Time Travel
Some reflections on a new approach to
genealogy and historical research to allow families to come into contact with
their deep ancestral history
The Farndale Family Website is the product of two
generations of research over seventy years. The rooting of the family name to a
small place in North Yorkshire has made it possible to identify the whole
modern family, and then to follow its history deep into the past. It has both a
breadth and depth in its scope.
In building
on the research and in trying to make it more accessible, the research has
increasingly drawn out the historical narrative to make it more digestible.
Whilst rooted in historical research, founded on a meticulous assimilation of
the sources of historical evidence, a family history must in the end become a
narrative, drawing out the story from the underlying facts. It is inevitable
that a historical journey is a story of time travel, transporting us back to
different times, and aiming to grasp at the experiences and perceptions of each
of the locations in time where our Tardis lands. It is not a misplaced
ambition for this particular family story to aspire to time travel, since it
was Joseph
Farndale, the Chief Constable of Bradford, who invented the police box
without which there would never have been a Tardis.
The
generational perspective of this research has built up an evolving methodology
to find a balance between maintaining a firm anchor in the underlying
historical facts, as a scientist intends, whilst drawing out the emotions and
the worlds of the narrative through story telling, as
an artist, drawing on historical records, photographs, paintings, literature,
accounts particularly contemporaneous ones and other such sources. The Farndale Story uses a matrix through
time to transport those interested in the story of the family, of Yorkshire and
of a path through the national story, to the principal building blocks of the
overall narrative, but allowing time travellers to take whatever path they
choose. It is not intended to be read like a book, but followed as a journey,
with many junctions leading to different places. It is a new approach to
studying history, which possibly better reflects the flow of time.