Family Tree UK – July 2023
English | 86 pages | pdf | 42.8 MB
Welcome at Family Tree UK Magazine July 2023 Issue
This summer sees the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury (June 1948). At once it’s an event from history – indeed we can study the passenger manifest online, page by page, line by line, reading the names of the 1,027 passengers bound for British shores. Te past is vividly evoked, too, by the photographs of people stepping down the Empire Windrush gangway that we can find online, many showing civilians and service personnel, British subjects arriving from the Caribbean to help with the post-war rebuild.
As Chris Paton explains in his article, “the British Nationality Act of 1948 … created an equal status between British subjects born in Britain and those born within the UK’s colonies, as ‘citizens of the United Kingdom and colonies’, as well as for those who naturalised”. It was this Act that enabled people to travel from the West Indies, for instance (among many other places of course), to live and work in Britain. Yet seventy years later, when the Windrush Scandal reared its head, it became apparent that some pledges of the past were broken, with some people of the Windrush generation detained, deported, and denied rights once promised. Yetunde Abiola’s article picks up the theme of our roots, and how political they may feel, and be, in her piece ‘94% European and 6% African’. DNA testing provides us with enormous capability to learn about our heritage – and Yetunde provides re ections and resources to help us understand crosscontinental DNA results, to think about what they can reveal about the previous generations of our family tree, and to make sense of our identity today.
So, what did make our ancestors move? Many, indeed most, of us will have ancestors who have moved, often for work and new opportunities, but very often, too, with little or no choice: enslaved, transported, simply out of luck, resettled once again in the place of their baptism, having fallen on hard times. Family history tells some tough stories about the past, about the worlds of our ancestors – stories that can be hard to research, perhaps still having an impact on our own lives today.
But surely that relevance to our present has got to be a driving reason for researching our past.
Helen Tovey
EDITOR
[email protected]
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