Is there any help for my new obsession?

my family records from the late 19th century

So I've just got my new website up and running. You'd think I would be focused on it, and also that I'd be doing paintings to feed it. But no. In fact I'm obsessively researching my family tree, using a fortnight's free trial on Ancestry.co.uk.

more family records, probably from the early 20th century

Actually, the genealogy was itself a sort of side-turn from the thing that first distracted me from painting which was an idea to write about my mum in some form or other. To prepare for that, I started collating all the ideas and diary entries and thoughts I've been keeping for years, plus letters, newspaper cuttings and writings by Mum. Then I extended it to my mum's mum as she too was a keen writer of articles and autobiography. The table is already 101 pages long and I've barely begun. And it's completely separate from the photographs, of which there are hundreds, going back to the early 1900s. If I carry on, I feel it will be like living inside a Borges story I'm sure I read in the Seventies, where the record of someone's life subsumes their actual life.

After a while, the table was getting so formless that I decided it needed a framework of facts and dates. That's where Ancestry.co.uk came in. I went on it to fill in the birth and death dates of various fairly close relatives but within about an hour I was hopelessly addicted. The actions you need to perform on the Ancestry website in order to pin down the life-facts of your relatives perfectly fulfil the same need in me to finish jigsaw puzzles, play spot-the-difference puzzles and keep Gallery Five gift-tags from the 1970s. And the element of detective work is totally gratifying, especially challenges such as chasing down female relatives' maiden names. I've only been researching for 9 days but there are already 307 people on my family tree. If you can link your tree with someone else's on the site, then whole branches can be added with just a few clicks.

mourning card for my great-grand uncle, who died in childhood in 1864

  As well as the amazing wealth of records that you can search via the Ancestry website, I have a few family documents that provide further details of some family members. My granny was very keen on family history and kept the old handwritten lists at the top of this post which she must have inherited in her turn. And among her possessions was the mourning card above, which was for her uncle who died in childhood in 1864.

As I've been spending almost every waking moment when I haven't been at work trawling through census records and birth, marriage and death indexes, I decided I had to force myself to focus on the actual point of it all. By this point I was researching very distant relatives just for the satisfaction of finding their parents or spouse. So I decided just to establish the birth, marriage and death dates of my direct relatives, going back to Jonas Mattison, born in Richmond, Yorkshire in 1795, plus their children, where they lived and what they did for a living. Jonas has the postition of paterfamilias on the second document above and was my great great great great grandfather.

So I had managed to limit the scope of my researches (notwithstanding that when my free two weeks run out I'm definitely going to have a go on the 'premium' membership of Ancestry.com because then I'll get access to electoral rolls, divorce records, baptisms, ooh, I can't wait. They sure know what they're doing with their business model...) and yesterday morning I sat down to fill in any missing data in my new list of need-to-knows. I had what I needed for my great great great grandparents Thomas and Mary. And I knew that my great great grandfather Christopher had been born in 1858 and spent his childhood in this house on Castle Hill, Richmond:

When Christopher was 24 he married a Scottish woman called Marion and they lived in Leeming near Bedale, about 12 miles from Richmond. Their reason for being there was so that Christopher could work in his uncle William's iron foundry as an iron moulder. The business was started in 1851 and became known as F. Mattison and Co, the F being Francis, William's son. They made agricultural implements and also many of the milestones used on roads all over the North Riding of Yorkshire, and also, in the 1890s, a huge waterwheel for a nearby mill (at Crakehall). The premises still stand today:

F. Mattison & Co: on the low-level part to the right you can still see the words 'Iron Foundry'

I wanted to know where Christopher and Marion had lived, along with their son, my great grandfather John. They didn't live with the foundry owners. Father and son, William and Francis, lived next door to each other in two adjoining houses just next to their business, called Elm Tree House and The Poplars. Here are some of their two families in their garden:

Unfortunately I don't know who anyone is individually. Perhaps the gentleman on the bench is Francis. I think the two houses shared the garden as the door you can see is that of the Poplars, the right-hand house. Here's how they look today:

You can see that there's a fence dividing the garden now. But you can also see that the door and smaller windows are still the same.
However, my direct relative Christopher didn't live here -- so where did he live? In the 1891 census returns, he lived on Leeming Lane but this is a very long road and none of the house numbers is specified.:

I tried (for hours!) to work out which house they might have lived in. I wanted to see it with my own eyes on Google Street View. Here's where I fell down a giant rabbit hole where time no longer meant anything...
I looked backwards and forwards on the census return for any identifiable house or place such as a mill, to which I could work out the relation to Christopher's house. I found a pub, two pages on -- The Crown Inn:

So if I could locate the Crown Inn I would be very close to pinpointing Christopher and Marion's gaff. I found two photographs of the Crown:

in the lower photo the Crown is in the distance where the road curves round.

I also found a very moving account by Audrey Milner in Pontefract of her husband Matthew's time as an airman stationed at RAF Leeming. Audrey used to stay at the Crown Inn when she visited Matthew and she said it backed onto the air strip which meant that she could count the planes back in from their missions. This narrowed the possible location down considerably, as you'll see from this aerial photo:

I thought that I could surely locate the Crown by 'walking' up and down Leeming Lane on Street View, looking all around, and spotting some detail of one or other of the old photos. But although I fear I spent several hours doing this yesterday (without even realising how much time was passing), I failed to locate the Crown. There's quite a lot of more recent housing now, so perhaps it was bulldozed. I couldn't find a useable reference to its location anywhere online, so if any pub historian knows where it was, please put me out of my misery. The irony is that, even if I locate the Crown, I still won't know exactly where Christopher and Marion lived. They moved back to Richmond in later life and Christopher had a job as a lamplighter for the Corporation. My granny has written about her memories of going out with him on his rounds when she was very little (he died when she was five).
So this is all just to explain why I'm not doing any painting at the moment...

My new artist's website

moo cards for my new website

I've got a brand-new website to showcase my art. Please do visit it: www.janehousham.co.uk. I think anybody who wants their art to be seen needs a website. I held off for a long time because I didn't feel I had enough work to show but now I want to let people see what I'm doing and encourage myself to do more.

I looked into lots of different 'pathways' to getting a web presence before I plumped for having a bespoke one designed for me. There are lots of less costly options on shared sites that give artists their own 'spaces'on them but, often (it seemed to me from rootling around), the websites have their own agendas and the individual artists' work can get a bit lost. I also looked into using online templates and instructions to make my own website. I did this once before when I was designing greetings cards, using a free version of DreamWeaver from a magazine -- I managed to create something useable but it nearly killed me. Even Wordpress seemed complicated.

I knew that I wanted really good navigability and a slideshow, so I decided to get someone who knew what they were doing to do it for me. I'm pleased with it but now I need to feed and nurture it with fresh work and more images. It feels a bit like a living thing that I mustn't neglect.

I got the little Moo cards printed to help publicise the site. If you don't know about Moo cards, I recommend them. They're very high quality and the best thing about them is that, if you're ordering 100 business cards, you can load up one single image or a hundred different images (or any number in between) and they don't charge you any more for lots of different cards. Trouble is, I almost like the little tiny reproductions of my paintings better than the real thing.

Review of 2012

Not to take myself too seriously, but here are some of the things I've really enjoyed this year -- they didn't all come out this past year as I'm usually to be found rootling around in the long tail.

Let's start with...

ART

Richard Hamilton: The Late Works at the National Gallery

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy

Lucian Freud: Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery

Martin Honert: Children's Crusade at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present at the National Gallery

BOOKS: FICTION

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (brilliant psychothriller)

Tin Toys trilogy by Ursula Holden (amazingly truthful portrait of childhood)

The Partnership by Barry Unsworth (wonderfully dark early novel by Barry Unsworth,died in 2012)

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (great novel by woefully underrated writer)

Bird Brain by Guy Kennaway (lovely, funny novel of just deserts and making amends)

BOOKS: NON-FICTION

My Judy Garland Life by Susie Boyt (beautiful personal account of hero worship and empathy)

Seeking Rapture by Kathryn Harrison (memoir of an impossible-to-reach mother)

Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas (psycho-architectural enquiry into New York City)

Groovy Bob by Harriet Vyner (oral history of Robert Fraser, the art dealer)

The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth (best rock tour account ever)

America: Empire of Liberty by David Reynolds (pulled together American history for me)

FILMS

True Grit remade by the Coen Brothers

Moonrise Kingdom by Wes Anderson

Nowhere Boy by Sam Taylor-Wood

Crossfire Hurricane documentary by Brett Morgen

The Queen of Versailles documentary by Lauren Greenfield

The Thomas Crown Affair -- the original by Norman Jewison

TV

The Killing III

Hunderby

The Glee Project

The Bridge

Murder

Moominland Tales: The Life of Tove Jansson

From the Sea to the Land Beyond

SINGLES

'Welcome Home' by Radical Face

'Home and Dry' by The Silver Seas

'A Lack of Understanding' by The Vaccines

'Hollow Talk' by The Choir of Young Believers (theme tune from The Bridge)

'Doom and Gloom' by The Rolling Stones (still got it)

plus

'Joburg Jam' by Pogo:

 

Briefly in Berlin

Grizzled musicians at the Christmas market near the Opera House

As soon as school broke up, we nipped over to Berlin for a few days, just before Christmas. We were back in time to hang our stockings up on Christmas Eve. I really wanted to blog about it before Christmas was over but it's taken me all this time to get to grips with my photos. So all my kitsch photos of plaster Baby Jesuses and glowing stars are looking a little past it, I'm afraid. Let's get them out of the way without more ado. It was wonderfully Christmassy, which was the main reason we went.

Having never been to Berlin before, I tried to mug up on the city before we left, watching Funeral in Berlin, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Wings of Desire and reading snippets of great books set in Berlin in the Berlin City Lit Guide from Oxygen Books (excellent series -- I had the New York one when we went to NYC last year). As all those films are set in the era of the Cold War and the Wall, it actually gave us a rather grim picture of paranoia, dereliction and division: of course, nothing could be further from the truth now.

     We were staying in a very nice Spanish hotel (thank you, Trip Advisor -- and the unexpected Spanishness was a welcome extra) close to Friedrichstrasse U-bahn station -- it was hard to grasp that this had once been on the East side of the wall. The area was really more or less indistinguishable from a London shopping street, with familiar shops and multinational coffee and burger chains.

Old and less old: the Opera House flanked by the brilliant TV tower from the days of East Berlin

But it didn't take us long to find a more German aspect of the city. We walked along the banks of the Spree to Museum Island, which looked fantastic -- monumental. But we didn't have time for massive museums on this trip. There was the tail-end of a bric-a-brac market just opposite the island with quite enticing objects (1960s plastic toys and the like) but they must have seen us coming as they were very pricey -- too pricey. I only bought these two little ball-bearing puzzles for my collection.

Hard to make out the picture on the left -- a soldier sitting on his helmet with an arrow through his head??

We came out at the Opera House and found our first Christmas market. And it was starting to snow!

The entrance to our first Christmas market

We immediately bought bratwurst (my son dared to have the infamous currywurst) and gluhwein ( and hot chocolate for the kids) and it was fantastic. My knees were burning with the cold by now, but the mulled wine made them feel as though they belonged to someone else. We slithered round the market in the surprisingly driving snow. Apart from my knees, we were just about dressed for it.

We came out onto Unter den Linden, whose name is so beautiful and had made me imagine a romantic, tree-lined street -- it was much grander than that, with massive buildings bristling with statuary. Just as we were starting to weary of the snow, we came to an exhibition of Modernist art from the Guggenheim collection, which I've just discovered is something to do with Deutsche Bank -- it was good, anyway, with, it seemed, one painting by all the key artists of the late 19th and early 20th century and a few extra Kandinskys thrown in for good measure. The shop was very imaginatively stocked.

The Brandenburg Gate

We carried on down Unter den Linden to the Brandenburg Gate -- very handsome. We turned left and walked down to Potsdamer Platz, and had a brief foray into the Sony Centre. It was very twinkly and Christmassy but a bit soulless -- not many people were around.

The Sony Centre

Christmas tree in Potsdamer Platz

I was in charge of the sightseeing and my goal was to reach the art gallery at the Kulturforum (an arts complex akin to London's South Bank, I guess). It was snowing really hard and laying quite thickly already. We are English wusses and not used to going out in the snow (as soon as I see flakes falling at home I usually wimp out and refuse to drive in it). It was also dark by now but still very jolly in the centre of Berlin. We found the home of the Berlin Philharmonic where a concert was just about to begin. Everyone was arriving and I wished we'd thought to get tickets. The usher told us that the art gallery was just a bit further on.

Part of the Kulturforum

We carried on but I don't think we actually found the gallery. It all seemed pretty shut. The building above was very dramatic in the snow -- I slipped on the marble pavement and chucked my camera in the snow but it was alright.

We decided to walk back to the hotel. The Brandenburg Gate looked brilliant all lit up.

I think this was some kind of performance art... Not real soldiers

Back at the hotel we had dinner in the Spanish restaurant which, unfortunately (in my view) had opted for the sort of cuisine made famous by El Bulli, so everything was cubes of foam and soupcons of mousse and tiny balls of avocado and other such silliness. My 'beef Wellington' was not the hefty slab o' meat and pastry of tradition, but a tiny finger of ultra-rare meat with a literally transparent sliver of something that could not be called pastry twinkling diaphanously somewhere in its vicinity, like a stray sweet wrapper. Very very strange. I did not like the black nubs of pasta-like dough either! Eee, there's no pleasing some folk -- I would've been happier with a plate of mushy peas and a pork pie, really. But it was an interesting experience. The kids took it in their stride admirably.
     The next day it was still snowing like mad. We set off on the U-bahn to Mauerpark flea market. 'Mauerpark' means 'wall park' and is a strip of green that was reclaimed from the no-man's-land alongside a section of the Wall after it came down -- reclaimed by the local people.

The flea market was a fairly familiar, Camden-style mix of hippy accoutrements, bags, clothes and vast arrays of quite saddening junk, which it was easy to imagine had been thrown up in the chaos the city has been through. Although I'm a very seasoned junk-rifler, it felt somehow wrong to be picking over these piles of belongings -- it made me think of Christian Boltanski's art works in memory of murdered Jews.

Warhol at the Hamburger Bahnhof

     After the market we battled over to the Hamburger Bahnhof art gallery which is housed in an ex railway station. It was worth the traipse through the cold, wet slush as it was an incredible space. And you were allowed to take photos. I won't bore you with all my poor photos but there was a great collection of work by artists that I love: Anselm Kiefer, Warhold, Rauschenberg, Joseph Beuys, Thomas Struth. Kiefer's 1990 work, 'Lilith at the Red Sea' incorporates children's clothes and seems to refer with unflinching directness to the Holocaust (in a very similar way to Boltanski).

'Lilith at the Red Sea'

detail

The temporary exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof was a retrospective of an artist I hadn't come across before, Martin Honert. It took me a while to tune in to his mindset but once I did I thought he was amazing. He is quite brilliantly singular, though I guess you could draw comparisons with Maurizio Cattelan, and his work to recreate photographs and memories as three-dimensional works actually put me in mind of Richter's blurred recreations of photos.

'Group Photo of Prefects': lifesize figures made from polyurethane, sand, glass, textiles and oil paint

detail

two views of 'Santa Claus', a three-dimensional recreation of one of Honert's childhood drawings (polyester, polystyrene, wood and acrylic)

'Fire' (with 'Starling' in the background)

Detail of 'Giants' which Honert explains are the same size as the world's tallest man and so perhaps explain ancient myths of giants -- just very tall humans

I was very very taken with Honert's art and it has given me so much to think about.

Alexanderplatz Christmas Market

That evening we went to the Christmas market at Alexanderplatz, which is the biggest one, I think (there are around 25 Christmas markets in Berlin alone!). We had more gluhwein, more deep-fried batter, pretzels, and, wondrous, the best Christmas bauble shop it's possible to imagine -- a wonderland of silvered glass. We saw naughty nurse baubles, elephant baubles, cigars, seals, fish, gherkins, policemen, you name it. Incredible. I chose a glass chameleon.

All that sugar doesn't necessarily make you sweet -- stallholder at the Christmas market

Curtain of sausages...

On our last day in Berlin the snow had stopped and it had all melted away from the pavements. We went walking down Friedrichstrasse to yet another Christmas market. This one was in Gendarmenmarkt which was the most beautiful spot we saw while we were there. An exquisite eighteenth-century square with a French cathedral, a German cathedral, a concert hall and a statue of Schiller in the middle. The Christmas market was the most traditional of the three we went to and rather more upmarket.

We also nipped into the trendy area north of Friedrichstrasse, Prenzlauerberg, to see if the KW art gallery was open but, alas, it wasn't. Their 'One to One' exhibition, on currently, is a series of artworks intended to be viewed by a single viewer and I think I would have found that really interesting. Some grafitti instead.

All too soon it was time to head to the airport and our own Christmas dinner the next day. It seemed very quiet at home after the intensity of three days in Berlin. It's a city I definitely want to go back to, for longer and in kinder weather. There's a mass of things I want to do there still. And now I also have a long list of books and films to take me deeper into the heart of Berlin.
     Hope you had a wonderful Christmas...