When my great grandfather decided to disappear ……… or who keeps the records?

When my great grandfather decided to remake himself back at the beginning of the 20th century it was a relatively easy thing to do.

Montague Hall, great grandfather, 1914

After all, back in 1902 there was very little of an official paper trail for any one to follow.  So, while he appeared on three of the four census returns covering the period from 1871 to 1901, and a handful of birth certificates, there was only his army records, and perhaps a National Insurance entry.

Of these I doubt anyone would go looking for the five birth certificates and one death certificate of his children from my great grandmother, and I am not sure how accessible his National Insurance details would be, even if he paid into it, despite it being compulsory.

As for his army records those for his time in the East Yorkshire Regiment from 1888-92, will have been little use after he left, given that he moved around the country, from Derby down to Birmingham and then the southeast.

And his later army records from 1914 to 1916 when he served in the West Kent’s made no mention of his five children he shared with great grandmother.

They lived together from 1894, never married, and separated in 1902, leaving only a reference in the records to the woman he did marry in Gravesend and their children.

Dad's Travel Identity card, 1940

All of which meant that his ten children from the two relationships had no idea that they were part of a bigger picture or that the man they called father had a phantom life.

All of this I say because I have been pondering on the evidence trail that follows me who was born in 1949.  These include, the registration of my birth, my post war identity cards, my NHS medical records, as well as my work details, pension information and National Insurance information.

To which I can now add that NHS Ap which allows me, and perhaps some clever and unscrupulous individual to find out about heaps of my personal information

I will also be on our kids records, including one for my grandchild, and of course shedloads of utility lists, patterns of shopping and even my interests on social media.

Now none of this is new.  We live in an information gathering age the extent of which would be the envy of every secret service down the ages. Added to which some of this “useful” information we have happily traded ourselves, while other bits we have volunteered up in the interests of the wider community.

Which brings me back to my great grandfather who was more than a bit circumspect at sharing anything about himself with anyone.  Least of all my grandfather, his four siblings or my great grandmother.

A little bit of me is a tad envious, not I hasten to add at his abandonment of my family for another, but of the opportunity he had for reinventing himself.

But that said it has still been possible to find him courtesy of the same 21st century online means which give thieves, scammers and trolls the ability to burrow deep into our lives.

And equally not all is grim for me in this information age.  My census returns are all safely locked away until well after I am dead, and my own medical practice it seems has lost all my medical notes from just after I was born through to the 1980s.  They assure me the records are available from the National Health Service but this as yet has proved difficult to track down.

So future historians might have a little difficulty finding me, including my appearance, which rarely makes it way onto social media and has not appeared in any of the ten books I have published.

My identity card, 1952

A little of me thinks I should give them a run for their money, but the historian that I am recoils at putting obstacles in the way of those seekers of the past, not least because it is what I do all the time in the course of my work.

Leaving me just that one thought which is the degree to which we should trawl over other people’s lives, and when does research become intrusion and worse voyeurism?

I close with that thought because it is a pertinent one and a personal one.

A decade and a bit ago I discovered that one of the brothers of my greatgrandmother committed suicide using a cutthroat razor.  The information was on his death certificate which arrived one sunny Saturday morning and cast a shadow over the rest the day, leading me to ponder on the degree of intrusion into another’s life.

But that is the consequence of trawling the information left to us.

Pictures; Montague Hall, 1914, Dad's Identity card, 1940, my identity card, 1952, from the collection of Andrew Simpson