and my daughter and made items of soft furnishings. As my eyesight worsened, it became a difficult task and these days I just sew buttons back on, mend things and sew name labels on school uniforms. From Nanna Hetty’s background, I learnt about a different type of thread than anything she had on her bobbins. It was family and the invisible thread that fastens us together, which I came to appreciate more when I started to research my family tree.

When our maternal aunt died, my sister and I, as next of kin, were tasked with dealing with everything. Amongst her belongings was a large envelope with my name on. It wasn’t private, it was open and over-filled, containing old family papers, certificates and important letters, directed to me because of my interest in family history.  Eventually, I got round to going through the contents, being very careful with delicate items. Most was self-explanatory but there was the running thread of a surname that was unfamiliar to me. Clearly, this name belonged in the family, somewhere. I needed to discover more and solve the mystery. Looking into my ancestry gave me the answers.

This year marks twenty years since I began to search online, piecing my family tree together. I have followed my paternal line to Southern Cemetery in Manchester, where upon finding a clerical error in their data input, I was able to help them to correct it and find the grave I wanted. I knew that my Nanna Hetty was orphaned as a baby as she’d told me, but I don’t know if she knew anything about her parents, in particular that her father was employed as a tailor’s assistant. That thread was definitely in her bloodline. The unfamiliar name in my maternal family turned out to be my great-grandmother’s maiden name. I’m grateful to Cheshire Births, Marriages and Deaths website for that discovery, long before I started on Ancestry.co.uk. My family tree, even now, is a work in progress. Now and again I pick up a known thread, which is often more than one person and see where it leads. These are the threads of life in my family, which will weave on into future generations.

I found this poem,

 

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

William Stafford   1914 – 1993

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Canals - Boatmen, Old and New

Working on my family tree by searching online ancestry sites is something I’ve been doing for a long time. I enjoy dipping in and out and finding new information. Sometimes it can be hard to stay on task when something grabs my attention and takes me along a different path. I wish my dad had lived long enough for me to share my findings with him, or better still, discover them for himself. He would have been fascinated and would have learnt a lot from the World Wide Web. He had a computer which he used for writing letters when hand-writing was too uncomfortable. He could print them and post them. There was no internet and mobile phones were just starting to turn up, like bricks with a pull up aerial. How sad that his untimely death denied him so much. He had started to build his family tree with the help of a niece during one of his visits to the USA. Twenty years or so after his passing, I was able to take things further back.

My dad was actively involved with the Lancaster Canal Boat Club. He bought his first boat sometime in the early ‘70s. It was a small cabin cruiser. This growing hobby soon found him to be the proud owner of a larger boat, another cabin cruiser and a wooden one, which reminded me of a galleon inside. Being made of wood, it needed lots of care to keep maintained, and lots of time to do it, which he had plenty of. With the boat club, he was on the committee for the campaigning of re-opening the Northern Reaches – the stretch of canal between Tewitfield and Kendal – where the canal had narrowed a great deal and become too shallow to allow a boat through. I think this was due to a lack of dredging. When he died, he was treasurer and President of the boat club. I’d been to a boat rally once, and a couple of dinner dances, but I’m no sailor, not even slowly on a canal, and his boating hobby belonged to a part of his life that wasn’t mine. However, I wish he’d known this.

Going back generations in our family, 1840s and 1850s, there were many boatmen, working the canals as carriers transporting all sorts of goods, mainly coal haulage, cotton and wool. They lived on their barges or flat boats, having a very meagre existence, working hard in all seasons. What I learnt, though very interesting, was also heart-breaking to me, and made me wonder if my dad’s fondness for the canals in all their glory, was some inherited thing. If so, it bypassed me. Dad had enjoyed lots of different canal holidays. His favourite was the trip on the Caledonian. If only he had known that his ancestors had carried goods up and down the Grand Union Canal before he was sailing on it. Sadly, he knew none of it.

My Haiku,

They travelled canals,
Boatmen of my ancestry,
Hard work in haulage.

Coal, cotton and wool
Carried across the country
For meagre payment.

Generations passed.
My dad loved his boats,
Two cabin cruisers.

Lancaster canal
His chosen sanctuary
For peace and quiet.

He stuck his oar in
With the Inland Waterways,
“Re-open the North!”

PMW 2023

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Discover New Writers

 By Ashley Lister

 Late last month I was writing a paper about poetry. It was a general paper and I’ll be delivering it at a conference in a month’s time. But, whilst I was writing the paper I inadvertently ended up discovering Edna St Vincent Millay.

Not that she’d been missing and I found her.

And not that I didn’t know some of her poetry before. I’d encountered First Fig a few years ago and thought it was an entertaining piece of writing.

First Fig

By Edna St Vincent Millay

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light.[1]

But I didn’t know that Edna St Vincent Millay was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. I didn’t know that she was a poet and a playwright, a feminist and an activist, and openly bisexual in an era when being open about any type of sexuality was frowned upon.

Some commentators suggest that it’s easier to understand First Fig when the reader is aware of ESVM’s bisexuality. I don’t know whether I subscribe to this belief. I do know that discovering Edna St Vincent Millay’s writing made that research immensely more pleasurable than it had been.

Which is why, my advice for this week’s topic, would always be to take the time to discover new writers. Whether they’re alive or dead, new or old, proven or untested it’s worth taking the time to explore how someone unfamiliar puts pen to paper. Sometimes it might be a disaster. But, more often than not, the discovery can be incredible.

I Too Beneath Your Moon, Almighty Sex

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex,

Go forth at nightfall crying like a cat,

Leaving the lofty tower I laboured at

For birds to foul and boys and girls to vex

With tittering chalk; and you, and the long necks

Of neighbours sitting where their mothers sat

Are well aware of shadowy this and that

In me, that’s neither noble nor complex.

Such as I am, however, I have brought

To what it is, this tower; it is my own;

Though it was reared To Beauty, it was wrought

From what I had to build with: honest bone

Is there, and anguish; pride; and burning thought;

And lust is there, and nights not spent alone.[2]

---

[1]Edna St Vincent Millay, (1923) ‘First Fig’ from Ballad of the Harp Weaver, and other short poems.  

[2] I Too Beneath Your Moon, Almighty Sex, http://risdyeswecan.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/i-too-beneath-your-moon.html Accessed 27th December 2012 

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