Telling the ancestral tales

xactly 40 years ago this month in 1980, I bought myself a nice new thick A4 notebook and wrote in it: Today I‘ve decided to make a start on my Family History. I won’t continue because what follows in bright green ink is excruciatingly pretentious, all about “buried yearnings” and “life forces” etc. Having rambled on about some inherited birth certificates, by the end of page 1 and still in that writing-for -posterity phase, I’d clearly decided