Heritage Day and Family History

Today is Heritage Day: what does it mean to you? Is it merely a public holiday, a rest from the office or school, a chance to work in the garden or to indulge in your favourite hobby? 

What is Heritage? In South Africa the holiday officially recognises different aspects of South African culture and encourages all South Africans to celebrate their cultural heritage, the diversity of their beliefs and different traditions.

Heritage includes features which belong to the culture of a particular society - traditions, languages, buildings, sites of major events - created in the past and retaining historical importance to all South Africans.

On a personal level, your Heritage is what you were born into, one's ethnic and cultural background, which may differ from that of other people or groups of people but which has especial meaning for the individual. Our personal Heritage is a vital part of our consciousness and in a sense makes us who we are - just as much as our DNA does.

Because it is so vital to each of us, we respect the Heritage of other people, as much as we respect our own. 

Heritage may be tangible - traditional clothing and modes of decoration, tools, buildings, artwork, monuments, modes of transportation - or intangible - not physical items but those which exist intellectually. Each aspect is equally significant.

Heritage is about respecting our ancestors (and those of other people). For anyone researching their family history, today allows some free hours to explore another forefather or find one you previously didn't know about. Or you might want to read about the times in which that ancestor lived, providing a context for your family narrative which will make it that much more interesting and exciting. 

Perhaps you feel like visiting a cemetery where your ancestors lie buried. Place some flowers to show they aren't forgotten, tidy the plot, clean the headstone so that the information can be clearly read. None of this is done in a mournful spirit - family historians find cemetery visits most enlivening!

Get out that shoebox full of old family photos you keep meaning to collate and preserve properly. Write down as much information as you know about the people in the photos - your children and grandchildren will be grateful. Keep them in suitable envelopes (never plastic).

Make a start on writing the family history. This doesn't have to be a huge volume that will take years to finish: put down the salient features known about each ancestor with some context and a photo, if one exists, to make sense of the results of your research for others who will read it later. Don't forget to put together your own life story - you'll be an ancestor one day!

Happy Heritage Day to all Mole's Blog readers!

What does Heritage mean to You?

How will you be celebrating Heritage Day in South Africa today?

Perhaps because I’m a family historian I find heritage lurking in the minutiae of my ancestors’ lives, those heirlooms and memorabilia which are tangible links to the individuals whose DNA I carry.

For me, a Voortrekker woman’s kappie (sunbonnet) with its wondrously delicate, complicated stitchery, preserved behind glass in some museum, is more resonant, provokes more emotion, than a vast circle of bronze ox wagons standing silently on lonely veld, or the forbidding brick edifice of the Voortrekkermonument. 

On this Heritage Day, take a photograph of a small but vital item in your family history collection: a letter signed by your ancestor, a diary page, a medal (not forgetting its all-important engraved inscription on the rim), an obscure ambrotype in its frame, a handmade lace fichu miraculously preserved in tissue paper, a group photo – while you’re at it add the names of as many of the people as you can identify and ask other family members for help with those to whom you cannot put a name. Nothing worse than unidentified group pics.

My great grandfather’s service papers, giving details of his career in the British army up to his discharge at the end of the 1870s, mean more to me than monuments and scattered white stones on the field at Isandhlwana. Indeed, does that battle-scarred place, heavy with history and blood, require anything more than the mountain itself to mark the honour and courage of those British and Zulu soldiers who fell in its shadow? In this instance, the mountain, intrinsically part of our ‘natural’ heritage (like all mountains, trees, flora and fauna), takes on a separate, significant role emerging as ‘cultural’ heritage. 

Take a photograph of Isandhlwana or any geographical feature – or, if you prefer, a listed building, a plaque, a statue - of heritage import in your area and submit it to Wiki Loves Monuments – the annual competition closes today. Google it. While you’re on those pages have a look at other people’s submitted photographs showing what heritage means to them. It is a staggering and enlightening collection.

As family historians we find heritage speaking to us from gravestone inscriptions, where fortunate enough to find these have avoided vandalism or greed and still retain their lead letters – so many have been picked out of their granite beds, destroying vital information and defacing the memorial. Sometimes even the graves themselves are opened, in the vain hope of finding treasure trove within, but in the process unnecessarily disturbing ancestors whose bones lie there. 

Whose ancestors they may be is immaterial: they are, like the Unknown Soldier, representative of ALL ancestors and deserving of respect. Let us NOT vandalise any graves this Heritage Day! Take a photograph of a family tombstone – or ANY memorial inscriptions accessible to you and perhaps vital to other family historians; share them by putting the photos online through eGGSA’s gravestone volunteer project. Google it.

On Heritage Day spend some time tidying and consolidating your family history files, making sure they are backed up and also ensuring that, should you be run over by a bus tomorrow, someone else would be able to pick up the torch and continue your work with a reasonable understanding of the material you have collated so neatly! Tempus fugit. Start/Finish writing that family narrative! Publish or Perish!

And while you stand around the traditional Heritage Day braai with loved ones and other relatives, talk about your shared ancestors, spread the word, engender some interest in the topic among the younger generation (they are the ones who will pick up that torch of yours later), show them some of your jealously hoarded memorabilia, tell ancestral anecdotes which will remain in their memories and be retold on other Heritage Days. Phone or email a distant relative, visit a lonely one – make their day: they all have stories to tell, photographs and information to share.

These are just some of the hundreds of things you could do to mark this Heritage Day – make it special, productive and enjoyable rather than just another blank day in the calendar before, inevitably, work obtrudes and the Present once again gets in the way of the Past.

Happy Heritage Hunting.

Hamilton Family Group at Genoa, Stevenston, Ayrshiren