I did some research into the year my Great Great Grandfather Thomas Trudgeon was born and found out that Cornwall also experienced a potato famine in that year, 1847. There were harder times even to follow that as the tin and copper mining industries wound down and left many without work, during the 1870s there was a movement towards immigration where countries such as Canada, South Africa, Australian and New Zealand offered men free passage to fill farming positions, apparently around 250,000 Cornish people left England then to immigrate.. When my GG Grandad departed at the age of 27 and arrived in New Zealand in March 1875 he did not become a farmer but went to work in a brewery which did not bode well for his alcoholism which I believe may have got worse after he and my GG Grandmother lost the first baby Eliza Jane (my great grandmother’s namesake and their 5th child) a month after arriving in NZ on the 12 of April 1875.
Sadly they went on to lose another baby girl, the second Eliza Jane 5 years later on my second sister’s birthday the 19th of February. That makes sense of some of the sense of deep lostness and loss she carries as a Sun and Venus sign Pisces and was shown in the sad beached whale dream I had about us both after I got sober and returned home but found it impossible to express the grief except through isolation and retreat from everyone. Our great grandmother was the 8th child born 3 years later in 1882 and bore the same name. Five more siblings followed. At some stage my great great grandmother left Thomas who was both addictive and prone to emotional storms spoken of in letters my second cousin received from one of our relatives still living in New Zealand who knew the family history well.
My heart goes out to my GG Granddad in compassion.. I am going to post the song Luka Bloom wrote about the immigrants from Ireland who went to America around 1847 at the end of this post. Those immigrants knew great fear and poverty as did my GG Grandad. When I think of how important making money became to my brother, as well as how important it is for him to keep a tight reign over our inheritance it makes sense.. Old fears may dominate descendants without them having a clue why.
Astrologer Liz Greene believed that the Kennedy curse that saw the deaths of John F Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy could be traced back to the iron will of their father Joseph senior whose grim determination to see his son’s succeed drove them on due to the great poverty and loss he also suffered. Apparently JFK was often in great pain due to the presence of Addison’s disease but had to force himself onwards and the ideals he fought for make sense.. Sadly the older daughter was lobotomized by Joeseph Senior.
Much as I now acknowledge my great need to live in the present it seems to me its essential to understand the roots of our past in order to make sense of family patterns. The pattern of estrangement in my family is not unusual for those families riddled with untreated addiction and trauma or emotional neglect.. Its not a happy history at all, but a very very tough, painful and lonely one so strongly Saturnian in the repression of hidden feeling appearing as both depression, confinement and emotional paralysis. But there is still a chance to turn that all around to the degree I can become conscious.
My older sister Judith died in April too, in the year 2014 at the age of 68, she was bed ridden for many of the final years… Its interesting to me that her death on Easter Sunday morning on the 20th of April was precipitated by a withdrawal and breathing difficulties that began to beset her around the anniversary of that earlier significant loss in our family history… I will be lighting a candle for that baby and Thomas an Eliza in a few weeks on the 12th of April as I acknowledge the termination of pregnancy I too, had around that time. I no longer blame myself. I did not bring a baby to term, but my dog Jasper is my baby of sorts.. For him I am grateful as I am for the peace I now have.. Gaining that insight into the field of fear that my Great Great Grandfather must have been born into in that year of famine has shed light on so very much for me over the past 24 hours.
Emerging From The Dark Night 