Thank You, Dear Ancestor

Thank you, dear Ancestor, from the bottom of my heart, especially those ancestors of my Grandma Kate Marsh (née Watts).

Perhaps you won’t be surprised, but you launched my career as a writer! You gave me the genetics for it, and then I sought education on the finer points of writing, including deliberate rule breaking. Yet until recently I didn’t realize what a rich writing heritage flourished in those counties of my youth.

Thank you, dear Ancestor, for writing skills you brought to my mother’s family tree! I don’t know which of you started writing first but you include a newspaper editor and more than one epistle writer to the misfits who emigrated in each generation. It was probably before the time of Charles Dickens (born in Hampshire) and Thomas Hardy (born in Dorset). I wish something of yours had been preserved, some letter or penny postcard, or that someone would send me copies of something you wrote those many years ago.

Charles Dickens was born 7 February 1812 in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England where we often visited mother’s relatives and some of dad’s, too. Dickens died 9 June 1870 and is buried at Westminster Abbey in London. I do not think there is any kind of extended family relationship between our Hampshire families, though I haven’t checked closely yet. There are many who think to use genealogy to link themselves to someone famous but I am not one of them. However, the environment contributed much. And I am happy with my shepherds, farmers, maids, cooks, and railwaymen.

Dickens’ experience of hardship and poverty was not all that different from what our lives would have been in a city instead of the rural town of Eastleigh. Although our air was cleaner overall, we still burned coal in the fireplace, trying to keep from dying of the cold during the winter months. The compassion of Dickens has definitely informed my life. As almost any other writer who has read Dickens, my sense of revulsion at widespread social injustice stems from similar experiences in my own background.

On the other hand, Thomas Hardy was born 2 June 1840 in the parish of Stinsford, Dorset, England. He died 11 January 1928. Due to a dispute between his family/friends and his Executor, Hardy’s heart is buried at Stinsford Parish Church at his first wife’s grave, but his ashes lie in the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey. At least one of my maternal grandma’s lines came directly from Dorset, and again, I haven’t tried to see if there is any connection.

Hardy was apparently a successful architect despite his family’s limited means but always felt like a social outcast in London. He returned to Weymouth, Dorset to write novels and poetry, often focusing on declining rural communities. Grandma loved going back to the Weymouth area but our family was able to visit only now and then due to not having the money for bus or train fare for that additional 81 miles beyond Portsmouth by road. Had we been crows, we might have cut 20 miles off that.

Growing up, I simply didn’t know the literary atmosphere was so heady and creative in Hampshire and Dorset! Other counties referred to us as Hampshire Hogs and (usually) Dorset Dumplings, after all.

We were confined to Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and writers of that ilk in high school! Never were we encouraged to read our native writers, and I’m sure the subject matter was considered inappropriate. Let’s not give them ideas different from their social station. The caste system in the UK is yet alive and well, even in the 21st Century, if perhaps you didn’t know. We could have learned early on how to escape from oppressors and become someone, instead of instinctively having to fight for freedom when we grew older.

So whether the Marsh line launched my career as a writer or the Watts line did, I have the genetics and the environment for it. Thank you, dear Ancestor, from the bottom of my heart.