I’m trying to put flesh on the names and dates in our family trees by telling people’s stories — writing from the clippings, diaries, letters, stories, family trees and photos our parents and grandparents left us, our own recollections and what I’ve found online. I admire these people and I’d hate to see them forgotten.

There are some good stories! — my father Cliff’s about the Depression and World War 2, my grandfather’s description of their lives as kauri bushmen, his two brothers who fought at Chunuk Bair, my grandmother’s brothers who died at Passchendaele, my father’s three uncles who died in a coal mining tragedy, my great-great grandmother’s diary from Whakatane in the 1890s, and the time that old Te Kooti came to visit. And that’s just on my side.

On Heather’s side there aren’t quite the same resources to work with. I wish I could paint a better picture of life for Rosa Ricketts. Her husband died, leaving two girls to care for unsupported. There’s the Swiss waiter who married a Sussex farmer’s daughter. I wish I knew more about Heather’s talented artist grandfather, who worked with Gordon Selfridge in the early 1900s and formed a charmed family with the wife and mother they loved. There’s plenty about their kids but less about their Scottish forebears. Even though their house was bombed, the Blitz doesn’t get a mention, but they mourn the brother and son who died in the skies over Poland. I’m left wondering what it is that draws people to London, and picturing 12-year old Angus skating the streets of the inner city, and the freedom our kids have lost.

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This is family lore, not family history. By and large I haven’t tried to validate what they’ve left behind in the way a historian would, just passed it on, as they did for us. The old photos, faded and unfocused, don’t bother me. They remind us how time passes.

If I’ve commented or passed judgment occasionally, I hope it was the exception not the rule. I think that generally speaking a healthy society is one that’s proud of the people who built what it enjoys today. I’d rather ask whether our forbears would be proud of us than stand in judgment of them.