One for me, One for you

It was a busy weekend.  I had spent most of Saturday following up what part of my mind told me was a crazy idea.  I decided that, with my subscription to a renowned family history database, it ought to be possible to compile a fairly comprehensive history of the family we’d stayed with for our summer holidays year after year in my childhood.  Yes, it was possible, but one thing led to another, and it took far longer than I’d expected.

I went to bed on Saturday evening, didn’t sleep too well, and woke up with a little couplet going through my mind.  I don’t think it’s Biblical, but I’ve no idea where it does come from. “We can’t have all we want ... and we can’t keep all we have!”  Some complementary thoughts as I carried on with the task the following afternoon led to this article.

At the beginning of the last century concern was being felt in high places about the growth of our population, and a question was included in the 1911 census that caused quite a bit of consternation.  Its aim was to provide an idea of female fertility, but a century later it’s proved a boon to the family historian.  Every married woman was asked to provide four numbers.  How many years had she been married; how many children had she borne in her present marriage; how many of these were still alive, and how many had died?  (Even more useful to people like me, some widowers provided the same information!)

One of the ladies in my research had answered this question, “9:4:2:2”; in nine years of marriage, she had lost half of her children.  The two daughters still living were now aged eight and seven, but when I compared the birth and death indexes, I found four possibilities for the others, the oldest of which lived only to two years of age.  How life has improved now.  As I wondered just what she must have thought at the deaths of children so young, I realised that this was par for the course.  Maybe the percentage in this example was a mite high, but it was quite common for families to lose a proportion of their children at an early age.  It was as if they were called upon to share their children with God, or death, or the ‘grim reaper’, depending on the depth of their faith.

While these families might have wanted more children, in many cases it was an economic certainty that they couldn’t keep all those they had been blessed with.  I broadened out this thought, and considered how it might have applied to me.  As an only child, I have always struggled with the idea of sharing.  The son of a farm worker, I may not have had all I wanted, but I grew up safe in the knowledge that anything I did have, I would keep!  I now reflected upon Jesus’ story of a rich man (Luke 12:16-21,) and thought of a line from a hymn that I quoted in a recent article, “here for a season, then above ...”; I also recalled one of the many beautiful prayers from the Book of Common Prayer, “... comfort and succour all them, who in this transitory life are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity.”

Not for the first time, something had prompted me to look with a wider perspective at my transitory life, and the need to grade what concerns me into the comfortable, the convenient, the important, and the essential; and to realise just how little around me actually originates in the last of those categories!