I read an article in the New York Times this week about how important it is to children to hear their family stories.

Psychological studies have shown that children are more confident if they know about their family’s background and have heard stories of hardship and success from their older relatives.

Once you start to learn about your family history, it can become very addictive. In fact, even if it’s not your own family, the stories of people of the past are a fascination to us all.

The article suggests that from a psychological point of view, the stories are an important element of feeling part of a community and allow the continutation of traditions. These allow us to feel secure in our current situation, whether that be a positive or negative state.

Certainly, if Who Do You Think You Are? is anything to go by, by learning about your own family story, you can improve your understanding of yourself. At the very least by knowing about your family’s past, you will understand certain behaviours or traditions that have been formed in your own family’s culture.

The stories that bind us was published by the New York Times on 15 March 2013.

I read this interesting snippet this week.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE STANDARD
SIR, — In this town there is an innkeeper who rejoices in the baptismal name of “Mahershalalhashbaz” (see Isaiah 8,i). I should think this is unique. He is commonly called “Maher,” but in the parochial and other lists the full name appears.

Report says (but I will not vouch for its truth) that his father wished him to be named “Uz,” but on the clergyman remonstrating he immediately said “Then we will have the other,” and produced from his pocket a slip of paper with the longer name.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
W. E.
Dereham, Norfolk, April 8.

The Standard
(London), April 11, 1892

Snippet from British Baby Names

The man in question was Maher Tuck, who I located in the 1871 census in Dereham. He died the year after this letter was written, aged 54.

In fact the letterwriter was incorrect in his assumption that Maher Tuck’s first name was unique, as although it was a rare name, there were other Mahershalalhashbazes living at that time. The name originates in the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament and is said to be the longest name in the bible.

More than most, it’s a name that required shortening, and other nicknames included Marc, Marshall and Baz.

I’ve been helping a friend find out more about his circus ancestor this week. Manoel Antonio Dutocq we knew was an acrobat and a slack wire walker from Brazil. He married a woman from Cardiff and they had their children in London.

Finding his stage name was the key to the research. He performed as Don Jose Manoel and was known as the ‘Celebrated Brazilian Equilibrist’. The Victorian newspapers are full of reports of where he performed with Hengler’s Grand Circus. It seems they toured the UK and Paris in the 1860s and into the 1870s.

The Liverpool Mercury describes his act:

‘The skill displayed by Don Jose Manoel “the Brazilian Equilibrist”, is both surprising and gratifying. Two of his feats – the whole of which are performed whilst he stands upon a slack wire suspended between two poles – are especially worthy of notice. First, he places a glass of porter on a hoop and twirls it around his head and in all sorts of positions without spilling a drop of the liquid. Next he balances a sword upon the edge of a drinking glass, the latter resting upon a pipe inserted in his mouth. At the top of the revolving sword whirls a large-sized bowl filled with fireworks, which explode after the vessel has made two or three resolutions, enveloping the artiste in a shower of fire.’

Liverpool Mercury, 26 December 1864

He died in 1881, aged just 45, at the London Chest Hospital, probably of tuberculosis. Despite performing until he was in his mid-thirties, there are no reports of his death in the newspapers.