THOUGHTS ON

This month, Diane Lindsay ponders on her wonderously growing family tree. Is it all getting out of hand? Or should she just revel in her remarkable tree?

To prune, or not to prune? What should Diane Lindsay do with her flourishing tree?

Years ago, soon after we moved to our present house and shortly after I’d started my family history in earnest, I planted a rose against an old garden wall, because I liked its name: The Rambling Rector. It was beautiful. But boy, in the rich loam of our old/ new garden, did that rector ramble. It rambled so much that it started to shut out the sunlight. It grew taller than the apple tree it was supposed to gently clothe. It grabbed and entrapped the unwary and showered us with hefty drops throughout the British summer. Over the years it grew a life of its own, till we began to feel like sleeping beauties in our own garden. At last, when it threatened to crush the ancient wall itself, it had to go. I still feel guilty; maybe if I’d just pruned it…

My family tree’s getting to be like that climbing cleric. What started out as a sapling, is now, forty years on, a mighty oak. Or perhaps I should call it a mighty Banyan, because watered bountifully with DNA matches it’s throwing out twigs and branches upwards bearing more ancestors and ariel roots downwards to new cousins, till I’m literally struggling to see the wood for the trees. (There is a myth that a banyan tree will suffocate you if you fall asleep beneath it; I wonder if that’s why I nod off so often late at night over my family history!)

Can you have too much of a good thing? For years, reading surname interests in Family Tree Magazine, I’d almost weep in despair each month on finding none of mine there. To find connections, I wrote politely to every address in the phone book bearing my direct line surname and had nice replies from several cousins I hadn’t seen for some years, one pleasant note from a chap who was sorry it was his adopted name and another, uncomfortable one from a recently widowed lady whose husband, though bearing my surname, originated from a totally different family. (I did take her some flowers and she was pleased to talk about him, but I learned a lesson or two that day.)

Ironically, I met my best connection over a coffee with a stranger at a shared table in a supermarket café, who turned out to be my second cousin through my paternal grandma. Which was even more ironic because I’d unsuccessfully been tracing the wrong surname for years on my Dad’s flawed information. Which eventually, and yet more ironically turned out to be sort of right, through a previous 2x great grandma, who remarried a Mr Walters and who then unofficially adopted her grandson, who was my grandma’s brother, and the grandfather of the lady I met in

Morrisons.

Don’t worry if you can’t follow that, because neither can I unless I work it out on my family tree software, which fortunately calculates relationships. It does go to show, however, how very convoluted and thorny a healthy rampant family tree can grow. I now have five confirmed DNA matches in different ancestral lines, two of which are solved brick walls from third cousin matches and only another 338 fourth or closer matches to go, plus a bunch of very probable fifth or more times shared great-grandparents to investigate, and you can see where I’m rambling. Possibly into oblivion. Or rehab?

It’s all very addictive, and I know I should draw a line somewhere, stop adding little snippets to peripheral families and concentrate on polishing the main lines to perfection. I have eight 7x great-grandfathers for goodness sake! After all, like the small ornamental eucalyptus we also planted in our early gardening years, which grew to be nearly 100 feet tall, became a landmark from the main road and then, sadly ended up as a garden seat before it killed somebody, I wouldn’t like the rambling edifice that is my family tree to topple.

So, to prune or not to prune? That is the question. I think you all know the answer… About the author

Diane Lindsay has been addicted to family and local history for more years than she cares to admit, still teaches it to anyone who will listen, and often slips it cheekily into her creative writing class. She has enough brick walls to keep her going for many years and plans to live long enough to knock down every one. She finds it very hard to take herself too seriously.