PEDIGREE-HUNTING.
WE doubt whether there is a single man of education in England who is not interested in his pedigree,— that is, who does not desire to know what manner of men his forefathers really were. Of course, there are plenty of people who do not care in the least for a Royal descent, or a Norman lineage, and for whom a distinguished ancestry has no attractions. If, however, a man says that he does not care to know where his great-grandfather lived, what he did, and what were that great-grandfather's politics and religious creed, it can merely mean that he is incapable of taking interest in one of the most interesting forms of human knowledge,—the knowledge of the details of the past. Of course, the compiling of mere strings of names, however long, is utterly meaningless, and its worship well deserves the contempt that has been poured upon it. To a person possessed of any historical sense, however, no name, if properly supplemented with date and place, is without interest. To find that a direct ancestor lived at Naseby about the year 1645, and so must have witnessed the great battle between the forces of the King and Parliament, at once gives life and colour to any family record. It is a happy circumstance that those who wish to prepare pedigrees are bound to compile them from documents which contain names not merely as names, but in definite relation to some particular event or special circum- stance. For instance, if an ancestor's name turns up on the Patent Roll, it is because he obtained, at some time or other, a grant from the King. When a name is found, an important fact in the life is found with it. Except the Parish Registers, there is, indeed, hardly a public record which does not attach some piece of information, great or small, to the names recorded in it.
A work just published by Mr. Walter Rye, "Records and Record-Searching," will give pedigree-hunters just the help and encouragement they need in prosecuting their favourite studies. Rich indeed are the fields Mr. Rye lays open before them. Previous accounts of the Records, such as those by Thomas and Sims, are possibly in some ways more exhaustive than the present work. Mr. Rye's book, however, leaves little to be desired on the ground of completeness. He begins his work by some extremely useful hints on how to compile a pedigree, and then proceeds to tell us how to write the history of a parish, ending by general remarks on the Records them- selves. To trace out the ramifications of a family line, is indeed an exciting and delightful task. No one who has ever felt it will forget the delight of finding the anxiously looked-for name in the index nominorum of some stately folio of the Records, the breathless turning over of the leaves to find the place, and the reward for days of hungry expectation that the passage, when discovered, affords. The charm of the chase is that the hunt is never up. To run down one game is only to start another. Say we find, by a deposition in the Rolls of the Chancery of the Duchy of Lancaster, the fact we were seeking to verify,—namely, that George Thomson held the lands of Blackacre, in the County of Essex. There the search is ended; but in the course of the deposi..
tion we find, what we had never suspected before, though it explains a hundred difficulties and impossibilities, that George Thomson originally came from Greenacre, in Surrey. The hunt is again in full cry, and the highest hopes are raised, perhaps to be rewarded, perhaps to be disappointed, that the pedigree may be at last pushed back those two stages, which will enable us to connect with this or that well-known house, whose lineage is all plain-sailing. The enormous amount of the English domestic records makes the hunting-ground so vast, that the stock of covert to be drawn seems quite inexhaustible. If the longed-for fact or date is not in one series of documents, it is sure to be in another, while the huge mass of unindexed and unexplored papers at the Record Office always allows the pleasing hope that what is wanted is not, in truth, undis- coverable, but only undiscovered.
We have dwelt rather on the sporting interest of pedigree- hunting, which may be explained as coming from that love of the chase to be found somewhere in every man's nature. Like actual hunting, however, it has another claim on our sympathies. Many votaries of fox-hunting like quite as much as the sport, the bodily exercise, the pleasant country they ride through, the woodland scenery or the pastoral they see around them, and the hundred objects of interest encountered in getting to covert or in a run across country. So with pedigree-hunting. The actual sport is a great deal, but killing the fact is not everything. Very many delightful days may be spent not only without killing, but even without ever getting near enough for a "View holloa!" The Records are a country with many wooded places, running streams, and pleasant hedgerows, and as we go through them, something of interest is always sure to meet us. Half the delight, half the enjoyment is sure to come from something different from that which we set out to find. Even the search of a parish register, which sounds specially dull, may bring to light a series of curious facts, seeral and historical. The present writer well remembers his interest in understanding, as if by actual experience, from a parish register of the sixteenth century, the importance of that "tramp nuisance" which appears in a dim and confused way in all the historical accounts of the Tudor period. We read of how Henry VIII. and how Elizabeth dealt with the "sturdy beggars" who infested the villages and high-roads, and wonder at the cruel stringency of the enactments passed against them. To study a parish register of the time, is to realise some of the real conditions of the problem. The register just referred to, that of a quiet Somersetshire village, has on almost every page some mention of "a stranger," man or woman, who has come into the parish and there died or given birth to a child. Nowadays, the only stranger who penetrates into the place is a flying bicycle-tourist or an archwological enthu- siast. The strangers who thus poured into the Somerset- shire village are, of course, the "sturdy beggars" or tramps. The reason for their appearance is to be traced to the dissolu- tion of the abbeys, the sudden change in the value of money caused by the discovery of American gold, the enclosures of commons, and the gradual conversion of the land of England from corn to pasture,—the change of which Latimer was thinking when he complained that where were once houses and tilled fields there are now " but a shepherd and his dog." How to cure these evils properly, the Government of the day was, no doubt, utterly at a loss. Still, the difficulty must have been a very great one, and we must understand the magnitude of the problem before we lightly condemn the way in which they met it. We must remember, too, that in our own time America has had to find a solution for the same difficulty—the bands of sturdy tramps that infest the roads in many of the Eastern States, and has applied remedies almost as drastic. So much for a digression intended to show the way in which the pedi- gree-hunter may start and run down much more important game than he ever went out to kill.
We cannot leave the consideration of the subject suggested by Mr. Rye's book without noticing that in his instructions as to compiling a fatally-tree, he leaves out one kind of pedigree which is well worth constructing, and, indeed, only deals with the chart of the ordinary simple line of descent through the male. Now, for all purpose of "heredity," this is by no means sufficient. Any one with a real thirst for family history wants to
know about his ancestors through the female deaceas as well as
through the male. A chart showing for four or five genera- tions the whole of a man's ancestors in blood is an extremely curious and valuable document. Pedigrees of this sort show first a man's father and mother, then his father's father and mother and his mother's father and mother, then his four great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, and so on, as far as possible. Of course, it is extremely difficult to carry this sort of pedigree any length. There is a story that Mrs. Tin-ale was very fond of saying that no one ever could tell you, at any rate off-hand, who were his or her four great-grand- mothers. This is, no doubt, true enough. A man often knows all about remote ancestors in the male line, of whose blood he inherits but a very tiny stream, and yet is absolutely ignorant of the great-grandmothers who can claim so much greater a share in his hereditary composition. Certainly, to most people, the names of their four great-grandmothers, even if they may happen to know them, sound strange and unfamiliar enough. The result of making a pedigree such as we have referred to is to bring home strongly to the maker the feeling that perhaps it is quite as interesting to get the record of all his more immediate ancestors, as to confine his attention to one thin line of distant male blood.
Perhaps one of the most curious things about pedigree- hunting, is the fact that it is tending to become more general as the political and social power conferred by birth is growing less. That this is so, has been the cause of much cheap satire in regard to the snobbish tendencies of democracy. We very much doubt, however, whether the present love for pedigrees has anything to do' with that pride of birth which has been so conspicuous a feature in other ages. Rather we believe that it is to be ex- plained by the fact that the horizon of human interest has been widening everywhere, and that the love for the study of ancestry has developed with the general love for knowledge which is everywhere steadily growing. A man now sets out to discover who his ancestors really were, not to establish a claim to Norman blood. The old pedigree-hunting was a sign of pride and pretension ; the modern is simply dictated by the desire to know whatever can be known. The one advanced itself by the methods of immoral advocacy ; the other proceeds. by those of scientific research.
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