walking a mile in their shoes
On the face of it, genealogical research proceeds like any form of research. As the O.E.D. provides, research is a 'careful search or inquiry' . . . an 'endeavour to discover facts by scientific study of a subject . . .' A genealogical researcher starts with what is known and, working back in time, follows connections to a point where speculation ceases. It all sounds so very clear and orderly but it is not consistent with my experience.
For one thing, this definition summonses a scientific paradigm and I, for my sins, am 'of the arts'. My mind doesn't always want only to follow the facts. More often than not, I find myself drawn to the more provocative environment that is speculation. As a result, this researcher gets into trouble, a side effect of which is that I accumulate irrelevant data and pursue a myriad dead ends.
Now I realize that I am not alone as a collector of genealogical detritus and, indeed, this piece is not about the misery of wasted energy and resources in pursuit of the irrelevant. Rather it is about the value derived from encounters with the unexpected, and reflection upon the unintended.
Having alluded to my visual art background, I should explain that I was becoming somewhat alarmed by the extent to which genealogical preoccupation was eating into my resources for facilitating studio occupation. Indeed for a while it appeared that, unless I sorted out all the genealogical dead ends, I may never get back to work in the studio. But I neither resolved the dead ends, nor was forced to choose between two competing activities. Rather, what changed was my outlook.
Essentially I realized that as I read a parish record or census, or scan the surface of a map in search of an elusive court or alley, not only do I acquire reliable information - the grist for my researcher's mill - I also derive aesthetic pleasure in much the same way as when I survey any visually inviting subject matter. Thus, for me, a gateway opened through which genealogical data passed to become a significant contributor to my studio activity. Rather than functioning as competition for one another, I came to understand them for what they really were: two sides of my particular idiosyncratic coin. Or perhaps, a more fitting metaphor would have them as the two bread slices with me sandwiched firmly between.
For me, Victorian maps became a visual, intellectual and, perhaps more importantly, an emotional link to my past. When reading a record or locating an address I see and feel something of where and how my ancestor lived. What was the neighbourhood like? Is it row housing? Are parks nearby? In what proximity are they to their parents' and siblings' abodes, and how far are they from their last known address or place of work? This kind of knowledge contributes to the creation of the picture of what life was like. But what to do with such 'pictures'?
Concentrating upon my paternal line and, using the image of a shirt as a symbol for the head of the family, I produced a series of drawings where the shirts were 'embellished' with a map appropriate to the location of the family, and with the relevant street identified by colour to differentiate it from its surroundings. These drawings tracked the family as it moved from Playhouse Yard in Finsbury, across London to High Street, Stratford. This is not a great distance, but the families moved frequently which provokes speculation upon what prompted those moves. In keeping with domestic references, I began work on a related series of ‘foot-stools’. These are objects that I remember seeing as a child but that, through changing fashions and functions, seem to have disappeared from most living rooms. Again, with these objects, a map became the surface. But this time, the upholsterer’s buttons served as the markers. At this point, it began to feel that I may have exhausted the potential link between maps and objects. However, an extension of this approach to production emerged from discoveries that I was making concerning the trades of my ancestors.
While I have only ever been an educator and an art maker, my father, an electrician for most of his working life, had also worked as a fireman, a butcher and a driver. Like him, his father had engaged in an array of occupations including publican, sweet shop proprietor, hairdresser, and mortar trench bomb inspector. One generation further back, I discovered much less varied career paths starting with my great grandfather who, in 1873 was apprenticed to box-maker Edward Joseph Jones of Turks Head Court, Golden Lane then worked for over forty years for the company of Messers Clarke, Nickolls and Coombs (Clarnico). Much of that time he was foreman of the wooden box department. His father's trade was that of a slater while his grandfather was a shoe maker. Each generation appeared to find his own way via a different medium and, perhaps significantly, no trade appeared to bridge the generations. If nothing else however, the fact that each worked at something different held potential for me and for my own work.
As a maker of art, I recognise and embrace knowledge of tools and media so decided to get to know my ancestors by experiencing something of their particular working processes.
Logically, if I had been true to the practice of the researcher, I would have started with my father's skills and worked back in time. But, as I stated earlier, for me art making doesn't always work in that way. I needed to begin where I felt the strongest, perhaps most empathetic, material connection. In this case, it was to my great grandfather the box maker. He worked in wood as, on occasion, have I. That said, I can be certain that our intentions towards the material were very different. His need was to mass produce while I am focused upon ‘one-of-a- kind’ production. Needing to honour this difference, even in a modest way, I used a quasi-industrial approach and produced two identical finger-jointed boxes of a kind that Clarnico may have used for lightness and disposability. Once assembled, I carved into the top surface of these boxes map references that would identify where and when my great grandfather worked and lived.
This approach to getting inside the materials continued and I persuaded a local cobbler to demonstrate how and then - in his shop and with his tools - permit me to resole a pair of my own shoes. Like the tops of the wooden boxes, these new leather soles became a medium carved with a map of the area around St. Luke's Church and Golden Lane. While I have been unable to locate his precise place of work, I do know that my great great grandparents were married in St. Luke's and I have to believe that his own footwear was, at least in part, the fruit of his labour.
My father, the electrician, was a different challenge in that I did not feel the need to create something electric. In one way and another, electricity is a medium with which I am familiar. It was his start with things-electric which provided the 'image' I needed. As a small boy, it had been my great joy to ride with my him in his three-wheeled, London Electricity Board (L.E.B.) van as he and his ladder patrolled his beat replacing burned-out street light bulbs. For nine years he was a modern day lamp-lighter; a fact which had escaped me until my wife, equally engaged by genealogy as a context for understanding history and vice versa, pointed it out for me. Unfortunately, it was a wrong step off the bottom rung of his ladder that caused a slipped-disc and, for the rest of his days, he walked with a limp. But that was part of who he was for me, so tapered ladders and an acid-etched light bulb became the focus of a small aluminum sculpture that locates our home: at the time, 85 Orford Road in Walthamstow.
For me today, living three thousand miles away in Nova Scotia, these works and material experiences function as a very real link to my roots. Where pictures exist, and there were only a few in my family, I was able to attach a face to knowledge gained through research. For the gentry and, to a lesser extent, the middle class, a painted portrait served as a form of immortality. For the labouring classes, only the invention of photography provided the conduit through which appearance could be known to succeeding generations. As evident from their occupations and places of residence, my family history is clearly grounded in the labouring class. So, while I have a few photographs of my great grandfather in his later years, I know nothing of his appearance as a youth when he apprenticed to Mr. Jones the box maker. The same is true for the slater and the shoe-maker and, in truth, I am no closer now to knowing their faces than I was when I first discovered their names. But I am convinced that I now know them better than I would have done had I not been able to identify where they lived; to see their marks on pieces of paper; or to experience with my own head and hands something akin to that they would have experienced with their head and hands.
Finally, and to ensure that I give credit to the generosity of genealogical researchers, I am greatly in the debt of those individuals that came to my aid by unlocking some of the mysteries that were impeding progress. Examples of such generosity range from the friend in Upminster who located and photocopied a Clarnico brochure that provided an image of the box-making shop, to the resident of North Wales who responded via email to my plea for information about slaters and slate. He supplied so much detail that I really came to know something of what my great great grandfather must have known. (His letters to me are here).
Unlike most art making, genealogical research is far from a solitary endeavour. Hence my presumption, albeit somewhat tangential to the normal practices of the genealogist, to share the experience of finding creative potential in seemingly less consequential aspects of information gathering. The acquisition of certificates has been of great importance, as has the acquisition of knowledge about the texture of a neighbourhood. But recognising an opportunity to get a little of the same dirt under my own finger nails may be the essence of what it is to
For one thing, this definition summonses a scientific paradigm and I, for my sins, am 'of the arts'. My mind doesn't always want only to follow the facts. More often than not, I find myself drawn to the more provocative environment that is speculation. As a result, this researcher gets into trouble, a side effect of which is that I accumulate irrelevant data and pursue a myriad dead ends.
Now I realize that I am not alone as a collector of genealogical detritus and, indeed, this piece is not about the misery of wasted energy and resources in pursuit of the irrelevant. Rather it is about the value derived from encounters with the unexpected, and reflection upon the unintended.
Having alluded to my visual art background, I should explain that I was becoming somewhat alarmed by the extent to which genealogical preoccupation was eating into my resources for facilitating studio occupation. Indeed for a while it appeared that, unless I sorted out all the genealogical dead ends, I may never get back to work in the studio. But I neither resolved the dead ends, nor was forced to choose between two competing activities. Rather, what changed was my outlook.
Essentially I realized that as I read a parish record or census, or scan the surface of a map in search of an elusive court or alley, not only do I acquire reliable information - the grist for my researcher's mill - I also derive aesthetic pleasure in much the same way as when I survey any visually inviting subject matter. Thus, for me, a gateway opened through which genealogical data passed to become a significant contributor to my studio activity. Rather than functioning as competition for one another, I came to understand them for what they really were: two sides of my particular idiosyncratic coin. Or perhaps, a more fitting metaphor would have them as the two bread slices with me sandwiched firmly between.
For me, Victorian maps became a visual, intellectual and, perhaps more importantly, an emotional link to my past. When reading a record or locating an address I see and feel something of where and how my ancestor lived. What was the neighbourhood like? Is it row housing? Are parks nearby? In what proximity are they to their parents' and siblings' abodes, and how far are they from their last known address or place of work? This kind of knowledge contributes to the creation of the picture of what life was like. But what to do with such 'pictures'?
Concentrating upon my paternal line and, using the image of a shirt as a symbol for the head of the family, I produced a series of drawings where the shirts were 'embellished' with a map appropriate to the location of the family, and with the relevant street identified by colour to differentiate it from its surroundings. These drawings tracked the family as it moved from Playhouse Yard in Finsbury, across London to High Street, Stratford. This is not a great distance, but the families moved frequently which provokes speculation upon what prompted those moves. In keeping with domestic references, I began work on a related series of ‘foot-stools’. These are objects that I remember seeing as a child but that, through changing fashions and functions, seem to have disappeared from most living rooms. Again, with these objects, a map became the surface. But this time, the upholsterer’s buttons served as the markers. At this point, it began to feel that I may have exhausted the potential link between maps and objects. However, an extension of this approach to production emerged from discoveries that I was making concerning the trades of my ancestors.
While I have only ever been an educator and an art maker, my father, an electrician for most of his working life, had also worked as a fireman, a butcher and a driver. Like him, his father had engaged in an array of occupations including publican, sweet shop proprietor, hairdresser, and mortar trench bomb inspector. One generation further back, I discovered much less varied career paths starting with my great grandfather who, in 1873 was apprenticed to box-maker Edward Joseph Jones of Turks Head Court, Golden Lane then worked for over forty years for the company of Messers Clarke, Nickolls and Coombs (Clarnico). Much of that time he was foreman of the wooden box department. His father's trade was that of a slater while his grandfather was a shoe maker. Each generation appeared to find his own way via a different medium and, perhaps significantly, no trade appeared to bridge the generations. If nothing else however, the fact that each worked at something different held potential for me and for my own work.
As a maker of art, I recognise and embrace knowledge of tools and media so decided to get to know my ancestors by experiencing something of their particular working processes.
Logically, if I had been true to the practice of the researcher, I would have started with my father's skills and worked back in time. But, as I stated earlier, for me art making doesn't always work in that way. I needed to begin where I felt the strongest, perhaps most empathetic, material connection. In this case, it was to my great grandfather the box maker. He worked in wood as, on occasion, have I. That said, I can be certain that our intentions towards the material were very different. His need was to mass produce while I am focused upon ‘one-of-a- kind’ production. Needing to honour this difference, even in a modest way, I used a quasi-industrial approach and produced two identical finger-jointed boxes of a kind that Clarnico may have used for lightness and disposability. Once assembled, I carved into the top surface of these boxes map references that would identify where and when my great grandfather worked and lived.
This approach to getting inside the materials continued and I persuaded a local cobbler to demonstrate how and then - in his shop and with his tools - permit me to resole a pair of my own shoes. Like the tops of the wooden boxes, these new leather soles became a medium carved with a map of the area around St. Luke's Church and Golden Lane. While I have been unable to locate his precise place of work, I do know that my great great grandparents were married in St. Luke's and I have to believe that his own footwear was, at least in part, the fruit of his labour.
My father, the electrician, was a different challenge in that I did not feel the need to create something electric. In one way and another, electricity is a medium with which I am familiar. It was his start with things-electric which provided the 'image' I needed. As a small boy, it had been my great joy to ride with my him in his three-wheeled, London Electricity Board (L.E.B.) van as he and his ladder patrolled his beat replacing burned-out street light bulbs. For nine years he was a modern day lamp-lighter; a fact which had escaped me until my wife, equally engaged by genealogy as a context for understanding history and vice versa, pointed it out for me. Unfortunately, it was a wrong step off the bottom rung of his ladder that caused a slipped-disc and, for the rest of his days, he walked with a limp. But that was part of who he was for me, so tapered ladders and an acid-etched light bulb became the focus of a small aluminum sculpture that locates our home: at the time, 85 Orford Road in Walthamstow.
For me today, living three thousand miles away in Nova Scotia, these works and material experiences function as a very real link to my roots. Where pictures exist, and there were only a few in my family, I was able to attach a face to knowledge gained through research. For the gentry and, to a lesser extent, the middle class, a painted portrait served as a form of immortality. For the labouring classes, only the invention of photography provided the conduit through which appearance could be known to succeeding generations. As evident from their occupations and places of residence, my family history is clearly grounded in the labouring class. So, while I have a few photographs of my great grandfather in his later years, I know nothing of his appearance as a youth when he apprenticed to Mr. Jones the box maker. The same is true for the slater and the shoe-maker and, in truth, I am no closer now to knowing their faces than I was when I first discovered their names. But I am convinced that I now know them better than I would have done had I not been able to identify where they lived; to see their marks on pieces of paper; or to experience with my own head and hands something akin to that they would have experienced with their head and hands.
Finally, and to ensure that I give credit to the generosity of genealogical researchers, I am greatly in the debt of those individuals that came to my aid by unlocking some of the mysteries that were impeding progress. Examples of such generosity range from the friend in Upminster who located and photocopied a Clarnico brochure that provided an image of the box-making shop, to the resident of North Wales who responded via email to my plea for information about slaters and slate. He supplied so much detail that I really came to know something of what my great great grandfather must have known. (His letters to me are here).
Unlike most art making, genealogical research is far from a solitary endeavour. Hence my presumption, albeit somewhat tangential to the normal practices of the genealogist, to share the experience of finding creative potential in seemingly less consequential aspects of information gathering. The acquisition of certificates has been of great importance, as has the acquisition of knowledge about the texture of a neighbourhood. But recognising an opportunity to get a little of the same dirt under my own finger nails may be the essence of what it is to
walk a mile in their shoes.
Bryan Maycock June 1999
Originally published in Family Tree Magazine December 1999 vol 16 No 2 pp 64/5 (reviewed by me and updated Aug 2021)
