3 minute read
Hidden Histories
Kavita Puri
is a journalist, broadcaster and author of Partition Voices: Untold British Stories (Bloomsbury, updated for 2022). Her Radio 4 show, Inheritors of Partition, is available on BBC Sounds On a recent summer afternoon, two distant cousins sat together to work out their family histories and how they connected. They had never met before.
One was from Melbourne, Australia; the other was from London, England. They had been able to track each other down only by their shared – and rare – family surname.
The Australian cousin brought black-and-white photographs of her ancestors, taken at the turn of the 20th century; they wore their best clothes, and posed formally. The other cousin was my husband, whose paternal Jewish family came from near Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, south-west Poland). His grandfather managed to survive the Holocaust by escaping just days before the Second World War was declared. Relatives who stayed behind were murdered by the Nazis.
Very little was known about the extended family who survived the Holocaust, and it wasn’t till this summer, eight decades on, that these two people from opposite sides of the world eventually worked out that they were fourth cousins. I watched them as they took a piece of paper and drew a family tree from fragments of knowledge, sharing the stories of old memories, passed down like the most precious heirlooms. Then came the awful questions: who survived and who died, and where?
As I listened to their attempts to piece together their personal history, I felt that I understood completely why their search mattered. I have been researching my own family history, particularly relating to the Partition of India. Over the past year, too, I have been following people from the third generation after that 1947 event as they investigate their own stories in my BBC Radio 4 programme, Inheritors of Partition. Some use DNA tests to find information; others return to ancestral villages in the land long fled, or embark on archival research. This is an active process happening across Britain today among the younger members of the South Asian diaspora.
Not all family histories that remain hidden are related to devastating historical trauma. We think of history as huge events, but each family – each individual, even – has a story, and it is not always easy to access. There can be many reasons for this. Silence in families may be the result of efforts to avoid burdening the next generation. Memories can be tied up with shame. Sometimes, remembering is too painful, the urge to forget too strong. There may be secrets. Or it may be more simple: if no one asks, no one tells.
The interest in family ancestry now drives a burgeoning industry, with DNA-testing services and websites including Ancestry, Findmypast and MyHeritage helping people connect with their past. It has also been fuelled by popular programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? – the very title of which suggests that a person cannot know themselves if they don’t know their personal past.
The desire to know your history – where you are from and how it connects to a bigger community and wider events of the time – is a powerful instinct. This urge may be even stronger for people who have been displaced or are descended from immigrant communities, for whom searching the archives is not a straightforward process.
In the same week my husband met his Australian cousin, he also met another distant cousin from Brazil. He’d never before met any relatives beyond his immediate family, so it was an eventful week. Of the few family members left around the world, many are now in touch, pooling what knowledge they have. After just a few weeks of work, they can already trace family members back to the 18th century. It’ s never too late to ask family members about their lives and those of their parents and grandparents – to hear about the exceptional and unexceptional, the stories that can be handed down. When those generations are no longer with us, finding our own history is so much harder.
m m w fte c t ei re xc p h ndi
A Je ew wish-owned shop the morning af ftere Kristallnacht, a Nazi campaign of f ananti-Semitic violence across Gerermany in November 1938. The gr randfather of Kavita Puri’ s husband fle ed d t theh Nazis, but many of his family didid not survive
