Roots

We have just come home from an extended journey across the United States, looking for our roots. That must be fairly unusual - mostly we hear of Americans trawling the so-called old world to find their origins. In this case, we have uncles or aunts living - all immigrants to the States since World War II - who know about the old family stories and that is what we went to find.

It was such a strange adventure, so poignant and full of discoveries I think it ought to be made into a book. There were themes which arose unexpectedly - of dementia, loss, memory, anger, old grievances, mothers, politics, anecdotes and coincidences - which knitted our various points of stay together quite bizarrely.

The American election was of course in full swing during our visit. Hillary Clinton was still bashing away trying to win the Democratic nomination. The attitudes of our various hosts to her predicament, and even more extremely their reactions to the prospect of a black candidate ranged from one pole to the other. For some of our hosts, Barrack Obama is the only person who could kindle hope for the young. For others he was more-or-less Satan incarnate.

In many of the households we stayed, there had been recent and actual bereavement.. In others our friends and relations were living with a frightening and anticipatory form of death - dementia in a loved-one, maybe Alzheimer's Disease. None of them had much if any medical insurance. They were using their own resources, and the tension was palpable. We were asked to watch, observe, reassure.

There was one really bizarre discovery, a coincidence whose odds I cannot calculate. Soon after our arrival in the States, we stayed for 3 days with friends in Maine. They used to live near us in England, in a tiny cottage in the middle of nowhere - a lane called South Street.

Two weeks and thousands of miles later, we were in California and I was browsing through the old family papers of my uncle, who died a few years ago. His widow, my kindly auntie Pat, let me rummage to my heart's content and I opened up all his files. He had been interested in plotting the family ancestry, always searching for some extra-grand connections, something royal or distinctive, and he had gone to the trouble of employing an English genealogist for a year or two, at some considerable expense, to try to prove something or other. I read the letters he had received from the researcher. The correspondence started normally enough - details of names and dates and places of birth evidently sent by my uncle, and reports back from the historian trying to track down the various family lines. Gradually a tone of bewilderment crept into the letters from the genealogist - he was evidently answering letters from uncle L which were verging on the crazy, things of fantasy. By the end of 28 months, the correspondence finished, the professional signing off with relief.

To me, what was fascinating was this strange little fact: the genealogist lived (lives for all I know) in a cottage right next door - actually attached - to the one once lived in by our friends now in Maine. They were neighbours for many years. Out of all the houses in England, all the millions of places where our friends might have dwelled, or where this genealogist might have lived, it turns out they were immediate next-door neighbours. There was absolutely no connection whatever between my uncle and my friends. I had not met these friends at the time my uncle stopped paying the genealogist. It was a complete coincidence. I was the connecting factor and did not know it till I looked through that box of papers.

I was in such a supercharged state of consciousness by the time I found this out, I almost fainted. We had had nearly three weeks of intense interviewing and discovery, and travel too of course, and the full emotional load of a large family scattered across the world.

Maybe writing this here will spoil the chance of writing it out properly. I hope not.