Meet Bart Gardien
Bart Gardien is the keeper of A Life in the Margins.
He is not a detective, although he asks questions. He is not a judge, although he notices things. And he is not especially interested in the famous, the powerful or the people who have already had books written about them.
Bart prefers the others.
The railway worker whose name survives on a staff register. The woman fined at a local court. The traveller caught for a moment in an old passport. The soldier, clerk, labourer, widow, prisoner, servant or shopkeeper who left behind just enough of a paper trail to say: I was here.
That is where Bart begins.
He wanders through archives, newspapers, registers, maps, court records, military files, photographs and whatever other scraps history has neglected to throw away. Sometimes there is enough to reconstruct a life. Sometimes there is only a name, a date and one peculiar little incident.
Both are worth noticing.
Bart does not promise neat endings. Records disappear. Names are misspelled. Dates disagree. Entire branches of families vanish between one census and the next. Occasionally an archive raises three new questions while answering half of one.
Bart considers this perfectly normal.
His job is simply to open the file, brush away a little dust and introduce us to whoever happens to be waiting inside.
Because history is not only made by the people standing in the centre of the photograph.
Most of us lived somewhere near the edge.
And that is where Bart Gardien likes to look.
Life in the Margins 