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Kathryn Hughes: Historians Generally Sneer At Genealogists, But Their Work Is Compelling

One of the more convenient side-effects of the explosion of interest in family history is that you need never again be stumped for what to give your nearest and dearest for Christmas. Instead of a lacklustre pair of socks or bottle of whisky, what could be more thrilling than a voucher that entitles the grateful recipient to extended access to the online version of the 1901 census?

For we are all historians now, chroniclers not so much of big events like the 1832 reform bill but of what year Auntie Joan went into service, or why Great-Grandfather Billy had to marry only five months before his eldest was born. Our heads are full not of kings and queens but of the housemaids, grocers and sheep stealers whose shreds of DNA make up who we feel ourselves to be today.

You see this new breed of historian every time you enter a local record office on the outskirts of a county town: hunched over microfiche, pencil in hand (Biros count as lethal weapons), in search of whiskery ancestors who share not just a name but, it emerges, green eyes, a temper, a propensity to a weak chest. What these amateur genealogists gain is a fuller, and certainly longer, sense of their own self, one that didn't start with their birth, but in another century, and often another place entirely.

Some historians - the sort who write books about the collapse of the Habsburgs or Tudor land enclosure - say that this is nothing more than narcissism dressed up in a wig and breeches. In the process, all the complexity, difference and integrity of "then" is turned into a pale facsimile of "now". Hand over the past to enthusiastic amateurs and they can be guaranteed to turn it into a kind of waiting room to the present in which people a lot like them hang around in funny clothes, waiting to be born.

But if you listen to the coffee-break conversations of family historians, mostly conducted in canteens where the only refreshment is a shrink-wrapped muffin, you soon realise that something much more complex than crude ancestor worship or muddled projection is in play. The long-gone relatives, for whom they search through the census, rate books and parish registers, are as solid as it is possible to be while still remaining, technically, dead. All those Ednas and Leonards who worked in shops, ran away to sea, married above themselves and took to drink, have taken on the shape and heft of individuals, each with their own compelling story that refuses to be absorbed into someone else's idea of how it should have been.

All of which raises the question: why are dead relatives so much more fascinating than live ones? Come Christmas it will be more inviting to slip upstairs after lunch, log on to Ancestry.com and go in search of Great Aunt Enid than it will be to sit with her daughter, Aunt Sue. Sue makes sarky comments about your cooking, hogs the remote and always turns the conversation back to herself. Enid, by contrast, is teasingly elusive. Dead these 50 years, she shows up on the 1901 census living with a male cousin who may have been her lover. There is a baby whose birth certificate is scandalously vague. Enid is all mystery and potential, Sue is lumpy and finite.