My ancestors live in a box

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/sep/06/my-ancestors-live-in-a-box

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When I was a child, the old oak chest that holds my family’s history stood proudly in my grandmother’s dining room. I was familiar with its ornate symmetrical carving and imposing wooden stand, but I never gave its contents a second thought. To me it was no more than a strange old piece of furniture, the kind that often clutters up the homes of elderly relatives.

My grandmother always referred to the chest as Gerald’s Box, but at the time I never thought to ask her who Gerald was, or what his box was doing in her house. Yet despite my lack of curiosity, his name wormed its way into my consciousness, just as my ancestors had intended.

The story behind the box, I later learned, was a dark one. Gerald was the beloved son of my grandmother’s own grandparents, Lizzie May and Walter Layton. In 1890, at the age of two, he died of meningitis and the wooden box, which had been in the family for generations, had been turned into a kind of shrine to him. As Lizzie May told her mother a few days after Gerald’s death, in a heart-breaking letter written on black-bordered paper, “We have packed an old carved box with one garment each of all he wore, the last he had on night and day, and his last favourite toys, his cup and saucer.”

She had also, in Victorian fashion, included a lock of his hair.

Although the box represented a very private grief, Gerald’s parents put it on public display, setting it up in their library, on the very spot where his cot had stood when he died. Around 2ft in length, it resembled not only the bed in which he had slept during his short life, but also the coffin in which he had been laid to rest.

For Lizzie May, in some sense the box really did contain her lost child – or at least the only physical artefacts that remained to prove that he had once existed. Alongside his toys and clothes, she placed the letters of condolence that she and her husband had received after his death, as well as a touching note written during his illness by his seven-year-old brother, Cyril: “Dear Gerald, I are [sic] very sorry that you are ill.”

Lizzie May’s plan was that the box should remain in the family as a permanent reminder of Gerald. But it was also perhaps a way of compartmentalising her grief – the loss could literally be put away, the lid of the chest drawn shut on the pain held within, as the family moved on with their lives. When Gerald was buried, his grandparents personally screwed down the lid of the coffin at Lizzie May’s request. The box in the library could be opened, but to do so was a deliberate act – a conscious decision to confront the grief for the absent child through the artefacts that remained.

The box had started off as a shrine to one son, but it soon came to hold the memory of others. Four years after Gerald died, Walter and Lizzie May lost another infant, Henry. This time, rather than his toys and belongings, it was the certificate of burial that was preserved in the box. Perhaps Lizzie May couldn’t bring herself to go through the whole process again, or had decided that treating her child’s clothes and belongings as relics wasn’t all that healthy. At some point, Gerald’s things were silently removed from the box, leaving only the lock of his hair, now preserved within a black brooch.

In September 1916, Lizzie May and Walter lost a third son, Eric, on the Somme, and his medals and letters home were added to the box. One note to his niece, Molly, accompanied a box of toy soldiers: He told her, “There are lots of real soldiers here.” There’s also a photograph of him standing proudly in his army uniform, swagger stick in hand, and a postcard sent just a month before he died. But one document is conspicuously absent: the telegram the family received from the War Office when Eric first went “missing”. Perhaps that relic was too painful for anyone to want to preserve it.

If Gerald’s Box originally represented Lizzie May’s refusal to let go of one dead child, Eric’s death was equally hard for her to process. Like many of the 5,000 men killed in France that day, his body was never found, and even a year later, when the War Office forwarded his will to the family, his mother struggled to accept that his death was beyond doubt.

In her Remembrancer – a kind of almanac in which she recorded family births, deaths and marriages – she uncharacteristically wrote his name and the letters RIP in pencil rather than pen, as if hoping that someday she would be able to rub out the entry. It was only after her own death 14 years later that her husband finally inked the words over.

In time, the role of Gerald’s Box within the family began to shift, as it metamorphosed from a shrine to a couple’s dead children into a more general family archive. By the time Walter died in 1933, and the box passed to his eldest son, Cyril, it already contained as many letters and documents as it did objects. As the box has passed through the generations – always bequeathed not to the eldest heir, but to the person most interested in the family history – its contents have continued to grow. It now contains books written by Walter and Cyril and several old family photograph albums, as well as a genealogical card index compiled by my aunt Gilly in the 1970s, when she and my grandmother traced the box back to its original owner, an ancestor born in 1723.

When my grandmother died it was my aunt who inherited the box, but as she lived abroad my mother became its unofficial custodian. Between them they have continued to expand the collection, but rather than adding family albums, as my grandmother did, they have scanned photographs on to CD-Roms. Alongside the box’s older artefacts, the shiny discs look out of place, and lack any tangible connection with the past, whereas looking through Lizzie May and Walter’s albums, you’re reminded that their hands turned the pages before you did. But these days space is at a premium – the box now sits not on the ornate stand that Lizzie May originally intended for it, but on a Homebase crate purchased to hold the overspill. No one wants the responsibility of deciding to throw anything away.

It was only after my grandmother died in 2006 that I opened Gerald’s Box for the first time. By then I knew roughly what I would find inside, but I wasn’t sure what it would mean to me. The box was something she had treasured for much of her life, and I hoped that looking into it would bring me closer to her.

In fact, for several years my grandmother had been suffering from dementia. She couldn’t have told me about my ancestors even if I had asked her, as her own memories of them had long faded. Yet in the box I found a kind of museum of our family’s history, organised by her into carefully labelled envelopes. My grandmother had grown up knowing Lizzie May and Walter well, and had often spoken proudly of her father Cyril and his exploits in the navy. Although I could never know these people as she had, and her own memories of them had been lost, she had allowed me to meet them in a way, through the traces of their lives she had helped to preserve. As an only child who had just lost one of my own closest relatives, it felt good to connect with a larger family.

Looking through the box, I was struck by how much of the material was associated with loss. Many of my ancestors’ letters concerned the shock of bereavement, their raw grief still palpable 100 years later. In 1914, Cyril lost a baby boy of his own, and the letter he wrote to Lizzie May and Walter the day after he buried the child echoed the one she had sent her parents after Gerald’s death a quarter of a century earlier. I found a note of condolence that Cyril had received from his brother Eric – the young man killed two years later on the Somme – filled with fraternal love and affection. It made me realise that, as much as the box preserved the remnants of grief, it was love that always shone through in the family’s words.

Not all the letters in the box were sad ones; some were filled with joy and hope for the future. I found the ardent words Cyril had scrawled to his future wife, Edie, when he decided he wanted to marry her. “This letter may mean as much as you wish,” he wrote. “If it does not find favour in your sight please put it on the fire and don’t answer it, but, if it does find favour, please answer it soon.” I felt strange reading something so intimate from a man I had always pictured as rather stern, with white hair and a Royal Navy uniform.

The box contained evidence of more difficult stories as well, including three generations of conflict. Shortly after Gerald’s death, Lizzie May and Walter renounced their Baptist faith and converted to Anglicanism – a fact commemorated by a set of beautiful, illuminated certificates – and had their surviving children baptised as soon as possible. Lizzie May had written to her mother of her certainty that Gerald had gone straight to heaven, but perhaps doubt was playing on her mind – as an unbaptised child (Baptists believed that only adults could be admitted to the church) it was possible his soul was stuck in limbo. The conversion cost Walter dearly – his father was so furious that he cut him off and even managed to get him fired from his job. Walter had lost not only his child, but his parents too.

The next family schism occurred because of Cyril’s engagement. Alongside the passionate note in which he declared his feelings for Edie, I found a long and rather tortured letter his mother had sent him a fortnight later, in which she apologised for not making “suitable speeches” when he announced his intention to marry. Apparently, she and Walter felt Edie was from the wrong sort of family and had responded distinctly coldly when Cyril asked for their blessing. He was so hurt by their lack of enthusiasm that he stormed off to sea in a rage.

Three decades later, history repeated itself. In May 1941, my grandmother – Cyril’s daughter, Helen – rushed to her boyfriend Bill’s army camp in Wales to marry him in secret before he was sent abroad, an action that scandalised the family. I could find no photographs of the wedding in Gerald’s Box – perhaps none were taken, given the circumstances – but the wedding certificate hints at the underlying bone of contention: in the box marked Father’s Occupation, Bill has put “builder and joiner”. My grandmother didn’t ask for her parents’ blessing because she knew they would never have given it.

The more I looked through Gerald’s Box the more I realised that what had originally been intended as a memento of one young boy’s life had come to tell a much larger story and had allowed me to know four whole generations of my family. It wasn’t just the letters that made my ancestors come alive – there were objects, too, such as a set of Walter’s business cards in a beautiful silver case, Cyril’s ID booklet from the Royal Navy and, most precious of all, the white gloves Lizzie May had worn on her wedding day. They seemed too tiny to fit any human hand and were almost paper thin, but as I held them I felt I was reaching out to her across the generations. I thought, too, of my own grandmother handling the gloves decades later, and recalling the grandmother she had lost.

That wedding day, on 1 January 1883, was the first entry Lizzie May ever wrote in her Remembrancer. But after her death, as the book passed down the generations through Gerald’s Box, members of the family have continued to use it. Opening it, I found an entry in my grandmother’s handwriting announcing my own birth, 100 years to the day after Lizzie May’s wedding.

Mixed with my grief at the loss of my grandmother, I began to feel a kind of contentment, an awareness that in writing me into the Remembrancer she had made me part of the family history, that the generations of ancestors whom I had never met – Lizzie May and Walter, Eric and Cyril, and even baby Gerald himself – were my family as much as they were hers.

• Men of Letters: The Post Office Heroes Who Fought the Great War by Duncan Barrett is published by AA Publishing, £8.99. To order a copy for £7.19, including free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846