You can choose your friends ...

“You can choose your friends … but not your relatives.” So said a friend of my father.

He might have been thinking about Lebanon, where every second cousin even the “once removed” ones that have joined the diaspora in Brazil or Canada or Mexico, are sheer musts for the wedding list. Two Lebanese meeting for the first time feel much happier when they’ve established some sort of family connection, even a linkage as tenuous as “so that means my niece’s husband is your first cousin, by marriage” . Trust me, I actually heard that one last month.

It’s difficult to imagine any market here for the type of relative tracking service offered through, for example, ScotlandsPeople, a government web-site with all the births, marriages and deaths recorded and indexed to help someone, well, er, track down their relatives. They charge you for looking at the results of each search through the index – by the page – and then five times as much to look at an entry, re-enforcing the time honoured belief that the Scots are serious about money.

But I’ve been using them, partly to build a family tree for my grandson, should he ever want it, partly for myself in wanting to verify, or debunk a variety of family myths. My task has not been made simpler by having fertile ancestors, for example, my maternal grandfather was one of fifteen children. “What, surely not all by the same mother?” asked a Lebanese friend, “er, yes, but she stopped having them when she got to thirty-five”. Ah well, there was neither television nor internet in those days.

Two pieces of received wisdom about our ancestors have been handed down to my sister and me. Apparently there was a “rich miller” in the distant past and a “sea-captain” as well, both on my mother’s side.

My mother was an avid recorder and keeper of information. One rather macabre list was the dates when friends and relatives (choose from “died” - unimaginative, “popped their clogs” – vernacular, “breathed their last” – poetic but clichéed) from about 1920 onwards. Armed with this, my sister’s memory and the aforementioned relative tracking databases, I managed eventually to find not just the miller, but the Mill, still standing in Burnham in Norfolk but long passed into the hands of the National Trust. Another fecund union the miller and his wife made, with lots of children called things like Harrison and Hubert, nine horses and a string of domestic servants, so small wonder that all the money has long since disappeared.

I haven’t found the sea-captain yet. Students of history will recognize Burnham as the parish in which Admiral Lord Nelson was born (his father was rector) but I am absolutely unable to claim any connection.

Pity we can’t choose our relatives.