Many of us have heard snippets of family history from our parents and grandparents, and now we have access to historical records online, we can dig a little deeper and trace the line back a little further. It's fascinating stuff, but at the same time deeply frustrating, because there are always so many more questions to ask and nowhere to go to find the story that lies behind the documents.
Simon Mawer's answer to this is to write an informed fictional account of what he thinks would have happened, and although he already has the bare bones of the story mapped out, I can assure you that this is not as easy as it looks. I tried it myself when I was putting together a history of my side of the family, and as I went forward I realised I was creating the ancestors I wanted to have and the reality was probably something wildly different.
There is always a great temptation to have people conform to modern standards, especially with the women. Women from every era can be strong willed and feisty but mostly with their peers. I really don't think anyone earning just enough to keep them out of the poor house would have risked any kind of disrespectful talk towards an employer, no matter what was said to them, and I did think that Simon Mawer had done this with his Great Grandmother.
I was also a bit surprised that he chose to describe intimate details that his ancestors would never want shared in print. This is the kind of thing that you can only get away with when everyone else is dead, as even Mawer's father would probably have felt offended by an account of his Granny's sex life.
It's an interesting book as there is a lot of historical detail both for both the men and the women. History is quite often dominated by men because they were the ones who went to war or sailed the seas in a Merchant ship, but life for a poor family was desperately hard, and it was often the strength of women that got the next generation through whatever life threw at them.
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