“Because the Earth, as all men know, is not just the All-Mother, but the common graveyard too.” – The Nature of Things 5.257-258

I have been conducting research on my own family history for the last thirteen years, and it always amazes me the endless amount of knowledge to be gained. What is often easy to forget, however, is that each name on a gravestone, each line in a parish record, and each name in a census are individuals who lived entire lives ahead of ours, complete with their own friends, family, and loved ones. 

This most recent round of research resulted in my being able to push back my patrilineal line – that of the Hembrough family – to my tenth-great-grandfather. The single earliest record I have found for this particular line was written more than four hundred years ago, recording the 1621 baptism of Margaret Hembrough, the daughter of Thomas. Her brother Thomas, my ninth-great-grandfather, was born the following year. 

These records come from parish records kept at Selby Abbey in Yorkshire, England. I understand it was one of the more notable religious institutions in the area at the time. Most parish records are divided into christenings, marriages, and burials, and these are invaluable resources for anyone looking to learn about who they came from. 

It is these burials that strike me. Of course, death is part of life, so perhaps it is ridiculous to be so struck by these records, but each line represents the end of an entire life unknowable to us but for anything that happened to be written down. 

Affording the humanity that each ancestor deserves can be difficult when so little remains, but some meditation on one’s own family history can bring this into clearer focus. 

My sixth-great-grandfather, Richard Hembrough, may be the oldest subject of my research that gave me significant pause. He and his wife, Mary, were the parents of twelve children. As was unfortunately quite normal in those days, not all of them survived. 

Richard and Mary were married in 1773. In fact, I have in my possession a copy of their marriage license, complete with both of their signatures, indicating they both were literate. They had their first daughter, Elizabeth, later that year. Their son Richard was born in 1774, but died just three months later. Around this time, recordkeepers began writing down more information – including cause of death. 

Their daughter Jane lived only two months before dying of “looseness” in 1780, and their son Matthew died the next year after just one month of life to “diarrhea.” The next daughter, Sarah, was just seven months old when she succumbed to smallpox. 

Sarah’s death was the one that made me pause. Most of us likely have family that died of smallpox, a horrifically disfiguring disease that killed one of every three people it infected. Thanks entirely to the science of vaccines, none of Earth’s eight billion people need worry about smallpox. But for our ancestors, it was a constant looming specter. 

Smallpox was also highly contagious and spread easily between people. Some unlucky families were mostly or entirely wiped out by it in a relatively short period of time. 

By 1783, the family of Richard and Mary Hembrough consisted of five living children. Four had already died. The oldest living child was just seven years old when her baby sister developed smallpox – old enough to at least partially comprehend the gravity of a situation like that. Smallpox was not subtle, either, and it often left its surviving victims with scars all over the body. 

Sarah was the only one of the family who died to this outbreak, but it is extremely likely that others in the family also developed this disease at the same time. Those who were spared were forced to watch their loved ones suffer through a horrible sickness, not knowing if they would live to see another day. 

There were two more deaths in the years after Sarah’s: Mary, the third child, made it to the age of eighteen before dying of “cholic,” and Mary, the wife and mother, died in 1809 of consumption, another relatively common yet devastating disease. Today, it is known as tuberculosis. 

Obviously, Richard Hembrough did have some children make it to adulthood. I would not be here otherwise. But it is important to remember that these people were just as real as we who are still alive are. They had loves and fears, friends and enemies, and wins and losses. It boggles the mind to think of just how precisely history had to line up to produce any one of us. And yet, here we are. 

The preciousness of life cannot be understated. As we share the Earth with those alive today, we all will eventually share the Earth with those who have already passed on. I do believe in an afterlife, and perhaps I will write on that soon, but no expected reward or punishment in the next life should discount the worth of this life. It is, in my opinion, one of the highest acts of veneration to live one’s life to the fullest – and to help and encourage others to do the same.