Roots, Chat and Romanies

Courtesy of Helen Musselwhite

I've been taking the time to investigate some of WH's ancestors whilst the weather has been cold and I'm not up to doing much for other reasons. At the end of last year my pc crashed rather spectacularly and all my family tree files were lost, the majority of them hadn't been backed up elsewhere, unlike all the stuff littering my desk top. I've now bought a brilliant external hard drive which saves everything automatically so I never have to worry about missing files.

But back to the family Tree, I did still have a paper record of it all amongst a foot high pile of paper which had been languishing behind the desk since the move here last July. So January's project anyway was to sift through it all and sort it out. It's really been quite useful having to input all the data into my Family Tree programme for a second time as I can weed out the rubbish and get a refresher course on some of the stuff I had forgotten.

WH's family or that section of it are descended from Romanies and searching back through the old censuses has been almost impossible in some cases. Because they travelled around and did not have permanent homes, they often escaped the enumerator's pen and where they are recorded they are usually at the end of a particular section (the enumerators were instructed to record them there) and in a lot of cases their names and such like were ignored. Quite often I come across a record like '7 travelling gypsies living in tents', names, places of birth, age etc etc all recorded NK, or not known. Where they were recorded there are errors, names and places are spelled incorrectly, ages are wrong; after all most of these people were illiterate (as were many others in regular houses) and enumerators wrote only what they heard, often phonetically. Couple that with people with strange accents and even stranger names and a very odd mix appears on the sheets and that's when you can read the writing. Names like Tryphena, Hezekiah, Power, Vashti and Defiance were commonplace amongst those communities. One girl I came across was labelled Finance!

I like a challenge however, and over the last 7 years I've amassed a wealth of information about gypsy families travelling around the South West and even further afield. If I couldn't find 'my' lot then I followed some of the other families and eventually like the proverbial bad penny one of 'mine' would pop up, living with cousins or some such and tagged on the end of family record, misspelled and wrong aged but enough of a link to know who they really were.

Only recently has it all begun to come together however. I chanced on a website where researchers help each other out and chew over such thorny problems as some of mine. Roots Chat is amazing and people are only too willing to help, regularly doing 'look-ups' for strangers and even in one case I read using their own 'paid for' credits on other websites to search for information. I also found some Romany Genealogy sites, these have been a mine of information and it's been fascinating reading about the lives of the travellers about which I had hitherto known very little.

Yesterday I was contacted by a Romany lady who lives quite near here and who is descended from the same families. We have lots of the same information and it will be fun comparing notes. She also suggested we could meet up in person and invited us to her Romany home which was very kind of her and totally unexpected. I'm not sure we can meet up at the moment, I'm really not well enough to go off meeting strangers and there is so much to do here, WH won't thank me for dragging him away for a day on a Family Tree jaunt. But one day we will meet I'm sure and learn more about the past and the families who have passed on their legacy of the travel bug to WH and several more in his family. Now I'm even beginning to better understand this complex being I live with.