Over the last 20 or 25 years I have been involved in a significant amount of historic research. This has led me to look into the lives of a great many individuals long since dead. As a result I have amassed a sizeable collection of ephemera, including personal letters, photographs, deeds, private paperwork and so on.
It is amazing what can be found from a few letters and a couple of photographs. Basic births deaths and marriage archive starts to build a family tree and a brief scan of the news archives can sometimes reveal a little bit more than we would normally expect. The letters and other documents open up a window into the feelings and opinions of the person. The photographs add the faces of those we are researching. The overall outcome is a preserved record of a person. A record that wasn’t destroyed in life and therefore was left for us to discover.
Why is this so important you ask yourself? The answer is that there is nothing better than touching history – the closer you can get to the past the greater the understanding we have of the present.
Just because a someone is no longer with us and possibly passed away a hundred years back or a few decades ago it does not necessarily mean that person’s life has disappeared for ever. Although they might be strangers, over a period of time during the research they can in a way become quite close.
I think it’s always interesting to know how life really was and how people managed in days gone by. What it was really like for all classes of our country, how people worked and how they survived. The ups and downs, the traumas as well as the good times and the celebrations – it is all blended together in a mix that was someone’s life.
If you are one of those people who consider that history is so dreadfully boring then please do think again.
In a way the greatest adventures are those that happened before we were born. Everybody was someone even those whose lives were so very brief.
Ian Waugh
Amateur British Historian and History Enthusiast