Andrew Kay is struggling with the fact that his own past is now a history

Growing up as I did in the cold and barren industrial wastes of the North West, I have strong memories of a life gone by.

It came home to me quite recently on a visit to see my parents where they now live in Somerset, as far away from the cobbles and back alleys of my childhood as you could wish to get.

I had bought my mother a big photo album and all the appropriate bits and pieces required to put the family photos in some kind of order. I erroneously thought that she might enjoy cataloguing our past so that my brother and I and his children might know and understand who our ancestors were.

“My god, they were all at it! One ancestor, a parson’s daughter, eloped with a French fisherman”

Sadly the idea fell on fairly stony ground as my mother rather morbidly assumed that this was me preparing her for her oncoming demise. Frankly, the way she bounces back from all that besets her, she will live forever. That, of course, is good news but the sad thing is that she still has drawers and boxes of pictures, most of them family members that I simply cannot put a name to.

I came away and started to put together a family tree on a well known website. It was pretty easy to start as I can name most of my family going back to my grandparents’ generation. But as it went further back I started to uncover all manner of family secrets and mysteries. Serial wedders, missing cousins, odd deaths, illegitimacy (very heavily disguised), children of one family member raised as the child of another… talk about a can of worms, I had tears rolling down my face from laughing so much.

Whoever thinks that permissive society started in the 1960s is very sadly mistaken. My god, they were all at it! One ancestor, a parson’s daughter, eloped with a French fisherman. I ask you, it puts most of my antics in the shade. It cheered Mum up too, raking over the past and revealing the stories and scandals.

The photos as yet remain in boxes and drawers, an archive of history of which I am now a part. What shocked me most though was not the scandal, no I can cope with that. No, the real shock was seeing that the family pictures of me as a child, once familiar and contemporary, are now archive material, historical documents mainly in black and white in which I am wearing clothes that look like museum items. How ageing that is.