Sometimes we have odd ideas about the past, like the idea that people were not naughty at all. But when you spot the term “irregular marriage” in your ancestry research it helps you realise that isn’t the case. And then there is the DNA checks that points out that people with unrelated family trees are actually related to you.
One of my relatives paid a half guinea to the poor and apologised to the congregation for having an irregular marriage. But when you think about how life happened in the past you can start to see our ideas can be wrong. In some communities they would not see a minister for long periods at a time. There was no way to book a church for a wedding on-line.
And that is pretty recent history – only 200 or so years ago.
The idea of the “good old days” is an odd idea. People want the past, but in so many ways the past is much worse than the present.
My take is that what people hanker after is not the lifestyle but is the feelings and emotions they had at the time.
The question is – how do you create those feelings in today’s society? Maybe to some extent you can’t. And certainly you will not do it by reading the press. But maybe we can capture some of it through simple things, like recreating some of the simple meals we had. And I do wonder if simplicity is at the heart of our desire for the past. Is that what we really all want?