"Digging Up The Family"

Rudyard Kipling wrote "If history were taught as stories, they would never be forgotten." Unfortunately, that was certainly not the way I was taught history during my school days. Then there were lists of dates to learn, battles to memorize, treaties to understand. And it was definitely "his-story" - accounts of famous men and their military exploits, their political intrigues and conquests of far-flung places, none of which I could relate to. It was many years before I learned that real history is also "her-story"; it's the exploration of how ordinary people were born, lived and died against a backdrop of their wider society. And as such, it has come to fascinate me.

Tomorrow my very modest contribution to history writing is published. Whilst the stories in it - of conflict and romance, crime and retribution, economic hardship and personal triumph - are based on my own family, they are also universal. For the Carters and the Garretts from whom I come are not the great and the good about whom biographies are usually written or television programmes made. They are ordinary people of their time and place, their lives woven into the fabric of the everyday world. They are the people behind the statistics, the individuals who make up our common history.

You can join my quest to unearth the reality of life for so many of the working classes, from the farms of Dorset and Pembrokeshire to the mines, foundries and dockyards of Monmouthshire, from the days of George III to the aftermath of the Second World War. "Digging Up The Family - A Lesson In Social History" is published by Matador (ISBN: 9781788038997); it's available from Troubador Publishing Ltd at £7.99. I hope you find it as interesting to read as I did to research and write!