By Vic Howard

Have you ever thought about writing your autobiography, or do you think your life is too ordinary? I used to be annoyed somebody had already used the title Diary Of A Nobody because it meant I could never record my own life experiences, but then I became interested in family history research and realised there are no nobodies.

Imagine if you could select from a shelf of volumes, each one a record of the ordinary life of one of your ancestors, and I am assuming that most of them, like mine, were agricultural labourers or house maids, wouldn’t you find them fascinating reading?

Many people have a sketchy knowledge of their family history. It’s amazing how quickly it fades from collective memory. This is partly due to us being given evasive answers when we were young and curious. Worse still, not being able to remember what we had been told, because we were not sufficiently interested at the time and only became curious when our parents had become too old to remember or were already dead. When I became interested in family history, my father and most of his surviving brothers and sisters were over 80 and either could not, or would not, remember. Secrecy was paramount. My mother had died several years earlier and, for her whole life, had refused  to talk about her childhood and family. Through public records, I managed to trace several generations back in my mother’s family and even had one visit me from Australia. Her own story, though, remains a mystery.

After many years of impatient research, I concluded I had a duty to record some details of my own life for the benefit of anyone coming after me. My children were still young enough not to be over-curious about their ancestors and, when the subject did arise, I found them asking questions I’d answered many times before. In fact, I never ceased to be amazed at how they could jumble up details and chronology of our own family life. I realised that, some time in the future, when they had children of their own and I was sitting in the corner mumbling about it being teatime soon, they would wish I was lucid enough to relate a few family details and annoyed that they could not remember what I had told them when they were younger. That’s when I decided to write; but I limited the story to my own development up to the day I got married and illustrated it with photographs where possible.

That was several years ago and, thanks to the wonders of the word processor, the narrative has gone through countless rewrites. Writing my autobiography had two remarkable effects: firstly, it vastly improved my ability to write. Secondly, it was wonderfully cathartic. I found I gradually reassessed the views I’d had of my parents who have been dead for many years. Writing about events that took place when my parents were perhaps younger than I was at the time of writing made me more understanding than I had once been. We are all victims of our childhood, whether good or bad, and often blame our parents for our own faults. I was also amazed at the remarkable amount of information I found just lying there in my memory, waiting for the concentrated effort of digging it out.

I no longer live in England and, when on a visit there some time ago, I called in at the library of the town where I was born. I found they were compiling books of photographs about the history of the town. I also found they lacked details and photographs of everyday life. All the high days and holidays were there but what was lacking were the sort of facts I had been recalling for my future grandchildren. So you see, ordinary lives are what make history interesting, not dates of Coronations or photographs of Mayors opening Town Halls.

Don’t write for publication, but for an unborn generation. That way you need not worry too much about upsetting anyone.  Social mores change, so what may have been shocking 30 years ago will probably be accepted behaviour to the next generation, if it isn’t already.

Remember the small everyday experiences of your childhood. This might lead to a description of your hometown as it was perhaps 20/30/50 years ago. By the time it gets read by your great-grandchildren it will be a word picture of a time long vanished. We tend not to notice the changes taking place around us. I was dramatically reminded of my age once when I asked a work colleague what she was doing when Kennedy was shot. “Playing in my nursery school, I should think,” was the terse reply. Things you remember and take for granted are history to your children and grandchildren.

There are other, slightly sinister, reasons for recording the past. AI is being misused a great deal today. News is being manipulated and history rewritten. We are currently being plagued by political correctness to a point where what we once regarded as normal is being questioned. The next step is to deny that life was ever different from how we now see it. Somebody once said: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” You could help to describe that foreign country to future generations and prove that it did exist.

There is a phenomenon called the ‘Mandela Effect.’ This describes how large numbers of people can sometimes have different memories of what happened in the past. For example, many people remember that Nelson Mandela died in prison, even to the point of remembering his funeral on TV; despite the fact that he survived and became president of his country. With that in mind, don’t rely fully on your memory without checking with an old friend first. There are still people who think man never landed on the moon, and there are others who say the Holocaust never happened! Historians need accounts written by those who know the truth. Your life and memories are important and should be recorded, so get ‘em down on paper or into your computer, no matter how mundane you think they are.

(c) Vic Howard, 2025

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