Welcome to 'Bothering Mi Ancestors'
Storytelling and Creative Personal Histories
A cautious welcome …
I’ve been a professional historian now for thirteen years, give or take, and I still don’t feel comfortable saying that. I think that I am reasonably good at it - and certainly at teaching the subject - but there is always the feeling that I am a square peg in a round hole. This discipline, like most, has a lot of unwritten rules, or it feels like it, and I’m just not good with rules, especially when it comes to writing.
So this is a space to write as I want to about some family history research I’ve been playing with in my own time. I say ‘play’ but it has uncovered quite a lot of intergenerational trauma which has also raised ethical and emotional questions for me. For that reason, I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. I have given a few papers about some aspects of it in academic spaces, which have been received much better than I thought they would be and I think that there is perhaps an appetite for the kind of writing that I want to do now. But I’m cautious because I’ve been here before: encouraged to be to be bold, be creative, but then ultimately told that there’s too much creativity, too much speculation, too much detail … just too much, all too much.
So expect too much from this Substack. Too much care. Too much abandon. Too much contradiction. Too much me.