I am recuperating from a serious cold this week and have not had the mental energy to produce research for my usual blog post this week. That has not stopped me from reading. Two things have come to my attention that made me think much about my family and house research and the accumulation of archive material.
The first is the author’s note to a novel. The author, William Boyd, never fails to entertain and inspire me with his extraordinary and inventive stories. His most popular one is Any Human Heart which is not written in the familiar fiction method but has been created as the autobiographical journal of a fictitious character connected to the art world and who describes his life during the 20th Century in short accounts of the people he meets from his adolescence until his death. It is the sort of memoir, albeit fiction, that I would love to have written about my own experiences – even though I am still alive and kicking.
In his recent novel, The Romantic (2022), Boyd returns to a fictitious biography of a traveller and adventurer in the 19th Century. By way of an introduction he has a short author’s note telling us about how he came to write this (fictitious) biography – acquiring a collection of letters, maps and artefacts of the man that he was writing about. Boyd then meditates on the subject of how much we gather of our own life in the form of papers, documents, photos, and other recorded memories., Many of these, particularly photos, are or become accumulated over two or three generations and then, by the time of our death, become disposed of. Only the memory of our life then becomes known because of a headstone, or notations in Census returns and other formal registers, or if well known, an obituary.
So when writing a biography with such little information that has been left, the writer according to Boyd, is left only with suppositions such as – ‘might have’, ‘possibly’ or ‘perhaps’. Biographers can only suppose unless they have first-hand information or good quality anecdotal information.
All of my own research is within the boundary of the 19th and 20th Centuries, and mostly concentrated between 1850 and 1990. Having access to nationally archived records both in England and Wales, and also in Scotland, is my greatest aid. In particular, the Census returns from 1847 to 1921 give me many suppositional stories and the later returns, with the head of of household’s signature, brings a relative alive to me in the absence of any letters, and photos. Going on field trips and discovering headstones and memorials never fails to amaze me. They tell stories and confirm facts that records cannot bring alive.
A lot of my archiving is on my computer, backed up on a separate hard drive. I have a dedicated shelving system to store boxes and tins of documents and other research material alongside many old photos. When I leave this world my children will have to decide what stays and what goes and more importantly, whether it is worth continuing to pay for the hosting of this blog. That will be their decision. While I am still alive I shall continue to share the stories of my ancestry (and yours, dear cousins) until I have nothing left to tell you.
The second article was more practical in the way of archiving our history. Practical in the sense that in our 21st Century digital age, what happens when some things interrupt our data storage if it breaks down. Where is this ‘cloud’ anyway ?
The article appeared in the Guardian on 15th February 2024, called “Power Grab: the hidden cost of Ireland’s datacentre boom” by Jessica Traynor. It is a critique and warning about the growth of datacentres which now number more that 80 in Ireland. They are vast warehouses containing banks upon banks of computers that are storing thousand and thousands of terrabytes of data. Most are owned by the big named companies such as Google and Facebook. Each time we ‘tweet’ or post a photo on Facebook, it is tucked away in the ‘cloud’ on one of these hard drives in one of these warehouses. Up to 88% of the stuff that gets stored is regarded as ‘junk data’ which will never be accessed again
The problem is that the growth of these data centres requires an enormous amount of energy to run them and also keep them cool, currently using 17% of Ireland’s electricity consumption. There are plans to increase the number of datacentres even though it does not equate to any increase in employment or reduction of carbon output targets.
Traynor gives some historical context to her concerns. One of the pivotal post Easter Rising events occurred in 1922 when the Public Record Office in Dublin, a repository of 700 years of records, maps, Census returns, registration information, was burnt to the ground during the Civil War. Described as ‘an act of cultural vandalism’, it has for ever prevented family history researchers with Irish ancestry from discovering their past. Traynor then starts to frighten us with what might happen if there was a breakdown in the data storage system. Blackouts caused by electricity failure. The development of cabling to connect with Iceland, where data storage is going to be a big development (because of the colder environment) takes that problem to a new level.
Cyberspace, the cloud, is nothing like my collection of cardboard boxes with my gathered past. I hope my children will remember that when I leave the earth.