alexandramilne's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
5.0
halfmanhalfbook's review against another edition
4.0
My father’s father died when I was eight years old. I had only just started to get to know him and he was gone. We didn’t know that much about him other than he was born in East Street, Bridport in 1902 and was an orphan whose mother was called Margaret Annie. About 12 years ago my father and I decided that we could see what we could find out if there was anything to find that was. We trawled all the family history sites and then one day got lucky and found his mother on a census. We discovered a whole family going right back to 1595 that we knew nothing about.
Rachel Morris didn’t have a problem. She knew lots about her family and the various characters involved from her parents all the way back through the generations to the painter William Gale. There were stories that she had heard that were more rumour than fact and most importantly she had boxes of these personal family archives under her bed and they had been there for years. Just the thought of them and the circumstances behind receiving them made her sad.
However, it was time to pull them out from under the bed, blow the dust off them and start looking through.
Tipping the contents out onto the carpet in her room from the first box and sorting them into small piles for each relative brought a flood of emotions back. There was no monetary value to the items within the boxes, letters, locks of hair, photos, poems, wool, diaries and even a hat! The treasure was the stories that the items would tell of her family.
And what a family it was. Her father was an immensely talented printer and mostly an absent alcoholic. Her mother had been told not to marry him by her mother, but being headstrong did so in secret. She was left bringing up her and her siblings, after the disappeared but never really stopped loving him as she was to find out through the letters in the boxes. The hub of these family memories is her Gran, a formidable yet kind woman. She was brought up on art books and romantic love. She had lived in New Zealand, a place that she loathed, written a book, went back to England leaving her husband with her two daughters there. She returned to the UK in 1947 and never went back.
As she is sifting these family stories into some semblance of order, she realises that she is creating what she calls the Museum of Me. It is fitting in some ways as she works for a company that puts together exciting and innovative displays for some of our top museums. Museums do what she is trying to do, which is with these personal effects to present the past in a way that we can understand and how they often came about from large personal collections.
Women are the memory keepers, they can keep those family links and connections
It is a fascinating story of her family and all their successes and secrets, full of happy and sad memories. Whilst she could not always understand the reasons why a particular family member did something, her collection gave her an insight into some of the reasons why it happened. I thought that it was really nicely written, sensitive and also written with an authority and confidence. She doesn’t judge her family for the decisions that they made, each person made that particular choice at a certain time of their life for a variety of reasons. If you like family histories, then I can recommend Dadland by Keggie Carew and Mary Monro’s Stranger in My Heart. They are very similar to this, women unpacking their father’s history that they knew almost nothing about.
Rachel Morris didn’t have a problem. She knew lots about her family and the various characters involved from her parents all the way back through the generations to the painter William Gale. There were stories that she had heard that were more rumour than fact and most importantly she had boxes of these personal family archives under her bed and they had been there for years. Just the thought of them and the circumstances behind receiving them made her sad.
However, it was time to pull them out from under the bed, blow the dust off them and start looking through.
Tipping the contents out onto the carpet in her room from the first box and sorting them into small piles for each relative brought a flood of emotions back. There was no monetary value to the items within the boxes, letters, locks of hair, photos, poems, wool, diaries and even a hat! The treasure was the stories that the items would tell of her family.
And what a family it was. Her father was an immensely talented printer and mostly an absent alcoholic. Her mother had been told not to marry him by her mother, but being headstrong did so in secret. She was left bringing up her and her siblings, after the disappeared but never really stopped loving him as she was to find out through the letters in the boxes. The hub of these family memories is her Gran, a formidable yet kind woman. She was brought up on art books and romantic love. She had lived in New Zealand, a place that she loathed, written a book, went back to England leaving her husband with her two daughters there. She returned to the UK in 1947 and never went back.
As she is sifting these family stories into some semblance of order, she realises that she is creating what she calls the Museum of Me. It is fitting in some ways as she works for a company that puts together exciting and innovative displays for some of our top museums. Museums do what she is trying to do, which is with these personal effects to present the past in a way that we can understand and how they often came about from large personal collections.
Women are the memory keepers, they can keep those family links and connections
It is a fascinating story of her family and all their successes and secrets, full of happy and sad memories. Whilst she could not always understand the reasons why a particular family member did something, her collection gave her an insight into some of the reasons why it happened. I thought that it was really nicely written, sensitive and also written with an authority and confidence. She doesn’t judge her family for the decisions that they made, each person made that particular choice at a certain time of their life for a variety of reasons. If you like family histories, then I can recommend Dadland by Keggie Carew and Mary Monro’s Stranger in My Heart. They are very similar to this, women unpacking their father’s history that they knew almost nothing about.
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