#HistFicThursdays - Three Historical Myths which Genealogy Research has Helped to Bust

 First of all, thank you to everyone who got in touch about the Science Fiction in Historical Fiction blog a few weeks ago. It is great to have such feedback and super to hear that these two genres are rubbing along so well!

At the moment, I'm doing very little writing. It's not intentional, it's just other things have been taking me in other directions. I'm truly honoured to have been asked to be a critical reader on a book set in 1490s Florence. I can't even begin to describe how much it means to have been asked! I finished it earlier this week and you can expect a post on it when it hits the bookshelves!

I've also been spending time in the Realm of Family Tree. This landscape is justly given its capital letters and, historical writers, I cannot tell you how important this is to your research. It is worth having access to genealogy sites just for the information, whether the people there are your ancestors or not. It's the looking beyond the names which suddenly bring these normal people to life. And this is where the myths start to unravel...

The furthest back point on our family tree so far.
This takes it back pre-Conquest.

The biggest myth of all is that people in the past didn't travel far. At school, we were taught that, until the Industrial Revolution, "normal" people didn't move around the county. Well, perhaps that is true, but it means that my family were certainly not normal! Agricultural workers were often forced to travel in order to find work, even if only from year to year, or season to season. In addition to this, those with a trade - however small and seemingly insignificant by today's understanding - were inclined to travel where that trade dictated. As Britain is an island, the sea was a major highway, with a great many people travelling up and down the coast as they followed the migrating herring shoals, an industry which boomed in the nineteenth century to such an extent that the fish numbers are only now recovering.

Another noticeable feature on the tree is that people seem to have been unimaginative over the choice of names. Daughters were frequently named after mothers, sons after fathers, and - on quite a few occasions - children were given the surnames of their mother or grandparents as a Christian name. I find myself trying to avoid this in my writing, simply because it may be more confusing for readers. Recently, in favour of believability, I've chosen to use pet names in order to clearly separate the characters.

And finally, no one is defined entirely by their social position. Marrying for love was as common as marrying for money, and marrying because the bride was pregnant does not appear to have been as common prior to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as you are led to believe. Baptism records prove that vicars often knew who the father of an illegitimate child was. Thank goodness for their diligent nosiness which has helped multiple times in building the tree. Of course, there are still mysteries and question marks in the tree with teasing hints of who someone might have been... A bit like a good story, really!

There are other myths, some oddly specific, which the Realm of Family Tree has helped me debunk, but these are the most common three. There is something quite exciting and emotive about writing your ancestors, and it is well worth trying, even if you create only an incidental side character who you know was based on your seventh-great-grandmother. Time to discover who she really was and bring her story to life...