On My Mother's Side

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

This quote from David Eagleman chilled me when I first read it. It implies a time when everyone I will ever know, including my son, have ceased to be. I’ve thought about it a lot since then as I do my genealogy research. So many names of so many people who are long gone from the Earth.

In our attic are several boxes of photos and documents left me by my mother, Renate Lilly (née Pniower). Much of it was in turn left to her by her own mother, Ruth Blume (née Hartmann), and some of that came from her mother, Else Sapatka-Hartmann. I won’t go on with this progression, but at least two documents date back to the 17th Century. It's a rich trove for an amateur genealogist, particularly as at least one ancestor did a lot of research themselves and wrote it all down.

I spent a fair few weeks going through everything, pulling it into some sort of order, and cataloguing it for my son for when he inherits it. When I’m gone, there may be nobody left who remembers what my grandmother looked like, and maybe also my mother. So I’ve been writing names and dates on the back of photos, labelling albums, grouping related photos into folders.

So many names came back to me from conversations my mother had with me. If only I’d paid more attention though. I remember her talking about her friend Inge Juchnowycz, but I don’t remember how the two of them were friends in the first place. Still, I found two photos of her, sent from Canada in the 1950s, and I’ve duly annotated them. Not that my son will have any interest in a friend of his grandmother, and perhaps I could safely just discard them, but once they’re gone, they’re gone forever.

Among my mother’s early photos was a card from 1939:

In February 1939 my mother was a pupil at Stoatley Rough School near Haslemere, so possibly she received this card on a school visit to Coultershaw Mill in Petworth. I made some enquiries, but if anyone now knows what these cards were for or why Gordon Gwillim was handing them out, I can’t find them.

My grandmother prepared two photo albums for my mother as mementos of their family. In these I found photos of her uncles, aunts, cousins, and also a baby sister who died aged just one, and whom I had never heard about. With a bit of work I was able to reconstruct the family tree enough to place these people, and then upload their photos into Ancestry.com. It may be a bit silly, but it feels to me that in some way they are not forgotten and so still live on.

Among my grandmother’s ancestors was a branch from East Prussia. Prussia was erased from the maps after WW2, and the place names I found in the papers are now in Poland. I was surprised and pleased to find that one of our ancestors has their own Wikipedia page, one Heinrich Friedrich Ernst von Corvin-Wiersbitzki, a major-general in the Prussian Army, who fought in the Napoleonic Wars.

My grandmother’s father was Alfred Georg Hartmann,

who was an arts reviewer for various publications. He used to clip out his reviews and paste them into scrapbooks, and these too have been handed down. There are dozens of them, all printed in Gothic German, none of which will probably ever be read again. Nevertheless I will hold onto them, for once they’re gone, they’re gone. A handwritten journal of his business trips, complete with records of all his illnesses, is of slightly more interest. I wondered why he would bother recording his temperature whenever he felt unwell, until I realised that he lived in an age before antibiotics, so dying from a fever was much more of a risk.

I had known that his wife, Else Sapatka-Hartmann (full name Minna Albertine Elisabeth Sapatka), 

was a painter. I hadn’t, though, realised that she was also an author, writing as Else Alberts. She kept a collection of acceptance notes from her publishers; more interestingly I found three different drafts of a children’s book called Hudi. It doesn’t look as if it ever made it into print. I wondered why she had bothered to keep all the drafts, but in a journal I realised that Hudi had been her pet name for her daughter, Ruth. She still used that name in a letter to her daughter written just a few months before she died.

The photos and papers are all boxed up again, safe in the attic. My Ancestry tree has one of its branches much extended, and the faces of long gone ancestors now look out at me. I know so little of their stories; by contrast, my descendants will potentially have reams of information about me, through my digital footprint. Including this blog.

Judi Beaumont

As I've mentioned before, I was adopted. My parents (the ones who brought me up, and who I therefore think of as my real parents) had told me about being adopted as soon as I was old enough to understand, and it never bothered me. It still doesn't.

There were, quite correctly, very few details about my birth parents. On my original birth certificate (you get a new one once the adoption is complete) it stated my birth mother's name, with the father section left blank. The adoption society that had placed me had given my parents a few snippets, so that I knew that my birth mother was short with brown hair and brown eyes, and that she was from New Zealand. In my twenties I had contacted the adoption agency after the law was changed to let adoptees get any facts that were held on them, and learned my birth mother's address in Wellington. I didn't act any further, and then largely forgot about it.

However, when I started researching my genealogy a couple of years ago, this small amount of information turned out to be all I needed to make contact with my birth mother's family.

My birth mother had died in 1995. I learned some details of her life and people were kind enough to send me what few photos there were of her, which let me build a picture in my mind of what she might have been like. Limited of course, after so many years. But how that has changed in the last week.

For a few years she worked on New Zealand TV, and now, through the kindness of relatives and friends, for which I will be forever grateful, I have a short DVD of some of her TV appearances. I am really quite stunned—what were the odds that I would actually get to hear the voice and see the facial expressions of this woman who died twenty years ago?

It makes her much more real to me. Not closer perhaps—our paths diverged a few weeks after I was born. I don't blame her for that; it was a different age, when being a single mother was far harder, and in any case, things turned out okay for me.

In some of the clips she's appearing in a Xmas special, probably in the mid-seventies. Most of her co-stars went on to achieve enough fame to show up in a Google search, even to have their own Wikipedia pages (including Jan Russ and Myra de Groot, both later of Neighbours). She does not though. But one of the reasons I started this blog was to put information onto the web that I wish someone else had provided when I was looking for it.

So here, then, is some small record of my birth mother, Judith Ann Beaumont (11 Aug 1935 - 10 March 1995), or Judi Beaumont as she appears on screen, and also sometimes spelled Judy Beaumont or Judie Beaumont. Once of 13 Burrows Avenue, Karori, Wellington; 94 Torrington Park, Finchley; 38 Hesper Mews, Earls Court, London SW6, 9 Nevern Square, London SW5, and 14 Beaufort Gardens, Kensington.

Genealogy is Magic

It truly is: it can make an entire evening disappear, with maybe just a birth certificate to show for all the time gone.

I never got genealogy. I couldn't see the attraction of rummaging through old records or wandering about in graveyards looking for distant ancestors. But I'm adopted, and a month ago I finally decided to try to trace my birth mother. Armed with a name and a rough address from 53 years ago, I signed up to ancestry.co.uk and started searching. At first I thought its search facility was appalling: so bad I had to be doing something wrong. I was. I still think it leaves a lot to be desired in ease of use, but with exploration of its features it turns out to be extremely powerful. I could soon see a record of my mother entering the country at Southampton (gave me a date of birth), and shortly afterwards I found her full address in New Zealand in 1957, as well as the names of her parents.

The New Zealand electoral registers are all searchable online, but only up to 1981. Also, the register is only compiled every three years. Still, I could track the family's movements to a fair extent, and found the name of another individual I presumed (correctly) was my uncle.

Then I found that the New Zealand government had an online search website that lets you look up births, deaths and marriages, providing they're at least a few decades in the past, or, for deaths, the deceased was born at least 80 years ago. For a small payment they will email you a PDF of the relevant document.

At this point I sort of lost the original plot, and began tracing my family tree. Matching up disparate records had turned into a hugely engaging intellectual puzzle, and best of all, one you can do sat at a computer. You can trust nothing, because filling in forms is a boring activity and mistakes get made. An 'o' was transcribed as an 'a', a person is born with one set of first names but dies with another, possibly somebody lies about their age. Evidence has to be weighed up, possibilities have to be sorted through. Lovely.

I finally 'got' genealogy.

As I predicted in an earlier post (The End of Genealogy), I'd gone back three generations when I bumped into somebody else's family tree: a truly massive affair with a cast of dozens, possibly hundreds, of people (it's hard to tell). If a married couple in that tree were also two of my great grandparents, then I could go back another three generations into 18th century Ireland. Exciting stuff, but as I explored this huge tree that someone (or surely an army of genealogists) had patiently built up, the scope of the job I'd begun came home to me: everybody has a big, big number of ancestors.

I went back to trying to locate my living relatives.

Revisiting the search websites armed with more experience of how to use them properly, I found a death certificate for my grandmother. From that I found a death notice on a site dedicated to finding them, which led me to a report on a local newspaper site, which gave me the names of an aunt and uncle. The aunt was on Facebook, so I finally bit the bullet and created a Facebook account. In another post I might talk about how much I dislike Facebook's user experience, so I won't bother now complaining about how it's constantly presenting me with names of people I've never heard of asking if I want to friend them, even though I've already told it several times already that I don't, or how sending a message to a person you're not friends with results in them not seeing it, or how their friend finder was unable to find "Charles Anderson York" even though it found loads of other Charles Andersons. No, I won't talk about that right now. Let's just say that, after a week of waiting for a reply to a message sent to the 'Other' inbox, I paid 35p to send the same message directly to my aunt's main inbox and I finally made contact with a birth relative other than my son.

My birth mother is no longer with us, but at least now I know, and I've discovered relatives that before I could only speculate about. I've also found out where the 3.8% Jewish ancestry that 23andMe identified comes from. (The 2.9% Neanderthal inheritance remains unaccounted for.)

I'll finish by saying that I am truly amazed at how much of this type of information is now available via the internet. And it will only get better as the genealogy sites get smarter and more knowledgeable. Since finding my birth relatives I've tried doing the same for my adopted parents. Both of them are already on other people's trees; all I have to do is cross some T's and dot some I's. And even if you're not into genealogy, genetic testing sites like 23andMe will connect you with your relatives as an optional extra. Soon we will all be related.

My Neanderthal Past

Interesting news from 23andMe, the organisation that sequences your DNA and reports on your genetic health risks. As a side benefit they can find out information about your ancestors, and this time they've really surpassed themselves. It turns out that 2.9% of my DNA is Neanderthal, a species that Homo Sapiens parted company with tens of thousands of years ago. Seems that some of my ancestors kept in touch though.

That was all a long time ago, so I'm happy to put aside the shame and let bygones be bygones. In any case, the average value for 23andMe customers is 2.5%, and Homo Neanderthalensis are no longer believed to have been the slow-witted brutes we once thought. In related news, I do not appear to have any Native American ancestors, and they reckon I'm ten times more likely to have ancestors from Ireland and Poland than from Britain.

Even though I've got a reasonable understanding of how scientists come by this information, I'm still staggered that it's possible at all. The lives of people who've been dead for hundreds of years are now being illuminated again. As their descendants discover their common ancestors, we can deduce where and when these people might have lived, even how many children they might have had. And this science is still in its infancy.

Stumbling Across My Mother

Last year I uploaded two photos of my maternal grandfather to this blog. I did it because, although he was slightly famous in his field, Google Image Search can't find a single photo of him.

It took a few weeks, but Google did eventually index the photos--but only for a few days. Since then a search for 'Georg Pniower' will bring up numerous images, including just about every other image on this blog of mine, even screen shots, but not those. I really have no idea of what algorithm Google uses that could exclude photos labelled 'Georg Pniower', while including one of me on the grounds that it lives in the same blog as a post mentioning Pniower.

I tried the search again last week. Still no photos of my grandfather, but imagine my surprise to see my mother, Renate, staring out at me, aged 12: a photo I'd never seen before.

Georg Pniower was half-Jewish, and when the Nazis came to power he and his family came under increasing threat of persecution. For safety he sent his daughter to a boarding school in Surrey set up for the children of refugees from Nazism. Stoatley Rough was a name I remember my mother mentioning often, though I don't think she ever visited it again, even though we only lived in Kent. Someone has created a web site about the school, with photos of the pupils, and so Google have included it in the results for 'Georg Pniower'.

Despite my grandfather's efforts to protect my mother, war broke out during the summer holidays in 1939 when she was back in Germany. Pniower thought twice about bringing her home, but the British Foreign Office reassured him that it would be safe. As we saw in Libya this week, competence is still something the FO aims for.

Georg Pniower

This is just a thought that crossed my mind while I was writing my last post. My mother's father was Georg Bela Pniower, the landscape architect. If anyone's out there doing research on his life, I have some items in my loft that might be of interest to you. Please feel free to contact me.

Here are a couple of photos of him, newly scanned into the digital world. As he died in 1960 and I found these in my family collection, I am assuming that either the copyright has expired or I've inherited it.

The portrait is undated, but the other is dated 24th May 1957. Pniower is third from the left.

The End of Genealogy

I was talking to friends yesterday about their research into their family trees. I don't do this myself, but it seems to me that this must be the Golden Age for amateur genealogists, with so much data available online nowadays, and more going that way all the time. The days of wandering around graveyards, combing through parish records, and scanning microfiched birth certificates will one day be over, when all conceivably available data is somewhere on the web, indexed and accessible.

And sometime after that, genealogy will be effectively over.

For once someone has accurately mapped their ancestors, there is no real work left for their children to do, except add on the latest generation. Even if someone coming new to genealogy knows that their parents never did any research, it is quite likely that one of their cousins did. Go back just three generations and you've already got eight direct ancestors. If just one of their other descendants has already done the leg work, all you need to do is link up with them. And with web sites like Genes Reunited, that's becoming increasingly easy.

If I ever decide to research my own family tree, it will be out of curiosity, not a wish to acquire a new hobby. If I can quickly link up with some distant relative's existing work, I'm pretty sure that's just what I'll do.

The principal reason I haven't ever had attempted to trace my own ancestors is down to me being adopted. Which tree should I trace? I've always been clear in my mind that my real parents were the people who brought me up and nurtured me to adulthood. And my real grandparents were the people I remember from my childhood. But go any further back and issues get muddied in my mind. If I ever wonder about who my predecessors were in, say, the sixteenth century, it's biological ancestors I think about.

Once again, modern technology is stepping in. Companies providing personal genetic testing like 23andMe can offer you the option of being put in touch with close genetic relatives who've also been tested. Just as in genealogy, family trees are going to be constructed, then linked together.

Not all linked together though. Genealogical records usually only go back a handful of centuries, and even royalty can't trace back much more than a thousand years. That's hardly anything when measured against the age of the human race. This will mean that, when we get to the point where everyone can access their tree (their paper, rather than genetic, tree) as far back as is possible, the population will be naturally partitioned into groups sharing a common ancestor. A common, known ancestor, that is.

Genetic testing will achieve a similar effect. DNA tests though, will go back much further than genealogical records. Logically any two human beings share a closest common ancestor, and our DNA should be able to make a good estimate of just how far back that person lived.

I wonder how human interaction will change when all this comes to fruition. In the last decade you've been able to google a new acquaintance. The day may be coming soon when you'll also be able to quickly find out how much DNA you've got in common.