The thing you should know about my family is that we feature more than one hardcore Whovian. My second cousin once removed is one of these, and he is trying to turn his newborn child into another. Now, what am I to do but to use my Who knitting skills to welcome my little third cousin* into the world of time and space? So I knitted a toy TARDIS. Pattern here.
I finished it up yesterday, and am wondering how long I can keep it to cuddle before I send it off. It was my first time doing colourwork, not counting when my grandma showed me how a couple of years back, so I made it a bit tight at the back. It’s lucky you can’t really tell what with the stuffing! Yes, there’s stuffing in the light at the top, too. All up, I’m really very proud of it.
I’ll… I’ll just hug the TARDIS for a bit longer before I hand it over, okay?
*Oh, you think it’s ridiculous that I know my third cousin? I have tea with my maternal grandmother’s first cousin’s wife’s brother’s stepdaughter’s brother-in-law’s wife.
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Must find out how to do colour work one day so I can defy my GP and make my own awesome knitted Tardis.
I am very not the person to teach you.
That’s okay, I usually manage to find a good youtube tutorial. Now I know what it is called, I can look it up. Thx
So your maternal grandmother’s first cousin is your first cousin twice removed (your mother and his offspring were second cousins, and his offspring’s children would be your third cousins), and after that it gets more complicated than my genealogical terminology can encompass.
Heh. I know many of my paternal second cousins, and my kids have met, although don’t really know particularly well, several third cousins. Mostly because my paternal grandfather died when my dad was very young, so the extended family was very important to him, and we used to drop in on distant *cousins while we travelled, and then in later years there have been many family reunions.
My mother’s extended family socialising is complicated by the fact that one branch of the family has distinctly darker skin than the other, and nobody wants to talk about how that came about (besides the bizarrely ahistorical “Black Welsh” family myth). Sad.
Oh! Must now knit one. Must.
I have a family bramble instead of a family tree.
Speechless with admiration.
@Tigtog – is that anything like the ‘Black Irish’? My Dad said that was the reason for his dark skin.
@Mindy – “Black Irish” is a common descriptor of a particular phenotype, similar to describing someone as having a “peaches and cream” complexion or being a “Nordic blonde”. The “Black” refers to hair colour, not to skin colour, sometimes in combination with dark eyes, although there’s some confusion about the etymology and proper usage. With respect to dark skin as a common trait several centuries ago? Ireland was then and still remains one of the palest-skinned ethnicities on the planet.
Googling “Black Welsh” comes up with a breed of mountain sheep, and the “Welsh Black” is a breed of hardy cattle. So far as “Black Welsh” people go, I think one of my forebears may have used it as analogous to the “Black Irish” idea while relying on others’ preconceptions about it necessarily describing darker skin rather than just dark hair. Maybe it was even originally meant as a little family joke for those who knew where the dark skinned trait actually arose. The descendants probably just repeated it without understanding the origin.
tigtog: her sister-in-law’s stepfather’s brother-in-law is my first cousin twice removed – that’s as close as I can get it. Although, the reason I know her is that, since prior to her marriage, she has been a friend of my mother’s. We’ve been family friends longer than we have been family!
Do it, liz! Please tell me when you do.
Thank you very much, Helen. One hopes the same will be the case with my cousin – although, I guess, he can’t talk yet, so.
That is interesting because Dad always claimed his skin colour was a throwback from Spanish visitors interbreeding with his Irish ancestors generations back, hence the Black Irish. Unfortunately no one who is left wishes to talk about this, although to be fair his one remaining uncle was just a baby when Dad’s mum married and so doesn’t know a lot anyway. I also suspect that there are a few skeletons in the family that those close still feel are shameful perhaps, while I think it is all fascinating.
Sorry Chally this has nothing to do with knitted Tardises. I once had a sewing teacher who made a fabric Tardis organiser of the type that you hang on your wall and put lots of bits of crap in. Do they still teach kids to sew these days at school?
I have been known to make jokes that we have secret shameful white ancestors in the family, Mindy; I like to mess with the heads of people who try to hide their non-white ancestors. (For the record: several people in my family have married white people over the last few decades, and no one is ashamed of them.)
That sounds excellent. We had sewing lessons at school (I graduated in ’08, for reference), but I was taught by my mother and grandmother long before then.
I think I will have to teach my kids too. My Grandmother taught me to crochet and my Mum taught me to knit and machine sew, embroider [badly] and cross stitch (although she was a Home Ec teacher) and strangely enough it was one of Mum’s students who first taught my brother and me to sew when she was babysitting us one evening. My Grandfather taught my Grandmother to knit when they would sit together in the evenings and knit socks for soldiers.
There are some strange happenings in my family (on both sides) that I would love to get to the bottom of but they were never spoken of at the time and so no one now who is old enough to remember knows what actually happened. The only indication that we had that my Dad’s father had other siblings was when one of them died and left him a small inheritance in her will. Up until that point he had just assumed that his father had been an only child like him. It was quite a shock.
I should probably explain: I’m not wanting to go ‘my great great [whatever] was [whatever] so therefore I am [whatever] I’d just like to know to satisfy my curiosity. But having been raised/lived white with all the privileges that go along with that for 38.5yrs it would seem a bit OTT to claim to be something else now.
Of course, it can be really validating and wonderful and important to learn about your family and their history.
What I find at the moment is that my family history feels unbalanced – I know tons about my father’s family history for six generations in Australia and several more before that in the Old Countries, because he had several cousins who were really interested in genealogy and tracking down original documents etc (all before you could do it on the internet, too). And then there’s my mother’s family history, which is just this immense silence once you go back beyond her grandparents.
A few generations ago it might have just been “The Taint”, as a convict ancestor was known. But everybody and their dog is proudly acknowledging convict ancestry now, so whatever nobody was ever talking about can’t have been just that.
I think it’s a real shame, because I imagine that a story of immense emotional pain and estrangement from a denigrated tradition as the price of assimilation is lurking in the family secrets box.
@Chally – yes, sorry I didn’t mean to suggest that people research their family history simply to claim that they are now [whatever].
@Tigtog – yes, this. I want to know why my Dad’s father’s family disowned his Mum and then why he did a couple of decades later. Although he wouldn’t talk about it either so I think I’ll just have to wonder.
I was trying to support you there, Mindy, not criticise you! Wishing you and tigtog both well with family learnings.
Arrggghh, I think my ‘am I being blinded by white privilege’ meter is out of whack at the moment! Thank you for the support. Even though I am an atheist, sometimes I wish there was a heaven so that I could sit down with rellies and ask all those really intrusive personal questions. Probably best that there isn’t really. Although it would be cool to have a Tardis and travel back and sticky beak.