We were ordinary folk – in both nature and nurture.[8]
In the early modern period[9], evidence of existence switches from forensic to documentary evidence. Individuals are only documented when they owe something to someone else – someone else who can at least employ someone literate. We enter history as tenants, debtors or chattels. Tithes and rental rolls, military service records, birth and death certificates. Not much narrative yet. No one recorded ‘our’ names unless ‘we’ were worth something to them.
What is evident from my genealogy, is a progressive convergence of the diverse threads on the area of Inverclyde which industrialised during the 19th century. The concentration of the diverse elements of my story into an emergent proletarian and civic identity in the communities of Paisley and Govan.
Despite an adult life of travel – enabled, I hope, by a uniquely ruinous period of extractivism which will prove temporary – this area of Inverclyde became the locus in which the various streams of experience inter-twined and melded over the course of two centuries.