COMMENT The mania to know oneself through ancestors spiked again this past week, as some 700,000 people searched the 1911 England and Wales census before lunch on Tuesday, when it was put on line. They could have discovered that David Beckham’s great great grandfather was a dustman (or “scavenger”) for Walworth Council; Amy Winehouse’s great great grandfather was a “hawker”; and that a number of bold women scrawled over their census returns variants of protests that they could not vote: “If I am intelligent enough to fill in this paper,” wrote one, “I am intelligent enough to put a cross on a voting paper.”
Why the itch to know? “There’s been such a loss of families’ oral histories,” said Jane Haynes, a psychotherapist, whose book, Who is it that can tell me who I am?, explores dilemmas of identity. “Divorce is so common: so many have lost touch with their pasts – and believe they can find it if they know who their grandparents and before were.”
