Living In The Past?

How do you fancy looking through my holiday snaps?  The phrase fills you with dread, doesn't it?  Hours of trawling through pictures of places you've never been to, and may never go to, depicting experiences you've never had and never will have.  They're moments after all, and very personal.  So why would anyone else be remotely interested in them?

The same could be said of one's family history.  It's personal.  It's about who I am and where I've come from, genetically and environmentally speaking.  It's about, God forgive me for using this phrase, my journey.  It's of no relevance to anyone else, nor can I expect anyone else to be interested in it.  After all, everyone else has their own families to worry about, their own ancestries to concern themselves with, or not as the case may be.  For some it's an area they have no interest in at all.  And that's fine.  Nobody expects you to care who your 3x great-uncle was or what he did in the Boer War.

A Tree.  Doesn't matter whose it is.

And yet, genealogy, or more specifically family history, has gone stellar in the last ten years or so.  I make that distinction in the light of an enlightening talk commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Society of Genealogists, in which genealogy was very definitely identified with research methods, lineage at the most aggregate level, and the place of familial connections in broader society.  It certainly wasn't about where my great granny Nell was living in 1881, which is what family history is about; the detail, the flesh on the skeleton of a family tree, the minutiae that distinguish your ancestors from someone else's.  You know, the stuff that bores everyone else.

Two factors can be identified as key in the widespread increase in popularity of family history.  They are That Internet and That Telly.  Who would imagine that, by 2012, one of the most popular uses of That Internet - besides looking at cats that look like dictators, and naughty stuff - is doing family history research.  The amount of historical information now available for a handful of Google searches is mindblowing.  So, unfortunately, is the amount of potential for error, misuse and misunderstanding of this information.  It's hard enough when you're trying to look for a specific name in a 200 year old, hand written document - harder still when you're being paid peanuts or less to make sense of pages of badly scrawled names for which you have no reference points.  So it is no surprise that, even when you pay good money to access websites that offer transcribed records, often what you get is bobbins, requiring often Heculean lateral shifts in thinking to find what you're looking for.

The trouble with That Internet is that people tend to believe what they see on it.  I mean there are still people - not to mention journalists - who use Wikipedia as a reliable source.  So you type in Smith and instantly you have a family of millions, even though there's no proof that any of them are connected.  There's a phenomenon known as Pacman Genealogy, whereby people aim to get a high score of number of people in their tree, without any effort to verify facts, establish relationships etc.  These are the people who will find your tree on a website, latch onto a random surname that happens to be in both your tree and theirs, link to your tree and hang on to it for dear life, even though in reality none of your or their ancestors came within 100 miles of each other.

Then there's That Telly.  Programmes like Who Do You Think You Are - which has become the average person in the street's buy-in to all things genealogical - perpetuate the myth that doing your family history is a slice of Battenberg.  You can turn up at some random library and a member of staff is there, ready with all the records you need.  Stuff comes through the post while you're driving to the place where uncle Sid was buried.  Genealogy while you wait.

Two men who died a very very long time ago

Of course, these programmes take months to put together.  And the key imperative is an interesting story that makes for good telly.  What was, at one point, a programme that actually was focused on helping people do research (the first series even included a how-to session at the end of each show with the go-to media genealogist Nick Barrett) has been known to drop slebs from the roster when they find their history is full of dull ag labs.  And the recent trend has been to focus on a small number of heart-tugging stories from a relatively shallow generational range.  Oh yes, and tears.  The ability of actors to shed a tear over something that happened in 1742 is both impressive and lamentable; I bet they never shed any at the time.  It's all part of the trend cultivated by those excruciating back-stories on reality karaoke programmes, and does little to enhance genealogy as a discipline.

So now family history research is something that we fit in around the other activities we indulge our copious free time in, like football and birdwatching.  Because we can do it quickly.  No interminable days spent in dusty records offices with scant return, when we can pay a tenner and get what we're looking for in our lunch break.  This perception of instantness can tend towards a lackadaisical attitude to verification.  It's important to remain cycnical - just about any historical document could include inaccuracies, lies and misinformation.  Just because it's official, don't mean it's right.

Maybe in some future blog I'll bore you with details of my own family history.  They're a fascinating bunch, but then I would say that. They're my holiday snaps.

Warning - May Contain Traces Of Football

If that isn't the subtitle of this year's Aston Villa season DVD, then it should be.  For this has been soccer Jim, but not as we know it.

Yesterday saw the end of an error, with the great and the good of B6 finally seeing sense - or maybe just stringing out for good timing effect - and getting rid of Alex McLeish.  Sure, there have been mitigating circumstances.  The wage bill of the O'Neill era - which brought great football but no real success - was proving crippling, and wasn't helped by worthy but financially disastrous sideshows like charity shirt sponsorships and pub refurbs, all of which now smack of Lerner buying the fans' affections.  So, big names had to go.  Milner had already gone the season before, which appears to have been the impetus for MON to throw his dummy in the dirt when the promised transfer war chest was sunk - not for the first time either, eh Norwich fans. So it was inevitable that further big sales would go through, and so Ashley Young and Downing went, to be replaced by the relatively cut-price N'Zogbia who, despite impressing for Wigan in the previous season, was never going to be an adequate replacement for two wide midfielders.

And yes, we've had players unavailable for long periods.  Dunne, Bent, Petrov, not to mention Jenas whose loan spell didn't even get started, and McLeish can't be blamed for those.  Neither can he be blamed for his signings, with the notable exception of Hutton, probably the worst right-back to pull on a Villa shirt since Darius Kubicki, but again he was a cheaper option than keeping Luke Young on.  N'Zogbia has been solid if uninspiring, while Given must be wondering what he has to do to become the fans' player of the year.  It's certainly far more down to him than Stephen Ireland that we are still playing Premiership football next season.  And McLeish can take the credit for bringing in Robbie Keane for a couple of months in which we actually looked capable of scoring goals and winning games.

But the poor guy was onto a loser from the start.  Notwithstanding the fact that he came fresh from over the other side of town, which in the eyes of some of the Holte End meant he could have won every game until the Second Coming and still not curried any favour, the fact that the paint hadn't dried on his second relegation in three years in spite of winning a major trophy sent alarm bells ringing across Aston.  Arguably he may have felt he wasn't particularly wanted anyway - he was seventh on Lerner's list, even lower than Steve MacLaren who had been shooed away when the fans rumbled discontent at the prospect.  But equally, he may have felt it was his best opportunity of employment, and in principle it was a three-year deal, better then his successor at St Andrews got.  No compunction to overstretch in the first year in order to convince the top brass to keep him on, drop in words like 'transitional' in post-match interviews, Rab's Yer Uncle.

Much as Villa fans listen to anything that the blue half of the city says, they got the message from the start that Eck was a purveyor of negative football.  Yes they won the Carling Cup, but mostly as a result of a strong rearguard action - if we're honest, their Wembley win owed a lot to stout defending and a couple of lucky breaks.  Good luck to them, that's how we won it against Man United in 1994.  This should have been the season where, depleted by big-name sales and relatively few newcomers, pereviously promising players like Bannan, Delfouneso and Albrighton should have been given an extended run in the side and the opportunity to express themselves, gain regular big-game experience and learn how to pace themselves - Albrighton in particular, who showed patches of brilliance but didn't always sustain through 90 minutes.  I remember similar accusations being levelled at a young Dwight Yorke.

But those three in particular have been, in the main, sidelined.  Some of the young players such as Herd and Clarke have grabbed the opportunity and increased their stock, but Bannan and Albrighton have been reduced mainly to the sub's bench, while Fons was pointlessly loaned out to Leicester.  This left us with pretty limited attacking options, with Ireland and N'Zogbia filling in the wide roles.  In fact, the number of times players have been played out of position this season has left us wondering whether McLeish actually knew where half of his squad were supposed to play.

No wonder the football has been turgid.  No shape, no structure, no game plan.  The stats speak for themselves: worst home record ever, no goals scored from corners, only two games won after going 1-0 down.  Three away wins, two of which were against relegated clubs.  Okay, the third was a stunningly incongruous 3-1 win at Chelsea, but that's not enough to outweigh the negatives.  A pretty indefensible record for a club that three years ago was knocking on the Champions League door.

We've been here before of course - back in 1994-5, two seasons after - for my money - the best season I've ever seen (typified by Dalian Atkinson's wonder goal away to Wimbledon) and one season after besting Man U in the Coca-Cola Cup, we went to Norwich City for the last game needing a point to stay up.  Sounds horribly familiar.  However, that time Brian Little had taken over and the next season brought about changes that led to further good times.  Ironically the front runner to take up Lerner's poisoned chalice is the boss of the renovated Norwich, who we condemned to second tier football on that day.  We can only hope that a change at the helm can herald a new era, though whoever comes in will have an uphill battle and may need to do some canny shopping around.

There were times this season when you wondered if we would ever score again.  Even in the dark days of Josef Venglos and David O'Dreary there was hope.  By the end of this season everybody just seemed to want it over, done with and forgotten about, and the manager got shot of.  I don't expect the DVD to be a big seller.