We Are Family

Me, my mom and her parents, 1982.

On July 25, 1979, about a month after I turned 11, my parents moved themselves (along with me and my sister) from England, across the Atlantic Ocean, to Connecticut in New England to start a new life. Our move was not the redemption story of so many immigrants who came to this country fleeing persecution or poverty or some other hardship, but I believe it changed my life in so many ways for the better. I love being an American and I love living in the United States; I believe that move 35 years ago gave me opportunities that I wouldn't have had staying in England. I'm not saying I would have been miserable or unsuccessful at life if we had stayed put, I'm just glad we moved. Perhaps more glad than anyone else in my family. Well…not perhaps. Definitely.

While the move across the pond had a lot of positives, the big negative was that we were all a lot further from family than we ever had been before. My grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all lived around Normanton in Yorkshire where my mom and dad had grown up. They seemed a long way away when we lived in Leicestershire (although it was really only about 85 miles); the distance from Connecticut to Yorkshire seemed insurmountable to an 11 year old in the late '70s. We could obviously not just take a weekend drive to see my two grandmas and my grandpa and granddad. The end result was that we just saw a whole lot less of each other. And I think that was unfortunate.

I try not to think about why and how I am on this planet too much because quite honestly, it freaks me out a little bit. I can't read any book or article that deals with the creation of the universe and the big bang theory; my mind just can't handle stuff like that. But I sometimes think about how lucky I am to exist and how my existence depends on all my ancestors somehow surviving whatever perils existed during the time they were alive at least long enough to procreate and pass their genes along. Generally speaking, my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on lived through wars, disease, famine, persecution and untimely accidents. If they hadn't survived all the stuff that threatened to kill them, I wouldn't be here. That just amazes me.

In the 35 years since I left the United Kingdom for good as a resident, I've been back there just five times, including my trip there last month. I returned twice as a kid with my mom (in 1982 and 1985) and, before August of this year, twice on my own as an adult (in 1997 and 2007). The two trips I took in the 1980s were completely about going to see family. On the other two I made without my mom, I saw family but the trip was not necessarily about visiting relatives. I try not to regret much in life because I am happy where I am now and I believe regrets and considerations of doing things differently might have led to a different outcome. But I do lament a little bit the fact that I have lost touch with people whose blood I share. I thought 2014 was maybe an opportunity to try to make myself regret less by connecting just a little with my past.

My grandpa and grandma.

My vacation in England this year was perhaps the best trip I have ever taken there. Not for what I saw or experienced or ate or drank but for softer reasons. I saw five of my six cousins, two of whom I hadn't seen in 1982 and one whom I had spent all of about two or three hours with in my life before last month. I saw all of my aunts and uncles, something I haven't done in one week since the same 1982 trip. I spent time in England with my dad for the first time since we left the country together in July of 1979. But perhaps most importantly, I spent time being in Yorkshire, the place where I really come from, with no other agenda than just being there.

Of course, just being there with no agenda actually had to have an agenda. I'm a creature of very deep ingrained habit and I have to accomplish things on vacations. So after six nights in London, I took a train north to Yorkshire to spend a couple of days and nights in a place that seemed so far away in my boyhood. And in between visiting with people I hadn't seen very often at all in the last three and a half decades, I explored my family's past just a little, with the help of my parents and my uncle Malcolm (who was always my coolest uncle - sorry everyone else), who performed double duty as both a guide and driver.

When we moved to the United States in '79, all four of my grandparents were alive. Some kids don't ever know some of their grandparents so I feel fortunate that I knew both my dad's parents and my mom's parents and can remember good things about them all, even if I didn't see that much of some of them after we moved. Within 20 years of our move to Connecticut, all four were gone. I believe all had long or long-ish lives (all made it beyond 70) but I would have liked some of them to stay around a little longer than they did.

I was anywhere from a teenager to my late 20s when my grandparents died. I wasn't able for one reason or another to attend any of their funerals and I'd never visited their resting places. On this trip I thought I should do that, not just to check an imaginary box or anything like that, but so I could understand exactly where they ended up and in my own way remember what they meant to me. I'm not going to write everything that they meant to me; some things are just for me and not for the whole world to read.

My grandma Dinky (so called because she had a poodle named Dinky when we were growing up) and my granddad were easy to find. They lie in a family grave (although my granddad was cremated and wasn't actually buried there) with my mom's brother Graham, who died at age four, and my cousin's daughter, who died as an infant. My mom's grandmother is buried in the same cemetery, along with her children who died early in life. Seeing the names of children on graves from the early and mid 1900s reminded me how far we have come in preserving life and staving off deadly disease. There were times in the history of this planet that the only way to guarantee children surviving to adulthood was to have a lot of children. I can't imagine how painful it would be to lose a young child, even if you sort of knew you were rolling the dice each time you brought a son or daughter into the world.

My grandma Dinky's grave.

My great-grandma Sophia's grave.

I've visited cemeteries before on vacation, although not in such a personal way. The cemetery where my mom's family is buried is part of a churchyard that includes the church where my mom and dad were married, so the visit here was not all somber. My mom and dad recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary (how awesome is that?) and I can remember the pictures at their party of them at this church 50 years ago. It looks just the same. I vividly remembered my much younger parents in those pictures when I visited and it honestly and truly looks exactly the same, which was just so incredible how in this world where so many things change, that some things don't change at all.

The church where my mom and dad were married.

While the trip to find my mom's parents was very productive, the next cemetery visit to try to find the graves of my dad's parents, my grandpa and grandma, was less successful. In fact, it wasn't successful at all. My grandpa, who was probably my first hero in life and whom I like to think is like me in so many ways even if it's just based on his complete lack of handiness which I share, is the only one of the two actually buried (my grandma was cremated) in the second cemetery we visited. And while we had some directions to the poorly marked communal family grave, we were unable to find the exact spot, which was ultimately a little disappointing. I'm still glad I went. It's the first time in a long long time I've been near my grandpa. That meant something to me.

In between and around the two cemeteries and a drive up pineapple hill, where my grandpa's brother Jeffrey died in a motorcycle accident as a young man, we also visited the houses where I remember visiting my grandparents as a child. These places are very vivid in my memory, which is sometimes excellent and sometimes frustrating in the holes that are in it. I had stayed in my grandma Dinky and granddad's house in 1997 because my uncle Malcolm had bought it when my grandparents moved out, but it had been over 30 years since I'd been to my grandpa and grandma's house.

I don't know why it comes as a surprise to me, but I am continually astonished at how small things that looked so big to me as a child are today. Before 1997, I was convinced that my mom grew up in a sizable English row house. I remember it as a three bedroom house with two living rooms downstairs that seemed enormous to me at the time. Not so much when I visited in '97. The place was small; I can't really imagine a family of five living there, although I am sure it was way more spacious than a lot of places folks lived back then, and even today.

Despite that experience, I was sure that my dad's parents' house would be the palace that I remembered it between 0 and 11 years of age. Not so much. I think the main reason I remember this house as being very very large was the garage (that albeit thinking back only held one car) and the back yard, which was like two large bowling greens either side of a row of what I remember as rosebushes but which I am sure probably were not. We couldn't run around the back of the house to check if the back yard was the size I remember it but suffice it to say that the driveway and front yard, which I remember as expansive in front of a house set back far from the road, were remarkably short. I'll have to remember not to be surprised in the future.

The palace on The Crescent…or so I thought 35 years ago. The garage is gone.

Finally, just a word about Yorkshire's recent history and how it ties into my own family's history. If there's an industry in the last 150 years or so that is tied to Yorkshire, it's coal mining. There is a massive coal seam called the South Yorkshire Coalfield between Barnsley, Doncaster and Sheffield which is very close to the surface of the Earth and therefore eminently accessible to men willing to mine it. Or perhaps more accurately, men willing to exploit other men to mine it. While Normanton is not within the triangle defined by the South Yorkshire Coalfield, there are significant coal seams below Normanton, which led to the establishment of a number of mines there in the 1800s and 1900s.

Coal mining is a dangerous and dirty business. It posed and poses both immediate (collapses, explosions or accidents) and long term (black lung comes to mind here) health threats to the men, women and children (yep, you read that right) who went or go down into the pit daily to work the black seam. But for some families, coal mining was either worth the risk or the only way they could survive at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. My great-grandfather (my grandpa's dad) was one of the men who braved the dangers of the pit daily, specifically for 50 years. Now, 50 years is not a conventional career as we think of today; he likely started working when he was just a little older than ten and retired at about the age of 60.

The National Coal Mining Museum for England is located in Yorkshire about a mile from my uncle Malcolm's house. The museum features a series of exhibits at ground level but it's greatest treasure is the 90 minute tour below ground in a former working coal mine. The exhibit is set up to walk you through the history of coal mining, from the earliest, very unsafe days to today's largely automated, heavily regulated industry. Our tour was led by a 45 year mining veteran (started at 12 years old) speaking in a broad Yorkshire dialect which lent a definite authority to the tour; the experience isn't going to be the same when these men retire for good.

The whole tour is useful and I'd encourage anyone to take it, but the first 30 minutes or so were truly chilling. Mining in the earliest days was a family affair, meaning the entire family (dad, mom and kids) would mine together. And this is not a good thought. 

The way it worked was dad and mom would mine a seam together, maybe 12-18 inches high, meaning on their hands and knees, separated from the main mine network by a wooden door which the kids would monitor. The purpose of the wooden door was to contain any sort of explosion or fire which happened during the work day. There are two really grisly things about this concept. First, if there's a fire or explosion, dad and mom are dead and the kids are orphans and they know it right away. Second, the mine owners only give the family one candle (candles cost money, after all), and the kids don't get it; they sit there all day long (with mice or rats but not both because rats will eat mice) in the pitch black waiting for one of their parents to knock on that wooden door. Or not. Think about it.

I am sure that by the time my great-grandfather started working in a mine that things had progressed a bit, maybe to the point where he only had to shovel 26 tons of coal per day to get any sort of payment in a cramped, barely lit, dirty environment still subject to collapse at any point. But that thought alone makes me so grateful for the world which I live in. It also makes me think I'm glad that somehow he survived all this to hand down his genes to me today and let me live. There are few things I have done on vacation recently that have made me think more than my visit to the National Coal Mining Museum.

I'm not sure where any of this leaves me long term, but I know short term I am a richer man. I'd love to spend more time researching my family history because I think it would really fascinate me, but I know to do that I need to spend a lot more time in Yorkshire, and that is not likely to happen in the next couple of years. Maybe after I get done with this five year plan, I can take some time to dig a little deeper.

The National Coal Mining Museum of England.