My big day is about to go down in history

LAST August, on one of the final hot days of that strange, unprecedented summer, we caught the ferry to Dunoon. Light rippled across the water as we chugged our way from Gourock to Hunter’s Quay.

As a child, I often came to Dunoon with my parents, and as we drove through the town I was flooded with memories of sticky ice creams, pub lunches in bars that smelt comfortingly of stale beer and peanuts, the inevitable graveside visit before home time.

Although it had been more than 30 years, the cemetery wasn’t hard to find. We drove down a little track on the edge of the town, past the recycling centre that had once been a bowling green. In the distance, graves sloped gently up a hill to a thick pine forest.

My Mum had told us where to look. Through the gate, turn right, several rows up near the end. We walked slowly, the flowers in my hand rustling, scanning the names and the dates.

And there it was. My great-grandparents’ grave. Their names faded now, the stone weather-beaten, a little empty vase with the word GRAN etched on it off to one side.

My father came here faithfully every year until he was no longer able, tending to the grass around his grandparents’ grave, pulling up the weeds. Casting my flowers aside, I got down on my hands and knees and did the same.

I thought of that trip the other day, when the woman from Glasgow City Council Registrars office rang to talk through our marriage notice. We had sent off the forms a few weeks ago, dutifully filling in the boxes denoting our names, dates of birth and professions, and those of our parents.

I thought the call was about a payment, but instead, she started asking me questions. What exactly did my fiancé do for a living? What about his mother? Did my Mum teach in primary or secondary schools before she retired?

Sensing my confusion, she explained. ‘It’s for genealogy purposes,’ she said. ‘So that when your descendants come to look you up at the registry office, they can find out a bit more about you.’ It is an inevitable truth that by the time you start becoming interested in the people who came before you, there aren’t many of them left to ask.

My great-grandparents died years before I was born, and although I remember my father talking about them – in particular he recalled being evacuated to their house in Dunoon from Glasgow during the war and being held up to the window to see the sky explode into violent orange, something he later learnt was the Clydebank Blitz – I really wish I’d asked more.

My Dad clearly felt the same and I remember, too, as a child a holiday to Northumbria, him following a tip that the Cowing name – an unusual one that we had never come across outside the family – may have come from near Hexham. On our first night, staying in a little village called Corbridge, we went to the graveyard and were astonished to find serried ranks of Cowings, the headstones stretching back centuries.

On that trip we spent hours in the Gateshead registry office, looking up birth, death and marriage certificates on microfiche, painstakingly scrolling until we found the relevant name.

Now though, it is easier than ever to find out more about your past. There are whole websites, indeed an entire industry, devoted to it, with complex family trees and histories awaiting us.

A few years ago I joined 23andMe, a genealogical site where you post off a DNA sample, and learnt that I am (somewhat disappointingly) 100 per cent British and Irish, and that there is a veritable smorgasbord of distant relatives with whom I share around 3 per cent of my DNA floating around North America.

TO be honest, I don’t really know what to do with that information. Instead, I wish I’d known the little things, like what newspaper my great-grandfather read, or if my great-grandmother had a favourite perfume.

It is, after all, in the details where people spring to life, even if they are long dead.

Those extra questions asked by the registrar this week won’t quite do that, but they’re a good start. Any descendants of mine will know exactly what my father did for a living, that my Mum was a teacher of music in both primary and secondary schools.

I imagine them perhaps watching a documentary about the Covid-19 pandemic that swept the world in 2020 and wondering what their family did in that time. Looking up our marriage certificate and, seeing the date, speculating whether we had had to delay our original wedding because of restrictions.

A voice from the past. Some flesh on the bones. And a hint, I hope, that lives are always so much more than names on a grave.