Alison Light, author of many acclaimed books about feminism and history, takes us on a journey to trace her own ancestors in “Common People: In Pursuit of My Ancestors.”
Many of us might be curious about our ancestors — who were they, what stories did they have to tell, what were they like? Exploring one’s lineage could uncover less than glamorous backstories or prove to be a frustrating endeavor with inconsistencies and dead ends.
Light, however, finds a way to chart the course of the lives of everyday people. She goes through the stories of servants, sailors, farm workers, combing through archives to revive their stories and allow these people to live once more — if only in her pages.
In her 2009 book, “Mrs Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury,” she was transfixed by the life of Virginia Woolf, a popular yet deeply depressed author in her own right, who relied on live-in domestic help during her life to help with the most intimate and mundane of daily tasks. In this book, Light uses the same approach but turns the focus to her own life and history. She tries to understand her own ancestors and — by extension — all of ours, too. Her attempt at understanding the lives of those who once existed helps us to understand our own lives. Family history is a kind of public history and one that we share.
The book has maps, detailed family trees and Light’s personal photographs to augment her painstaking research and ability to zap life into those long gone.
“I began this book because I realized I had no idea where my family came from,” she says in the preface. Although she knew where she grew up and her personal history — as well as fragments of her parents’ lives, which they shared, and some stories about her grandparents — she did not know the bigger picture.
Her mother’s mother was an orphan and her father’s side was littered with blank spaces. She concluded that many of her relatives had no roots, as far as she could tell, and so the book became a quest to dive deeper into what it is possible to find out about people we never met but whose bloodline we share.
Since genealogy has become something of a trend in recent years, finding out your genetic background has become a simple process — spit into a tube and have it analyzed. But what are the stories that go behind and beyond the science?
Light’s book tries to find out, and you, the reader, can join her on that journey.
