A new person has arrived, the last of the Gentleman Friend’s relations aside from a few outlying ones. This is someone who is very interested in genealogy (something that, I must admit, interests me not at all) and has been on a decades-long quest to map out relations from Trinidad to New Zealand. Along the way there has been discovery of a freed slave ancestor (the necessary corollary, of a slave-owning ancestor is not mentioned) but the distant Caribbean relations are seemingly uninterested in investigating on the ground perhaps because, this relation said, ‘they are as black as the ace of spades’ – a term I have heard used a few times among NZ folks of a certain generation, and which makes me jump when it is brought out as the decisive argument.
The lineage peters out around the 18th century while the Gentleman Friend’s other side goes back, I believe to the 14th century. My own shajra on my father’s side extends back to the god Brahma and takes in Ram for good measure, but of course is almost entirely fictional and only interested in men. I don’t know if there would be any way to trace the women, or even to verify some of it, since I doubt there are surviving records here in South Asia, certainly none comparable to Britain with its diligent church and civic record-keeping and fewer opportunities for records to be destroyed. In any case, I suppose stories are not to be found, unless there are still some of the traditional keepers of the lineage alive somewhere – the shajra I have was written down from the memory of one back in the 1920s.
Mexico has been fully arranged, at least the start of it, though the end and the nature of the end is still uncertain. Also uncertain is whether I shall fly to Toronto in the middle of the stay where a new nephew is expected in May.