A different theme has been handed down each week for a whole year and now the final, Week 52 of the #52ancestors family history project for 2023 has arrived.
Each theme provided the opportunity to write about a different ancestor on my family tree and has proved to be the perfect stimulus to reflect on the process of family history research, and broader subjects like identity, personality, class, power and place. It has led me to ask myself just what part do all these people in our past play in making us who we are? What kind of relationship can we have with them through space or across time today?
With this being the last opportunity to celebrate an ancestor, I knew I had to write about my Mum’s Mum, Joyce Hale (1930-1999) so that she could be included. The theme assigned for this week was “Me, Myself and I”, with a steer suggesting that “you are a part of your own family history. This week, write something about yourself. What do you hope future generations know about you?”.
Luckily, my Nan Joyce had arguably the biggest influence on me of all my ancestors, so I can legitimately fly the flag for her in this end-of-year post. With my Dad having to work two shifts most days to make ends meet while I was growing up, and my Mum going out to do additional cleaning jobs before she eventually began a career at the local hospital, my grandparents on my Mum’s side took up much of the slack when it came to parenting duties. I spent a lot of my childhood round their house, five minutes down the road living on the same council estate. I owe much of my ingrained personal value system to my Nan.
Joyce was born on 26 November 1930 at Castle Bottom, Eversley, Hampshire. Castle Bottom is not a place you will find identified on many birth certificates. It is a magical place. When you reach it from the heath or woodland on either side, it is as if you have gone through the wardrobe to Narnia. The landscape is more akin to Devon than to Hampshire. Today, the area is a national nature reserve, a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). Back in the 1920s and 1930s, it appears at least two families lived in small cottages on the terrain. Nothing remains of the properties except for some bricks from the foundations in undergrowth.
Joyce was the daughter of Emily Charlotte Vickery (1901-1967) who I wrote about in a post in Week 14, and Reginald Richard Hale (1899-1981) who I wrote about in a post in Week 15. Joyce stayed put in this corner of North East Hampshire. By the time of the 1939 Register, her family had moved the short distance down the road into Eversley, in a house on Chequers Lane. She was one of eight siblings, and one half-brother.
While she grew up in Eversley, she spent all her adult life in Yateley, first living in one of the abandoned Nissen huts left behind by the officers at RAF Hartfordbridge, then living the ‘municipal dream’ in one of the council houses that were to replace them once they were cleared, in which she lived for almost fifty years.
She married Frank Stephen Francis Holland (1921-2014) on 26 January 1949. I wrote about Frank in a post in Week 47. The couple had three daughters – my Aunt Eileen Joyce (1949-present); my Aunt Brenda Margaret (1950-present), and my Mum Mary Frances (1952-present). Joyce had been pregnant with at least three, possibly four sons, but all either miscarried or in the case of a set of twins, were stillborn. This was to have a strong influence, first a particularly strong bond when first Brenda, then my Mum, Mary gave birth to boys in 1970, giving Frank and Joyce their first grandsons, Antonio and me, Paul. As we grew up, and my Mum gave birth to a daughter, Carol (1973-present), and Brenda had another son Daniel (1975-2018), that bond obviously broadened and they doted on us all, but it was the insight that they had lost at least three sons themselves that had an impact. They spoke very little about those pregnancies and it has proved difficult to research them through official sources, including for the parish when there was supposed to be a burial. All very sad, and too much to dwell on.
The fact that Joyce and Frank had endured the loss of at least three sons also meant that the ‘Holland’ surname would not continue on this particular branch of the tree. This had an impact on me. I had considered changing my surname to Holland, but nothing came of this at the end of my teens. When I came to selecting a freelance identity in my thirties, the passion to keep her married name returned, and I focused on a version of her husband’s nickname, ‘dutch’. I had found a way of keeping her name alive.
Joyce was about hard graft. In my teens, I would increasingly find myself cycling to many of her cleaning assignments which she ran personally. These included the ‘County Tractors’ factory in the old US Navy Air Force hangar off Blackbushe Airport; Mr Hilder’s dental surgery on the main road in town; and the Gateway Supermarket where I would then go on to be a butchery assistant at weekends as a teenager. I most associate each week with spending a couple of hours, early on a Sunday morning at my Nan and Grandad’s, devouring all of the Sunday broadsheets and picking apart politics. My Nan provided the space and challenge which would provide essential in getting to university to study politics, and ultimately to work for an MP, then in a press office in Parliament, then go on more broadly in PR. Discovering back copies of ‘The Face’ magazine for the first time in the waiting room of the dental surgery that I cleaned with my Nan may have come in handy when it came to working at BBC Radio 1 over a decade or so later too. I was transfixed.
Joyce was a diminutive physical figure, but a huge importance across relations in the family. Her body was ravaged by the time she died at the early age of 68 years, but it was clear that the hard graft that went beyond those roles I have mentioned took their toll.
The theme for Week 52, the final week of the #52ancestors genealogy project for 2023 has been ‘Me, Myself and I‘. I chose my Mum’s Mum Joyce because she probably was the ancestor with the biggest impact on me. I have found completing this challenge each week so useful for reflecting on identity and place, and thinking about where future writing on family history might take me – such momentum. Do not hesitate to contact me if you have any queries or corrections.
Thank you for joining me – I am sure I will return to the genealogy themes, but this is me signing-off, and will not be on board for the project in 2024. Having written this while my Aunt Eileen spent Christmas with my Mum at our place this Christmas, all that remains for me to do is wish you all the very best for a Happy New Year in 2024. I’m holding out to discover a stash of hope after dislocating my shoulder, and bruising most of the rest of my body in the last few weeks of 2023. Feeling sore.
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