Gillian Tett: The World Is Littered With Descendents Of The Ultra Rich
Today's billionaires should take note. My mother's ancestors were comfortable, not mega-rich, but their story underlines the fact that financial success can prove much more transitory than the wealthy might ever believe.
In fact, a notable minority of families that start with great privilege squander their wealth over time. This does not just occur in countries, such as the US, which are supposed to have made a virtue of social mobility (though this has always been more of a myth than reality). Even in a supposedly class-ridden country such as Britain, it seems that up to a fifth of the modern population may have had ancestors who were much more wealthy in the past.
Today's billionaires, in other words, might dazzle, but if the past is any guide, it is a fair bet that some of their grandchildren or great-grandchildren will eventually be left pondering relics of this faded glory - and wondering where on earth all that money has vanished to.
Tracking financial mobility with any accuracy has always been a fiendishly difficult task for historians. Until recently, few households kept comprehensive written records of their wealth, and those that did were invariably the richest and most successful. It is the rich, after all, who have the resources and incentive to leave wills, create written household budgets or get into fights over money in court. The poor rarely have reason to bother. Before the onset of sociological surveys in the first half of the 20th century, it was much harder to get an insight into downwardly mobile households.
But in a corner of commuter-belt Surrey there are signs that this might be changing. Five years ago, a husband-and-wife team of former computer programmers, Julie and Steve Pankhurst, set up the Friends Reunited website, which allows internet users to track down old school and university friends. The site proved so successful that two years ago the Pankhursts branched out into genealogy, launching a website with the rather ugly name of Genes Reunited.
Initially, the Pankhursts had very modest ambitions for their new website. "They imagined it as a little sideline to Friends Reunited," explains Anthony Adolph, a professional genealogist and broadcaster who also acts as Genes Reunited's genealogy consultant. But within six months of its launch in May 2003, about 1.5 million internet users had paid a joining fee for the site, and overall membership could hit four million by the end of this year. This makes it easily the largest genealogy site in the UK, and it is revolutionising the nature of genealogical research.
Before the internet, building a family tree meant hours of combing through dusty archives around the world. The internet dramatically speeds the process: at last count the Genes Reunited site had more than 40 million ancestors on its data base, and had just acquired the records on 32 million more people since buying the electronic files of the entire 1901 British national census.
This is opening up whole new avenues of research. A few months ago, Genes Reunited sent out a questionnaire to its members who had successfully researched their family trees, asking whether their ancestors had risen or fallen in social and economic status. Only a thousand-odd families replied and the results may have been biased, according to Adolph, because people often prefer to search wealthy families rather than poor ones: "As Noel Coward said, 'People would rather go to see a play about a duke than a pauper.' Also, some people choose to research wealthy ancestors because they hope they will find a pot of gold - though they rarely do."
But even allowing for bias, the results were striking. About 40 per cent of respondents said their family's social and economic status did not appear to have changed much, while 40 per cent considered that their family had increased in wealth over the generations (a pattern that probably reflects the vast expansion of the middle class in recent decades). But about 20 per cent of respondents had discovered that their ancestors had been much richer than they were, sometimes losing their money in dramatic fashion. Since the rich have historically formed a very small part of the overall population, this suggests that tales of downward mobility - like those of my own family - are not as rare as might be supposed.
In fact, a notable minority of families that start with great privilege squander their wealth over time. This does not just occur in countries, such as the US, which are supposed to have made a virtue of social mobility (though this has always been more of a myth than reality). Even in a supposedly class-ridden country such as Britain, it seems that up to a fifth of the modern population may have had ancestors who were much more wealthy in the past.
Today's billionaires, in other words, might dazzle, but if the past is any guide, it is a fair bet that some of their grandchildren or great-grandchildren will eventually be left pondering relics of this faded glory - and wondering where on earth all that money has vanished to.
Tracking financial mobility with any accuracy has always been a fiendishly difficult task for historians. Until recently, few households kept comprehensive written records of their wealth, and those that did were invariably the richest and most successful. It is the rich, after all, who have the resources and incentive to leave wills, create written household budgets or get into fights over money in court. The poor rarely have reason to bother. Before the onset of sociological surveys in the first half of the 20th century, it was much harder to get an insight into downwardly mobile households.
But in a corner of commuter-belt Surrey there are signs that this might be changing. Five years ago, a husband-and-wife team of former computer programmers, Julie and Steve Pankhurst, set up the Friends Reunited website, which allows internet users to track down old school and university friends. The site proved so successful that two years ago the Pankhursts branched out into genealogy, launching a website with the rather ugly name of Genes Reunited.
Initially, the Pankhursts had very modest ambitions for their new website. "They imagined it as a little sideline to Friends Reunited," explains Anthony Adolph, a professional genealogist and broadcaster who also acts as Genes Reunited's genealogy consultant. But within six months of its launch in May 2003, about 1.5 million internet users had paid a joining fee for the site, and overall membership could hit four million by the end of this year. This makes it easily the largest genealogy site in the UK, and it is revolutionising the nature of genealogical research.
Before the internet, building a family tree meant hours of combing through dusty archives around the world. The internet dramatically speeds the process: at last count the Genes Reunited site had more than 40 million ancestors on its data base, and had just acquired the records on 32 million more people since buying the electronic files of the entire 1901 British national census.
This is opening up whole new avenues of research. A few months ago, Genes Reunited sent out a questionnaire to its members who had successfully researched their family trees, asking whether their ancestors had risen or fallen in social and economic status. Only a thousand-odd families replied and the results may have been biased, according to Adolph, because people often prefer to search wealthy families rather than poor ones: "As Noel Coward said, 'People would rather go to see a play about a duke than a pauper.' Also, some people choose to research wealthy ancestors because they hope they will find a pot of gold - though they rarely do."
But even allowing for bias, the results were striking. About 40 per cent of respondents said their family's social and economic status did not appear to have changed much, while 40 per cent considered that their family had increased in wealth over the generations (a pattern that probably reflects the vast expansion of the middle class in recent decades). But about 20 per cent of respondents had discovered that their ancestors had been much richer than they were, sometimes losing their money in dramatic fashion. Since the rich have historically formed a very small part of the overall population, this suggests that tales of downward mobility - like those of my own family - are not as rare as might be supposed.