A warning that my 5* rating is influenced by my interest in family history research.

Alison Light's book was listed among recommendations for a family history writing course I just started.

What a great discovery. It is exactly what I might seek to achieve with my own writing - not just the names and dates, but also the context of my ancestors' lives.

She has incorporated herself and her search in the history, which not everyone embraces, but I think it makes her book more readable. I appreciated her observations on family historians, and their motivations. Her deep dives into various trades/poverty and workhouses/maritime history/location history were fascinating. She is like Bill Bryson in this respect, another non-fiction writing I enjoy. She is also very thorough in researching her family branches, and also follows up neighbours, etc...

Some quotes:
Pg. xxix
"As I have written this book, many questions have weighed on my mind but one more than another other: why do we need these stories of people we can never know?"...

"As culture becomes more 'globalized', and migration becomes the norm, as more of us than ever live in cities, what do we want from those stories which both anchor us and tie us down, evoking lost ancestral places to which we can never return? Can there be a family history for a floating world?"

Good questions.

I would love to be able to bring my ancestors to life in the way Alison Light has done here. She says herself that she hopes to have inspired her readers to do just that but I think few of us would have the talent to do so in such an entertaining, sympathetic and scholarly way. But I might try.....
She has managed to turn the lives of the type of ancestors we all have; the labourers the farm workers, the builders, the industrial workers, the paupers and sadly even those confined to the asylum into several fascinating 'stories'. It was even more interesting in my case as my several of my ancestors lived in Portsmouth-I learnt a lot about the city. There is a crucial section at the end of the book which help to explain how the author went about her research- the sort of books and records she consulted and where they were found-very, very useful to us family historians.
Not quite 5 stars just because it's so tricky trying to keep track of who is who and how they are related, despite the family trees at the beginning of the book. I'm not sure how this can be avoided in any family tree, which I know from experience, quickly turn into giant spider's web. Highly recommended.

As other reviewers point out, this book skips around way too much between different ancestors and locales, and time periods, often in the same paragraph. It really bogged me down as a casual reader. BUT the idea of ancestral research focusing on the "common people" of England, especially just before, during, and after the industrial revolution was great. Light tells you what like was like for her ancestors in poorhouses, asylums, and slums. The section that focused on the Baptist church in England and its appeal to the working class (promoting literacy and labor reform) was great.

In my mind, this book is exactly what family history should be. Light recounts the history of her family not just through anecdotes and data taken from census records but she recreates the world of the working poor in which her family lived. She researches workhouses, insane asylums, slums, and pauper’s graves. She describes the lives of bricklayers, Baptist preachers, domestic servants, and those in the navy. She reads local histories to understand how the geography of a place shaped her ancestors’ lives. Through Light’s research, she gains a better understanding of her ancestors and the worlds they inhabited.

I’ve always felt that while doing genealogy, you learn just as much about the history of society by the records your family leaves behind as you do about your ancestors--and sometimes, you may end up learning more about society than you do about your own family. Light demonstrates that genealogy is more than just names and dates but is really about bringing to light the lives of the “common people” and how politics, wars, religion and geography have affected the lives of everyday citizens.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2882781.html

This is a great work of social and personal history. Light has taken her four grandparents and traced the genealogy of each as far back as she can go. None of them were from the well-chronicled upper or middle classes; she remarks that if anywhere can claim to be her ancestral home, it is the workhouse, as someone from every generation ended up there. She gradually zooms in on Portsmouth as the focal point of the story, but not before travelling around the middle and south of England in general. Where there may be personal data lacking, she diverges into intense history of the disruptive effect of the Industrial Revolution on society, the precise details of needle-making, the life prospects of the building labourer, the reality of the Navy in the tweentieth century; and she humanises these sweeping sources of data with moving empathy for her own ancestors and their fellow citizens. It's a tremendous piece of work, both sad and uplifting, demonstrating that historical writing can almost completely avoid the great and the good and still be really memorable. Strongly recommended.