What is a Guern? Easy, said one deputy during April’s population debate. If you didn’t do ‘bunchos’ at school, you’re not one. But there’s a lot more to it then that, says Mark Windsor GENEALOGY, like nostalgia, isn’t what it used to be. Since the evolution of the internet and websites devoted to the subject, we’re all potential family historians.

Last year, at the venerable age of 50, I took up a website subscription, keen to find out more about my ancestors before I become one.

For me, a key question in my research was: to what extent am I a Guern?

Researching your ancestry online has advantages, but genealogy websites act as an aid to key documentary evidence, but not as substitute for it. Whether or not you’re a Guern, if you want to verify your ancestry you might have to, at least, do some of the donkey work and see the original records for yourself: family registers at churches, parish, Greffe and town hall records, census information and so on.

What websites do provide is a huge network of potential contacts and links, some of which will share or incorporate research previously undertaken. Other contacts may provide anecdotal information that could be vital in building up a picture of your family tree. You can make connections with lost relatives or distant ones that you never knew about. I’ve made contact with long-forgotten cousins in Australia and have heard from UK relatives that I never knew existed.

What makes a true Guern? In the limited technical sense, you can consider yourself one if you, your parents and both sets of grandparents are all Guernsey-born. But that doesn’t necessarily tie you in to a traditional Guernsey heritage. In the terms described, I’m a Guernseyman in all respects bar one. The fly in the ointment is my mother’s father, Patrick Joseph McGrath, one-time brewer at Randall’s.

He was born in Tipperary long ago, before Southern Ireland became an independent republic.

Whether my lineage is pure Guernsey or not, I am a Guern by birth. Still, it’s hard to deny that the name, Windsor, lacks authenticity in an island where the majority of true Guerns – a diluted and dwindling species – have Norman- or Breton-derived names – Le Poidevin, Le Tissier, Le Cocq, Le Prevost, Falla, Martel, Ozanne, de Garis, Collenette, Priaulx etc.

With a pedigree clearly less Guernsey than these, my links with the island’s past are, like my accent, partial. This signifier of my local heritage has been eroded, like that of many other local people, through a conspiracy of time, anglicisation, education – here and in the UK – and for the last 40 years, global commercial culture.

From the point of view of maintaining the sound of our Guernseyness, this is not a good thing, even if some do think it’s easier on the ear.

Given that patois was patronised as a ‘peasant tongue’ and not taught in schools in previous generations, it seems that the enunciation of English peculiar to Guernsey people has been and continues to be slowly eroded from island life, as has Guernsey French.

Generations of children were denied their own language in school and have spoken English in the Guernsey idiom, only to be frowned upon by teachers of English and others and made to feel embarrassed about their ‘country ways’. English, as spoken by Guernsey people, was considered ‘bad’. There may have been just a hint of class warfare going on in our past, which anglicisation swept under the carpet from its lofty position of assumed cultural superiority. Perhaps one of the mitigating problems was that Guernsey French had too few people to champion it as a written language.Stripped of the language and with most having left behind Guernsey’s traditional livelihoods, do we have anything to show for our Guernseyness apart from our accents, which in any case may be en route to oblivion? Without a language of our own, what clues – apart from our names – are there to our heritage and ethnicity?

At the risk of sounding facetious, we’ve all but given up wearing guernseys and flat caps. Few local people knit proper guernseys by hand any more. Shag tobacco stopped being the norm in pubs long ago and many Guerns lost their ‘green fingers’ when they or their children migrated to the richer pickings of offshore finance and were replaced by ‘foreign’ workers in what remains of our horticultural industry.

I suppose there’s always our traditional antipathy to the crapauds. If it wasn’t for Jersey, we wouldn’t be Guernsey – we should be thankful to it!

Go back three generations and my family tree seems to be dominated by names from outside the island.

Back four or five generations and we find the more traditional names of my Guernsey French ancestry at the point of their intermarriage with non-Guernsey people. Were we to follow a matronymic as opposed to a patronymic naming system, my traditional Channel Island ancestry would be more obvious. I’d possibly be a Bisson or a Le Messurier rather than a Windsor. But that doesn’t quite figure, as even those are male line names.

Since my maternal grandmother was born in Guernsey in about 1890, the world’s population has gone up from about one-and-a-half billion to just under six billion souls. The strange thing is, when you research all the lines of a family tree (and not just the patrilineal or father’s line) they seem to spread out in all directions – as if the world’s population was bigger going back in time. We know that’s not quite the case. Although more people have lived in the past than live now, they have been strung out in lines over millennia, with the number reducing the further back you go. It doesn’t take too much thinking to realise that we are all more closely related further back in time and that the human gene pool from which we are all descended is quite narrow. Spreading our genes may be one of the compelling reasons for human migration.

Wherever people leave, sooner or later others will take their place, either through expansion of the existing population or through immigration. When the net balance of population isn’t maintained or increased, communities often go into economic decline or even die, as is the case in some of the Scottish islands.

It’s clear that the Guernsey community’s identity and culture are tied up with its history and geographical location but its economic and cultural vitality also depends on interaction with the outside world. Trade and commerce generate and depend upon the exchange of labour. Prejudice against incomers (temporary or permanent) often clouds the reasons why economic and cultural change takes place in local communities. We tend to associate change with incomers as if they are a cause of it, when in fact they are only the sign of the deeper economic forces operating beneath – in which we willingly participate or generate ourselves. Locals will often overlook their own responsibility for change and the implications of their own decisions – or just as importantly, the implications of watching others make decisions for them.

The irony for an island that has trumpeted political and fiscal independence to the global finance industry as its unique selling point is that in so doing it has traded much of its autonomy and soul to become dependent upon it. While many of the skilled people the island has imported to help run the finance industry have or develop a genuine love of the island, the sector itself is a much more mercurial creature, driven by other prerogatives that have little or no sentiment.

Who knows, it may be gone tomorrow. The industry, however, should not be berated for that. I think it’s up to our political and business leaders to continue to press for alternative methods of generating income to run alongside finance. That probably won’t mean reverting to our traditional industries but it might mean improving levels of self-sufficiency, with islanders putting more of their money the way of local producers: the farmers, the growers and the fishermen all of whom have been our mainstay in times past and who are still vitally important to our future. It also means having a more pragmatic understanding of the benefits of migrant labour and of our moral obligation to showing them more genuine hospitality.

One of the essential qualities still with us in small measure is the earthy, hard working ingenuity and humility of island people, who derive these from the traditions of our rural and maritime past. These qualities should be respected and honoured by islanders themselves, as well as by incomers. It’s essential we acknowledge and honour the island’s cultural past – the manifest cause of the present – so that we can communicate its true spirit and vibrancy to future generations. But to stay vital we also must look forward – culture is an organic and evolving thing and a certain amount of change is inevitable. So we mustn’t freeze-dry our past but retain its best qualities and adapt for the future.

Autonomy is not about Guernsey people complaining about change or ‘outside influences’ just for the sake of moaning and doing nothing else, it’s about them being proactive in their community and taking ownership of the decisions that shape their culture and their island’s future.

If I’ve learnt anything from my researches into genealogy and family history, it’s that mixed ancestry is really not at all uncommon – it seems that in varying degrees we are all the sons and daughters of nomads and migrants.

Even the original Guerns were migrants from the Gallic mainland and they’ve perennially mixed with incomers ever since.

Driven by necessity or desire, migration and nomadism are the time-honoured ways of human kind. Migration is a constant stream, punctuated sporadically by great waves.

In the last 200 or more years, hundreds if not thousands of Guernsey people joined the European exodus and emigrated to America and Australia. In contemporary times, a number of us regularly disperse into the UK, Europe and beyond. We shouldn’t forget that we have our own emigres in other countries. Just under a million or so Brits have taken up permanent residence in France and Spain – among them is a sizeable contingent of Channel Islanders who are quite happy to take up the benefits of temporary or full-time residence in those countries.

As a footnote about what it is to be a Guern, I know a guy who works in St Peter Port and lives on the west coast. He has a small boat and fishes off Les Hanois every summer. He also has a small vegetable garden and takes great pleasure in producing fresh food for the table.

He likes the simple life.

Last year he did a small experiment in self-sufficiency and for a week or two, without the exchange of any cash, successfully lived off the food he had either caught or grown. What he couldn’t produce he bartered for, exchanging his surplus goods for what he needed.

He has no great pretensions in living this lifestyle and knows its limitations.

But to me, he captures Guernsey’s traditional flavour more vitally than many other people I know in the way he embraces growing and fishing and the sheer enjoyment of being that these traditional activities bring.

It’s no small irony that he’s a naturalised Guernseyman who happens to have originated in Essex.

But his Guernsey genealogy starts here with his love and respect of the island.