‘I Can’t … yet’: How a Collaborative Family Narrative Transformed Understanding of Childhood Institutionalisation

In 1937, aged two and a half, Harry Drabble was diagnosed with bovine tuberculosis of the hip and elbow, separated from his parents, and admitted to a Sheffield orthopaedic hospital, where he spent three and a half of the next seven years. For more than eighty years he carried as private shame the anger, rage, and detachment he had shown as a small child. This paper describes how a family narrative built between father and daughter across twenty years, completed in book form in 2025, changed what those responses meant for both of them: for the father, recognition that they were the documented reactions of a separated child lifted the shame in his lifetime; for the daughter, the work produced the method the paper now names. Genealogical reframing is the deliberate use of established psychological research to read family history material, so that what a relative lived through can be recognised as an instance of a documented pattern. The paper identifies the mechanism by which the method works when the subject is living to do the interpreting, considers what changes when the subject cannot, and offers the method, within an ethical outline, for deliberate and accountable use by family historians.