She had sole access to the traditional family records: old photographs, old birth, marriage, and death records, newspaper cuttings… She managed their oversight with a great deal of irresponsibility. In short, she was burning them in her sitting room fire, one by one.
I and a group of cousins tried to stop her. These are irreplaceable records, we said. She responded with, no one needs know what an earlier generation did. Get on with your own life and stop poking your nose into the business of generations you didn’t know.
But aunt, I said, my parents and grandparents are in those records. Just pass them on to me.
We were sad enough when great-aunt Norma died. It’s hard to know if it was sadness or relief. There were no records left. No albums, no scrape books. Only an old cabinet with a sticky note attached: “This cabinet was my great grandparents. It might fetch something in a pawn shop.”
Since I was interested in family history I began tracing as much as I could through other records – government records, genealogical societies, and so on.
I learnt one thing: great-aunt Norma was my biological mother.
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