The Custodian of the Harlick Family Tree

After writing the story, You Knew, You Witch, I became mildly obsessed with the idea that I might actually be descended from witches.

Not convinced. Just curious. There is a difference.

I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if somewhere in my family tree there was a woman accused of witchcraft? Someone living hundreds of years ago, perhaps in Lancashire, perhaps somewhere else entirely, gathering herbs, knowing too much about childbirth or plants or people, and eventually being called something dangerous because of it.

And because I am apparently incapable of having a passing thought without turning it into a project, I opened my laptop and started building my family tree.

There was another reason for it too. I am estranged from my mum and dad now, and I think that has left me with a strange pull towards history. When parts of the family immediately behind you feel fractured, perhaps you start looking further back. I wanted to know where we came from.

So I began going through records. Censuses, births, deaths, marriages, addresses, occupations. People appearing in one place and disappearing into another.

I got surprisingly far. Great-grandparents became great-great-grandparents, then another couple of greats, until I was several generations deep, staring at names belonging to people I had never met but who, somehow, were responsible for me being here.

There is something extraordinary about looking at an old census and seeing an ordinary family frozen in time. Their address. Their jobs. Their children. Their neighbours. A tiny bureaucratic snapshot of an entire life.

And then something fairly obvious occurred to me. Someone in my family had already done this. My Auntie Mary had spent years researching the family tree. So rather than spending several months rediscovering everything she had already found, I texted my Uncle Dave.

"Do you still have all the family-tree research Auntie Mary did?"

He thought he did. He would fish it out. Within about a day he messaged again — he had it, all of it, I could come and get it. We arranged for me to go over on the Saturday. I deliberately left the children at home. Uncle Dave loves them, but he is much more naturally a dog person than a child person, and I had a feeling this particular visit would be better just the two of us.

I took the scenic route, over the tops, along the country roads that wind above the valley. Rolling hills, fields, huge stretches of countryside. It was one of those drives where you suddenly realise you've made the right decision simply because the world is beautiful.

I was travelling along one of the faster roads when a squirrel ran out, reaching the middle just as a car came hurtling towards it from the opposite direction. For a few seconds my entire consciousness belonged to that squirrel. The other car was probably doing sixty. I was probably doing nearly sixty. Everything was moving quickly, and yet the moment seemed impossibly slow. It narrowly missed the tyre. And made it. The relief I felt was ridiculous — complete elation, utterly connected for a moment to the survival of an animal I would never see again. As I drove away, I said out loud, "Oh, don't be doing that again." Because apparently I also tell off wildlife.

The road took me past another piece of my own history — the house where my first boyfriend Neil's parents lived. I was seventeen when Neil and I were together, and I had the most beautiful relationship with his mum, Pauline. Warm, kind, easy to be around. I adored her. We split up when I was nineteen or twenty, and I haven't seen her since. Yet whenever I drive past that house, I still look. I always think that if I ever saw either of his parents outside, I would stop. I never have.

Eventually I pulled onto Uncle Dave's estate. He answered the door exactly as Uncle Dave answers a door — casual, cool, completely unflustered. He has always had an air about him. A mixture of Mod and hippie somehow. Motown. Vinyl. A bit of Leonard Cohen. A joint in the conservatory. Measured opinions. Very little tolerance for bullshit. He thinks before he speaks. He has an incredible vinyl collection, still buys and sells rare records, and gives the money back to the hospice that cared for Auntie Mary when she was dying. Now he's retired, he spends five mornings a week volunteering in the hospice shop. That tells you quite a lot about him.

We sat in the conservatory and caught up. He smoked. I drank coffee. We talked about Auntie Mary, about my mum, about the fact that both of our relationships with her have diminished, in different ways.

Then I read him some of my stories. One of them was Toast Wrapped in Tinfoil, about his mum — my nana — bringing me toast. Reading it aloud to him was harder than I expected. I cried, quite a lot. Uncle Dave, not exactly known for dramatic displays of emotion, had a couple of tears he was trying very hard not to let escape.

Then he said something that finished me off completely: "She would have been your biggest supporter. You two would have really got on."

I barely remember my nana. She died when I was young. So there was something enormous about hearing her son tell me who she might have been to me as an adult — the reverse of something I've written about before, wondering what it would be like to know the adults people became after you lost them. This was someone telling me about the adult relationship I never got to have. Apparently she would have liked me. Apparently I would have liked her. And sitting in that conservatory, decades after her death, I got a tiny piece of that relationship back.

We laughed too, a lot. Uncle Dave is particularly good at puncturing any nonsense. At one point we were talking about dogs — he'd recently lost Dino, who had been a huge comfort to him after Auntie Mary died. I was telling him about Bob.

"Bob's naughty," I said.

"Why don't you get rid of him?"

I knew exactly what he was doing. Testing me. Seeing what kind of person I was when an animal became inconvenient. Absolutely not. Bob may be naughty, but Bob is ours.

"He'll eat anything," I said. "He gets hold of anything he can get hold of with his hands."

Uncle Dave looked at me. "Dogs don't have hands, Fran."

Conversation over. We both started laughing.

Eventually we moved onto Auntie Mary's research — folders, binders, photocopies, years of somebody else's curiosity carefully organised on paper. Most of it followed the Harlick side of the family. There was a suggestion the name came from "hair lock," a streak of grey hair. I don't know yet whether that's historically accurate, but it made us smile, because my mum has always had a very distinctive streak of grey at the front of her hair.

I had already found some of the generations myself, including ancestors from St Ives, which I'd naturally assumed meant Cornwall — sea air, fishing villages, artists. It turned out to be St Ives in Huntingdonshire, now Cambridgeshire. Slightly less romantic. The records showed a family that had often lived very ordinary, very difficult lives: poverty, workhouses, people moving north from Huntingdonshire into Lancashire. Whitworth. Bury. Shawforth — strangely enough, where my husband is from. Little geographical loops appearing between lives that had no reason to know they'd one day intersect.

Then Uncle Dave handed me a sheet listing the Harlick men, generation after generation, my distant grandfathers, one after another, until the line reached Uncle Dave. Underneath his name was a large full stop, and the words: "Somebody has to put an end to this ridiculous family."

I burst out laughing. "Who wrote that? Did you say it to Auntie Mary?"

"Oh, bloody hell, I can't remember, cock."

Which made it even funnier. But underneath the joke was something real. Auntie Mary and Uncle Dave deliberately chose not to have children. The Harlick surname through that branch will end with him.

Sitting there surrounded by generations of names, we started talking about what families pass down — not just names, not just grey streaks, but patterns, and the different ways people choose to carry or set them down. Uncle Dave chose not to have children. I did. I could have lived a beautiful life without them, I genuinely believe that, but I also know in my bones that my life is more beautiful because Halle and Nell are in it. Part of becoming their mum has meant deciding what I'm willing to pass forward. I didn't want to end a family. I wanted to try to end some of the things travelling through it.

Uncle Dave asked about the girls, about home education, about how they were getting on, and told me Auntie Mary would have been proud of me for choosing it. Another small message from someone who isn't here anymore, delivered through the person who knew her best.

Eventually he announced, "Right, I'm going to go for a walk now, Fran." Not a suggestion I join him — Uncle Dave politely telling me the visit had concluded. "Absolutely," I said. "Let's crack on with the day."

Before he managed to fully eject me from the house, I pointed at the folders. "Am I actually taking these?" I suddenly needed to check I hadn't misunderstood.

Uncle Dave looked at me. "I am officially making you the custodian of the Harlick family tree."

Custodian. I loved the word immediately. Not owner. Custodian — somebody entrusted with looking after something that existed long before them, and hopefully will exist long after them too.

I drove home carrying generations of my family.

It wasn't until I got home and started going through Auntie Mary's research properly, on my own, that some of the smaller details began to reveal themselves. When Halle was born, I wanted her to have a family name — Halle itself wasn't one, so she became Halle Frances, connecting her to me, Francine, and to my mum and my nana. A thread deliberately tied through generations of women. When Nell was born, none of the family names we knew from either side worked with Nell, and there was never going to be a different first name, so I thought she simply didn't get one.

Then, going through the research, I found a Nellie — a daughter born into our family around 137 years ago. I had never known she existed. I didn't name Nell after her. There was no ancestral intention behind it at all. And yet there she was.

Another small coincidence: our Nell was born on Halloween, 31 October. My nana was a twin, and she and her twin had a brother also born on Halloween. I had never thought of that as part of any wider pattern. It was simply sitting there in the records, waiting to be noticed.

None of these things prove anything. I know that. They don't need to. Sometimes discovering a tiny thread between two people separated by generations is enough.

Auntie Mary spent years gathering names, dates, marriages, deaths, occupations, places. Now I spend my time gathering stories. Things people said. Moments that would otherwise disappear. Toast wrapped in tinfoil. A squirrel crossing a road. A man in a conservatory listening to his niece read a story about his mum, quietly trying not to cry. Different archives. Same instinct, perhaps — to notice, to keep, to remember.

And my witch? I haven't found her. Not yet. Interestingly, Auntie Mary and I independently reached roughly the same point in the family tree. To answer the question that started all of this, I need to go further — back beyond censuses and into parish registers, old marriages, baptisms, burials, wills, whatever scraps of evidence remain. I need to get into the 1600s.

So the folders Auntie Mary left behind are not the end of the search. They are where I begin again.

For now, I am the custodian of the Harlick family tree.

And the witch hunt continues.