![]() Luke Owens art gallery up at Rennes le Chateau was open and so I went to say Hi, and when Luke asked me how I am I couldn't be totally positive about that, well, I'd thought I was OK, but really my status as a village reject was sensitively exposed and paining me, and then tears were in my eyes and I jolly well told Luke of many things and he tolerantly and kindly listened to all. The conversation with Luke became very interesting. I was tying into my explanation that I am an outcaste that theory I have about one reliving and feeling so deeply what was also the way for the ancestors. I told Luke why, even without any proof, there are clues to my having a gypsy heritage, such as my Mediterranean DNA, the outcaste lives of my ancestors in Greenwich, the distinctive appearance of my ancestress Maria, and such talk got two responses from Luke. Firstly, he confesses that like me he is only ever on the peripheries of society, for he is shy of such worlds, and is content to avoid so called civilised places in which there is yet so much judgement and hypocrisy. Secondly he reveals that he himself is a gypsy. He totally identifies with my dilemma, while with emphasis telling me I should not conclude that by this treatment I am a 'reject', but rather that the outskirts of society in which he dwells, as do the gypsies in general, is the best place to be. When one has no need to conform then can arise the arts and more natural ways which do then end up improving the society which itself had easily rejected us. And does one ever really want to be in such judgemental spaces. He necer accepts a word such as 'reject' and neither should I. Although my own family, somewhere along the way, covered up their gypsy past, so it may never be rediscovered, his own is recent and he totally knows it. His father was an out and out gypsy. He'd not told me this before, leaving his fathers side a mystery. But that exceptional appearance of my ancestress Maria Harrison, which had so long both fascinated and puzzled me, his aunts had totally that same look, exactly the black hair and alabaster skin, and it is one of the known appearance of some of the Irish gypsies. The gypsy folk have not only that look, they vary a lot, one of his aunts having a darker olive complexion. And it makes sense now, how it is that I'd previously thought him to have some middle eastern influence on his fathers side, it being the gypsy influence, those brown eyes and his eastern look. It just fascinates me to know he is a gypsy, and if I'd not been babbling on about my own theories he wouldn't even have told me that. His fathers side still travelled in caravans and even his mothers side was of gypsy heritage, though further back, being people who had tried to settle and conform into society. And of course they wanted to hide their origins in order to avoid societies prejudices, which is what my own family has done. This so aligns with Maria's appearance, so Luke confidently asserts, that she was a gypsy. Even her daughter Mary Ann's chestnut hair, blue eyes, high cheek bones and sucked in face is another look of the gypsies, this Luke tells me. In conversation with Luke I do feel I have found one of my lost tribe. Totally calm, content and radiant he insists I should embrace this separateness and non-belonging, this being our great ancestral heritage. Luke is total gypsy, whereas my own gypsyness if of undefined amount, mixed with Shetland Viking and some Welsh. It is quite something to reflect on this more. Elder family members had told me my Greenwich ancestry was 'rough and ready', which was maybe a way of saying 'gypsy' without totally giving it away. Somehow 'gypsy' is a secret never to be mentioned to younger generations. Just how much had they known but not been able to say. Like my nanny Eileen who had summed up her mother Florence's family as 'Irish', when really it was only Florence's mother, and not her father, who had been born in Ireland. Maybe what my nanny meant to say, and yet could not, was 'gypsy'. I so wish I had known more when my elders were still alive. I could have talked with more depth and unearthed so much more. So many clues are there too that my fathers side was gypsy, but never anything within records to confirm this as fact. The Irish-Mediterranean DNA I have from both my mother and father, and such a weak English element that wasn't even passed onto me, cries out gypsy all the more. Florence was not at all accepted by her husband Percy's Dovercourt and Harwich based family, and when my nanny Eileen had talked to me of this she stopped short of saying, while maybe part of her wanted to say it but did not dare, that the reason she really was ostracised was because she was gypsy. Only on this day do I understand what has been between the words which no one else would tell me. "There are many gypsies all around us" Luke told me. "One just has to know what questions to ask." AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees.
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![]() On hearing talk from friend Arthur about his family, his father being an American neuro-psychologist, I was inspired to look up his genealogy, and we looked it up together, which he liked, and quickly enough I connected him back to Scotland, and even one of those Scots had been born in Australia, and one line of the family was of Czechoslovakia. Arthur's mothers side, which I didn't look into, was Prussian. So, there you are, the excitement of yet more genealogy to absorb in. In talking a while with Luke the artist, I also offered to look at his genealogy, though he was not easy with telling me his real name. Thinking that here was a guy too private to confide details to me, surprisingly he then opened up. He knows nothing of the Irish side of his family, just his dads name, David Thomas Hughes, a catering manager, born in Dublin. This had been looked at by someone else, and nothing of his fathers origins could be found. Maybe, just maybe, there had been illegitimacy. This I did suspect, as Luke has a Middle Eastern kind of look to him. As for his mothers side, the Carlin's, they were factory workers and miners of the north, playing their parts in the Industrial Revolution. Having a good look more at Luke's genealogy, I found something, aha, juicy, that one of his Carlin ancestors had been put in prison for fathering a girls bastard child. The Carlin's were a rough and ready Irish family, which is rather interesting to research. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. |
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