"Family history begins with missing persons," Alison Light writes
in Common People. We wonder about those we've lost, and those we
never knew, about the long skein that led to us, and to here, and
to now. So we start exploring. Most of us, however, give up a few
generations back. We run into a gap, get embarrassed by a
ne'er-do-well, or simply find our ancestors are less glamorous than
we'd hoped. That didn't stop Alison Light: in the last weeks of her
father's life, she embarked on an attempt to trace the history of
her family as far back as she could reasonably go. The result is a
clear-eyed, fascinating, frequently moving account of the lives of
everyday people, of the tough decisions and hard work, the good
luck and bad breaks, that chart the course of a life. Light's
forebears--servants, sailors, farm workers--were among the poorest,
traveling the country looking for work; they left few lasting marks
on the world. But through her painstaking work in archives, and her
ability to make the people and struggles of the past come alive,
Light reminds us that "every life, even glimpsed through the chinks
of the census, has its surprises and secrets." What she did for the
servants of Bloomsbury in her celebrated Mrs. Woolf and the
Servants Light does here for her own ancestors, and, by extension,
everyone's: draws their experiences from the shadows of the past
and helps us understand their lives, estranged from us by time yet
inextricably interwoven with our own. Family history, in her hands,
becomes a new kind of public history.
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