Genealogy has become a national obsession. Right now, more than three million of us are digging up our family trees via the National Archives. It’s not all royal bloodlines and pleasant peasants, though, as the novelist and comedian David Baddiel can testify. In fact, the Latin motto of genealogists should translate as “beware of what you seek”; many of the histories that this sanguine sleuthing exposes are sad, profound and resonate down to the present generation.
Baddiel researched his Jewish family history for the BBC genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are? and his experiences are reprised as part of the Times DVD today. The original show aired two years ago this week, but Baddiel is still being contacted by fans.
He says: “Loads and loads of people want to tell me about their family histories now. Complete strangers send me letters containing pages and pages of their family history. It’s sometimes fascinating (he laughs); though sometimes not.” His family’s own history is markedly short on laughs. His grandparents were among the last Jews to flee Nazi Germany, his grandfather was interned on the Isle of Man and the family lived in poverty in England until the 1960s, when reparation money started trickling through.
For the series, Baddiel travelled to Poland to find where his great-uncle Arno is believed to have died in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, though the details of how or when remain unknown. Much of the detective work was done by paid researchers, but it was still a journey of discovery, he says: “The BBC don’t tell you everything they have found before you start filming. While I was on the train to Warsaw they showed me some Red Cross postcards from my great-uncle asking for the rabbi to pray for him because he was ill. I made sure I didn’t cry on camera because I just don’t believe in that thing. I know these things are for entertainment but it was complicated, ethically.”
In another episode, actress Amanda Redman was shown in tears after discovering that her uncle was illegitimate.
It is crucial to tread carefully. The National Archive’s latest figures show that 54 per cent of its six million or so readers, who either visit in person or via the internet, are researching their families. Dr Nick Barratt, a family research specialist on the BBC series, cautions: “Genealogy should come with a health warning. It can often be an emotional and upsetting journey.” Last year, the Society of Genealogists called for psychotherapy to be made available for people who stumble across unpleasant family discoveries. The society is one of several organisations concerned that amateur historians are not sufficiently prepared for the secrets they might uncover. Else Churchill, a genealogy officer at the society, says: “People can be dealing with many serious things, from discovering your ancestor was a rapist to finding out you are adopted. You have to be incredibly sensitive when dealing with such issues. Having trained counsellors on hand could help.”
Many inquisitive investigators end up discovering illegitimacy, bigamy, adoption and previously unknown relatives, as well as criminals. There is a simple reason why rogues, as well as royalty, tend to turn up regularly: they leave stronger traces, as highly detailed public records were kept by the police and courts. Maurice Kellner, a county officer for Genuki, the genealogical body for the UK and Ireland, reports how he helped a woman in Tasmania seeking facts about her family connection to the village of Wappenham, near Towcester. He found that one of her ancestors had been sentenced to be transported to Australia for committing unnatural acts with a cow. “I’m not sure if she was grateful or not because she never contacted me back,” he says.
And last year, Giles Gauntlet, who had not seen his father since he was five, was inspired by Who Do You Think You Are? to track him down. The 30-year-old Southampton man traced his father’s address in nearby Portsmouth via the website, Genes Reunited and plucked up the courage to call, but there was no answer. Looking through the letterbox, he could see his father, 56-year-old Barry Alp, lying dead in the lounge. An inquest in Portsmouth was told that Mr Alp had died of pneumonia and may have been dead for a few days. “I really cannot believe it,” Gauntlet said at the time. “I just wish I hadn't left it so long.”
But there are also those, however, who might be disappointed if they fail to find some dark secret. Last year, a survey conducted by 1837online.com, a genealogical website, found that 10 per cent of amateur historians hope to unearth a family skeleton. Some genetic facts may never be welcome, though. Men who delve into their family history by having their DNA analysed could unintentionally find that they are infertile. Many companies offering genealogical testing screen male customers’
DNA for a region of the Y chromosome called DYS464 that happens to be linked with infertility. If it is missing, it is odds-on that the customer is infertile. Professor Mark Jobling of Leicester University, reports in the Journal of Medical Genetics that one in 1,000 men has the deletion. He says: “Companies should either stop looking at DYS464 or warn customers beforehand that it could reveal infertility. People are buying a genealogy test but end up getting a fertility test.”
For Baddiel, the fact of his uncle’s death was not a shock, but exploring the truths around it brought a completely new and perturbing level of insight. “Arno died in the Holocaust, I knew that already, but I discovered more about him, so that he is now more than just a name. I have more of a sense of the person who was murdered. More difficult and saddening for me is that I have a greater knowledge of what my grandmother and my other great-uncle went through as regards carrying that knowledge, not knowing how he died and just having to accept that he wasn’t going to reappear and that the best they could do was put his name on a Holocaust memorial.”
Baddiel’s experience shows you don’t have to dig deep to discover a world of strangers. “You only have to go back to the Second World War, and people in my family were having terrible lives with no sense of security. It made me realise how near I am to their insecurity. When I was a child, all that stuff seemed to have happened a long time ago. But the war had ended only 20 years before I was born. Now I’m 42, I can see how short a timespan that is, and how close I am in time to people whose lives were lived under such terrible threat.
“It also makes me feel that, with the people I knew as a kid, I didn’t really know them much at all. You realise how much of the things that they kept silent about were full of narrative.
“Examining my roots publicly was one of the first things I have done that was overtly about me being a Jew, about what it feels like to be Jewish and in Britain, but having these deeply embedded Eastern European roots. My third novel, The Secret Purposes, was based on my grandfather’s experiences in the Second World War, but I didn’t know so much about what happened to the other family members in Poland.”
And he says researching your family history can further tangle the family roots. “My grandparents fought on different sides in the First World War. One of them was a Russian Jew who had been brought up in Wales, and the other one fought for Germany. It’s really fascinating. I’d much rather have my history than some of the other celebs on the series, such as Ian Hislop and Jeremy Clarkson: it was easy to find their roots because their families were not persecuted. Not much seems to have gone on with them.”
Often, it’s the sadnesses rather than the successes that echo down the years. The Times DVD rattles with the sound of skeletons falling out of closets. Vic Reeves discovers that his grandfather was a bigamist, while Amanda Redman found hers was a womanising bully.
Lesley Garrett, the opera singer, found that her great-great-grandfather, Charlie Garrett, had almost certainly murdered his wife Mary Anne with carbolic acid. The coroner ruled it accidental, but the programme unearthed enough circumstantial evidence to put together a convincing case that the killing was deliberate: bottles of carbolic acid were easy to differentiate from other medicines as they had a unique shape and were clearly marked with a poison label at the top and bottom.
“I can’t believe he didn’t know what he was doing,” said Garrett, who was the first in her family to move out of its home village of Thorne, near Doncaster in Yorkshire.
The Baddiel family story is still unfolding. During filming he met a cousin from a branch of the family who are Orthodox Jews. His own side has not spoken to them since becoming secularised. It could have been the start of a rapprochement, but he says: “I am slightly frightened of them because I know they are very orthodox and fundamentalist, so they are bound to have all sorts of ideas about the things that I do . . . I vaguely think one day, when I have the time and the headspace, I will go and see them.” Or he might just leave it to the next generation.
David Baddiel’s novel The Secret Purposes (Abacus, £6.99) is available at £6.64: 0870 1608080, www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
Kith and kin: the highs and lows of playing detective
Jeremy Clarkson laughingly laments his lost legacy: “The Kilner side of my family amassed a fortune from the glass industry. They owned piles of houses. It was George Kilner in the early 20th century who blew the family fortune. He blew my money. I don’t feel any empathy towards these people, these Kilners, as though I have anything in common with them or that they have given me anything. It’s been an interesting story, and the amazing thing is how everything that’s happened is still written down somewhere. But I don’t feel a connection with them.”
Lesley Garrett wants to lose hers: “When you look at your history, it challenges you to write your own story. I met some incredibly powerful people in my family’s Yorkshire past. I understand the strong family traditions they created, and I’ve benefited enormously from them. I can’t help but wonder whether that way of looking at life is appropriate any more to a 21st-century, liberated woman. What is right for me now is very different from what it was then. I feel now that I don’t need my Yorkshire family history’s permission any more to do what I want to do.”
Bill Oddie is relieved to have found out the truth about his estranged mother’s schizophrenia. He discovered that she had previously given birth to a baby girl who had died after five days, largely because his grandmother banned his mother from fussing over the child. “Learning this was a complete lifesaver,” he says. “It confirmed that my mother was in no way negligent or incompetent. She was just enormously unlucky. I can really say that I am really sorry, Mum. And I wish I had known her better.”
FREE DVD
Today’s Times has a free DVD of excerpts from the first series of Who Do You Think You Are? plus tips on how to trace your family history. In The Sunday Times tomorrow you will find a free CD-Rom giving you tools to do it.
