I am also the eldest and have told stories for most of my life but never shared them on paper until recently. The concretisation of words, solidifying a story in black and white, excites but scares me, especially as some are not my stories to share. I was always the enfant terrible, the one that asks embarrassing questions or tells awkward truths at parties, who wants to understand the truth behind the silences, the one to whom secrets are confided.  ‘People tell you things, Rob. You have that sort of face,’ say friends. 

Therefore, I know more about my aunts and uncles, more about my grandparents’ lives than my sisters do. I know more about my father-in-law’s family background and his stories in WWII in Africa than his sons who tuned out when he began to ramble. I like rambling … I pick up the pieces of stories each time they are told, hold them, examine them, see if they fit, look for consistencies and inconsistencies and finally put the puzzle back to construct a cohesive picture.

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MasterClass (2021) A Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction. Available at https://www.masterclass.com/articles/a-complete-guide-to-writing-creative-nonfiction (accessed 02/11/2022)

NHS Health Education England (2020) Health Literacy 'how to' guide. Available at https://library.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2020/08/Health-literacy-how-to-guide.pdf (Accessed on 26 October 2022)

Pellegino (2010) An interview with Maeve Binchy. Available at https://www.nowtolove.co.nz/celebrity/celeb-news/an-interview-with-maeve-binchy-2482 (accessed 30 Oct 2022)

Social Care Wales, (2017) Code of Professional Practice for Social Care [online] Available at https://socialcare.wales/cms_assets/file-uploads/Code-of-Professional-Practice-for-Social-Care-web-version.pdf (Accessed 11 July 2021).

White, D.S. and Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and Residents: a new typology for online engagement First Monday 16 (9) available at http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171/3049 (accessed 02/11/2020)

Truth is subjective and more than mere facts, it is what one believes, and people are willing to believe all sorts of lies if they are told convincingly and often. The “Big Lie” was defined by Goebbels in WWII and propagated by Trump in the 2020 US elections. For me, it is little white lies that have become embedded over years. Robert Breault (n.d.) is quoted as saying, “Somewhere between the honest truth and the deceptive lie is the deceptive truth and the honest lie.” My reflection on these issues led to more questions so I knew I had to do some research but still worried about countering the dominant story and falling out with family. 

 

I did my best to sort and collate them before scanning and storing them online with all my photographs on Flickr and external hard drives. I gave the family access to Flickr and a DVD containing a copy of all my grandparents’ photos – hundreds of them all indexed for ease. I hoped my aunts would join me in my research, but they are mostly digital visitors rather than digital residents (white and Le Cornu, 2011). Some can use one app in some basic way such as eBay, Skype, Facebook. 

 

I produced a comprehensive family tree, joining Ancestry.com and gathering many records of births, marriages and deaths. I loved tracking down records, but I recognised some of my limitations. I employed a researcher to find out more about older family members in Belfast learning in the process that my family had included people who did not read or write – making Xs on documents they couldn’t read, leading to people using names that were not correct. 

 

Reading is their dominant and preferred form of literacy. Deafness means they even read TV programmes with subtitles on and sound off. My mother’s side of the family are big readers and instilled this in me, so much so that I could read and write before school. Great library goers, they ensured we read what we wanted and were always happy to read with us.  Gramps’ valued knowledge and was interested in the history and science of his hobbies. 

 

By contrast, my father’s family never read anything harder than the Sun or Daily Mirror. My stepmother owned two books. A copy of Enquire Within Upon Everything from nineteen-nought-spit told you how to address a letter to a Bishop or remove stains from woollen carpets. She’d never written a letter to my knowledge, nor allowed stains on the foam-backed nylon shagpile. The more recent Dairy Book of Home Cooking was purchased on the doorstep from the milkman at my urging. My dad enlarged this library by fifty per cent when he moved in with his Observer’s Book of Dogs. They were all stuffed into a drawer of the kitchen cabinet. Photos are hidden away, going mouldy in an attic or stuffed to the back of cupboards; there are none of those mementoes you see in other homes – school photos, wedding albums etc. 

I found it interesting to read Brice Heath’s (1994) notion of differing literacies practised within families in Tracton, Maintown and Roadville.  I could see how the storytelling of my mother’s family, and their interest in literacy for education and social capital as well as pleasure had given me a resilient approach to continue reading, writing and drawing even when those around me only valued active and social pastimes such as fishing or gardening. 

 
MEDIA LITERACY to analyse and evaluate how individuals and families may see things as opposed to how newspapers reported it in real time. I took out a subscription that allowed me to view old papers and it was interesting to see how mundane the headlines, and how commonplace the adverts were during the height of the troubles. When pubs were being blitzed the papers reported on a couple who had eloped to Gretna Greene.

 

FINANCIAL LITERACY not only to gather figures about wages and prices in past times but to help budget for buying certificates and employing researchers when necessary.

 

HEALTH LITERACY as defined by WHO according to NHS Health Education England (2020) refers to the personal characteristics and social resources needed for individuals and communities to access, understand, appraise and use information and services to make decisions about health. Health literacy includes the capacity to communicate, assert and enact these decisions. I had been told that my mother had died from Leukaemia six months after my youngest sister was born, but the death certificate tells me it was just three months and the cause of death was cervical cancer. It was important to share this information with my sisters.

EMOTIONAL LITERACY is linked to emotional intelligence to comprehend the situation in a holistic way. Also, it helps deal with discussing shared histories that may feel uncomfortable or be remembered by others differently. Younger generations were unaware of how socially unacceptable it was to discuss divorce, child deaths, disease or homosexuality.  ‘Living in sin’, ‘having a child on the wrong side of the blanket’ or ‘marrying a black man’ were knowing asides said in whispers. 

These details were woven into the text for verisimilitude but only covered the first 500 words of the story. Any one bullet point resulted in meandering conversations about Belfast right back to the aunts’ younger days in the 1950s, creating triggers for future pieces of writing.