The hand-drawn family tree gift
It was my aunt’s 70th birthday, and for the years leading up to it I’d been researching her paternal ancestry as part of the research into my grandma’s life.
My research went back generations, and her ancestors - both maternal and paternal - were complex, as these things often are. My aunt has an Ancestry account, but it was impossible for her to view the full tree on her fiddly iPhone. And no matter how many times I drew it out on napkins in cafes, she still struggled to visualise how she fitted-in to everything.
A framed hand-drawn family tree with photos, colour co-ordinated according to blood line, seemed to me to be the perfect gift. A card overlay hid the new discoveries, with holes cut out so only the ancestors we’d known about (very few!) were visible initially, creating a ‘before’ and ‘after’. It now hangs on her landing where she sees it every day and hopefully she now knows where she belongs! The blanks squares create a stamp album feel, so the tree has space to grow,
I knew next to nothing about my maternal grandma, other than her name (Edna May Smith) and that she’d lived in Liverpool. Nothing about her parents (or ancestors beyond), nothing about the nature of her life (other than it was difficult - anecdote from my dad).
I bought an A4 book (pictured) to make notes and it gradually became a bit of a family compendium.
It was the information uncovered by this project that led me to write Take Me Home, my first novel, inspired by my grandma’s life.
To give a feel of the depth of research, the gallery below shows just a small number of extracts from the journal that became a monster!
I haven’t included uncovering my grandma’s life in the ‘DNA-led Projects’ section of this website, partly because it was such an enormous project, but also because I think it’s a little too close to home. But this journal is keeping her story safe.
The Compendium
