Dear All

Out of the blue I received an email from a 80 year old man in Canada claiming to be my mother’s cousin.
This was on her father’s side, which I knew little about.
Intrigued, we met on Zoom.

I was absolutely spellbound.

Not only did he seem vaguely familiar but he told me that he’d managed after years of research to go back 23 generations in our family to the 1100s.
To a John Cawood, our earliest known ancestor, who held the title, probably from the King, of Keeper of the Forrest, taking care of the hunting lands around Cawood Castle in Yorkshire.

This research had been a lifelong passion for Michael, which had taken him all over the world.

He went on to tell me about other family members that I had no idea existed but were completely fascinating to me.

He sent me a photo, saying….
“I have attached a postcard showing a picture of Doris Hill, one of your ancestors, protesting by not standing and curtsying to greet the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, when he visited Preston racecourse on July 8, 1921.
She was a keen suffragette at the time and worked tirelessly for women’s rights and the vote. She would have been about 24 years old then”

He also told me about his grandmother Winifred and her two sisters, who couldn’t have been more different.

Winifred was a staunch Presbyterian
She forced everyone to go to church twice on Sundays and forbade any laughing or even smiling on the Sabbath.
She tried to end her first pregnancy or maybe her own life by throwing herself down the stairs.
One of the twins was born dead two months later and the one that survived was Michael’s father.

Ada, a more colourful sister
With her husband she owned the famous Piccadilly club the Café de Paris that opened in 1924 and was one of the leading night clubs in London till shutting down finally during the pandemic.
Ada was always seen drinking at her table until it closed in the early hours of the morning – the grand Madam.

The third sister Grace was the clever one
The first Cawood (and the first woman) to get a degree at the University of London.
Becoming a librarian, she helped develop Dewey Decimal, still today the world’s book indexing system.
Sadly she married a bullying husband, and spent most of her subsequent life ill, in and out of hospitals.

Michael told me stories of ancestors who had been singers and performers.

Including one embarrassingly part of the black and white minstrels – unfortunately he was one of the ones who used to black up.
He sent me a picture of the workhouse my great grandfather had died in, relatively young.
He’d been a publican who ended up destitute and probably ruined by drink.

I had no idea these family members existed but it had a powerful effect on me.

That night, when I went dancing, I felt light and free and very strangely connected with this mad bunch of humanity that were my family – and some old idea of not fitting in didn’t seem to matter any more.
I had this sense of being cheered on by this invisible family which I never realized I had.

This is so uncannily like a Family Constellation and why so many people love it and come back again and again.

It’s a sense of belonging to a tribe, one that goes back through many generations. They are our roots and where we come from.

Just by knowing about them supports us in our everyday life. In some inexplicable way Michael had given that ‘Constellation’ to me, out of the blue and quite unexpectedly and it still makes me giggle.
Whoever they were, however much they messed up, just to know they existed is like a blessing, especially for those growing up like me in very alienated, nuclear family where nobody really felt they belonged.
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But this feeling, which had taken Michael 28 years to discover through family tree research, Family Constellation can give you in one weekend workshop – a deeply illuminating sense of family and belonging.

So this broken human family we all belong to suddenly makes me smile and not take myself so seriously.

Much Love

Sarasi