It's been another busy week, much of it tied up with the addictive pastime of family history. Today I've been chasing a Suffolk family in Lincolnshire. Many families from rural Suffolk migrated in the mid-nineteenth century to find work. Some, no doubt, were encouraged to go by parents and elder siblings to relieve the pressure on the domestic economy caused by the decline in agriculture.
Others, on the other hand, may well have found pressure in the opposite direction. Landlords or employers might have been loath to lose the services of a useful and hard-working man, possibly unable to pay what it might have taken him to stay but willing to apply emotional pressure to prevent this move. In some cases, other pressures, too, might have to be overcome before that long journey could be made.
Most often, the favoured destination was the cotton mills of Lancashire, or the woollen trades of Yorkshire, or even coal mines further afield. This particular family settled in a Lincolnshire town and set up a photographic business. Over the years it expanded; one son explored the cycle trade, and eventually embraced motors as well. Another developed a trade as a maker of picture frames.
The important factor in all these lives was freedom. Whatever the pressures - financial, family or anything else - they had the freedom, if they chose to exercise it, to go where they could make a new and more profitable life for themselves and their families.
Freedom is one thing that comes with retirement, I find. I'm free to go wherever I can persuade my little motor to take me. I'm free, if I so decide, to leave the car at home and 'let the train take the strain' (as the advert of some years ago used to put it). This latter was my choice on Monday, when I exercised an entirely different sort of freedom.
I remember giving a talk many years ago about giving to charity, and being able to let go of one's money. How feasible it might be I couldn't say, but my recommendation concerned going to a fairground. I suggested that, well before leaving home, the fair-goer should decide how much he or she could afford to 'lose' at the fairground, take that amount only with him or her, and leave everything else at home. Once there, I suggested, one would then have complete freedom to use that money on rides, dodgems, coconut shies or slot machines ... in whatever way one chose, with neither concern nor guilt, because of the decision that had already been made.
My daughter had given me as a Christmas present a plastic card - what in card form a few years ago would be have been a book token - and I had chosen Monday to go to the appropriate bookshop to use it. My journey to the city had one purpose and one purpose only. From the time I left home to walk to the station, until I returned some hours later, my time was allocated and I knew it wouldn't be available for anything else. There was therefore no competition, no regretting what I wasn't doing instead. It wasn't until I had been walking around the shop for well over an hour that I realised the completeness of the freedom I had enjoyed. As I looked at one volume after another, my interest solely on what I was reading, time had passed without my noticing.
I wonder what other new freedoms are waiting around the corner of this weekend!
Saturday 28 January 2017
Saturday 21 January 2017
Women: The Old, The Young and The 'Will-be-soon's
One of my irritating traits - at least I suspect that it's irritating, while hoping that it might be endearing - is to fix on small or irrelevant details and draw them into conversation whenever I can. One such detail is the bizarre fact that, although we can boast four bell-ringers in our congregation, our church has no bells. Out of our four ringers, myself and one other are active, and ring every week at the only church in our lovely First Garden City that does have a ring of bells, one is retired and the fourth was dormant.
I say 'was dormant' because this week, after a protracted campaign, the necessary transformation has begun to change this to 'active'. Having not touched a rope for about twenty years, this is not instantaneous but, once learned, the underlying skills are never completely forgotten and a couple of weeks of intense practice will work wonders of reinstatement.
In an e-mail exchange to arrange the details of this return, reference was made to 'children getting in the way' - one of the major hazards to life that is far from unknown to parents of young children near and far alike. I said I could still recall those frustrations from my own past. In our conversation on Monday evening, our transformee reported her five-year-old asking of me, "How old is he?" She had shown her daughter my e-mail and had, as an indication, pointed out that I'd said that my daughter was now 43. "Gosh, mummy," came five-going-on-ten wisdom, "That's older than you!"
At this point in our conversation, I revealed my own age and was gratified to be told that I looked younger: "Really! I thought you had retired early from work." As I wrote here only a few months ago, and explained there and then, I feel much younger, largely as a result of the company I keep.
After the midweek church service, I was talking with a woman of about my own years about small 'triumphs' in life, and cited overcoming an habitual reluctance to make social phone calls. I explained that I had made a diary note to call two people this week, and had now phoned one of them ... which I regarded as something of a 'triumph'. This is an old lady who has been a friend for many years - a former bell-ringer, as it happens - whose husband died, after several years of incapacity, last Spring. I made an arrangement to go and visit her for a chat next week. The other woman, also recently widowed, is a distant cousin and I also phoned her this week to see how she is coping with life alone.
This second widow is only a little older than me, and her husband died quite suddenly at Easter-time. I spoke to her for the first time ever in a phone call just before Christmas and learned first-hand of the terrible loneliness that she still feels. Perhaps it's not surprising that I wasn't looking forward to fulfilling my pledge to 'keep in touch'. It's difficult to know what to say in these circumstances ... especially if, like me, you're the sort of person who likes to have a conversation mapped out in advance. In our brief exchange this week - she was about to go shopping - she explained that this is something we have in common!
As I write this, the elder widow has just phoned to say she's not feeling well, and has had to put off my visit until another time. Another aspect of getting old, I suppose: there is much to be grateful for in having a warm room with a desk in the sunlight streaming through the window. Now, am I going to carry on digging into the great families borne by women of yesteryear ... or shall I go to that football match this afternoon?
I say 'was dormant' because this week, after a protracted campaign, the necessary transformation has begun to change this to 'active'. Having not touched a rope for about twenty years, this is not instantaneous but, once learned, the underlying skills are never completely forgotten and a couple of weeks of intense practice will work wonders of reinstatement.
In an e-mail exchange to arrange the details of this return, reference was made to 'children getting in the way' - one of the major hazards to life that is far from unknown to parents of young children near and far alike. I said I could still recall those frustrations from my own past. In our conversation on Monday evening, our transformee reported her five-year-old asking of me, "How old is he?" She had shown her daughter my e-mail and had, as an indication, pointed out that I'd said that my daughter was now 43. "Gosh, mummy," came five-going-on-ten wisdom, "That's older than you!"
At this point in our conversation, I revealed my own age and was gratified to be told that I looked younger: "Really! I thought you had retired early from work." As I wrote here only a few months ago, and explained there and then, I feel much younger, largely as a result of the company I keep.
After the midweek church service, I was talking with a woman of about my own years about small 'triumphs' in life, and cited overcoming an habitual reluctance to make social phone calls. I explained that I had made a diary note to call two people this week, and had now phoned one of them ... which I regarded as something of a 'triumph'. This is an old lady who has been a friend for many years - a former bell-ringer, as it happens - whose husband died, after several years of incapacity, last Spring. I made an arrangement to go and visit her for a chat next week. The other woman, also recently widowed, is a distant cousin and I also phoned her this week to see how she is coping with life alone.
This second widow is only a little older than me, and her husband died quite suddenly at Easter-time. I spoke to her for the first time ever in a phone call just before Christmas and learned first-hand of the terrible loneliness that she still feels. Perhaps it's not surprising that I wasn't looking forward to fulfilling my pledge to 'keep in touch'. It's difficult to know what to say in these circumstances ... especially if, like me, you're the sort of person who likes to have a conversation mapped out in advance. In our brief exchange this week - she was about to go shopping - she explained that this is something we have in common!
As I write this, the elder widow has just phoned to say she's not feeling well, and has had to put off my visit until another time. Another aspect of getting old, I suppose: there is much to be grateful for in having a warm room with a desk in the sunlight streaming through the window. Now, am I going to carry on digging into the great families borne by women of yesteryear ... or shall I go to that football match this afternoon?
Saturday 14 January 2017
Bells and Smells
Last Saturday saw the annual meeting of the local district of the bell-ringing association that I'd re-joined last winter upon my retirement. This took the usual form of a period of ringing before and after a formal sequence, comprising a service in the church where we had gathered, a very filling tea in the village hall and the meeting itself while we were still gathered in warmth of the hall. Once the necessary reports had been received and officers appointed - or, in great measure, re-appointed - we emerged into the cool evening air to the discovery that the village had no street lighting.
As I headed for the door a voice hailed me, "Are you going back to the cars?" (These had all been parked on the roadside outside the church, a few hundred yards away.) I said that I was. "Do you have a torch?" "No," I replied, "but you're welcome to stumble along with me if you like." The woman who had quizzed me decided this was an offer too good to miss, and we must have caused both anxiety and amusement to passing motorists as we made our way by the beam of their headlights and little else, trying to avoid traffic on one side and a muddy verge on the other.
The foregoing highlight apart, the week has offered little excitement - not even the drama of serious winter weather, despite all the gloomy forecasts at the beginning of the week. I hadn't planned to bore my readers with another genealogical post this week but, if I'm honest, I've been doing little else. At least this one is a bit different. You may recall that, during the latter months of last year, I had been researching the families of my father's two eldest brothers' wives, one of whom I had never met, and the other who had died in the 1970s. The former of these two had spent her whole life in Derbyshire and, during last Spring, I had coupled a short break staying with my cousin in the next shire with a visit to the County Record Office in Matlock. She knew that I wanted a few more details that I'd said were only to be found there, and so had suggested a few weeks ago that I might like to repeat the exercise early in the New Year.
Having made sure that my preparations were complete, and that I had all the background information I would need, I set off on Thursday, despite the weather forecast indicating heavy snow that afternoon and evening. The trip was a wet one but the rain turned to sleet for only a few minutes. We woke up next morning to a thin coating of snow but, by the end of breakfast, this had vanished from both car and road. My 20-mile journey over the hills was most picturesque against the stippled backdrop of the snow just tipping the ridges of the fields, and the return was completed in bright sunshine.
I had gone with a list of 30 people, all born in the one village between 1816 and 1906, for whom I sought a baptism record. I found 29 of these, but also 26 more entries, for the complete family of the eldest of these people - a total of 11 siblings - and for many of his grandchildren, whom I hadn't listed. The bonus was the discovery that the next register on the film contained the record of his marriage in 1840.
Once I've processed all these data, I'm hoping that I might get around to dealing with some of the glaring omissions I've recently discovered, dating from some of the earliest entries I recorded. Many that I've found, based solely on here-say, have prompted me to think, 'did I really not look up the record for that?' This could take some while, during which my frontiers will advance little if at all, but at least if there are any really false trails I've followed and characters I've revered as genuine relatives, they can be rooted out before they cause any more wasted hours of research (the false scents that are the 'smells' of this week's title).
As I headed for the door a voice hailed me, "Are you going back to the cars?" (These had all been parked on the roadside outside the church, a few hundred yards away.) I said that I was. "Do you have a torch?" "No," I replied, "but you're welcome to stumble along with me if you like." The woman who had quizzed me decided this was an offer too good to miss, and we must have caused both anxiety and amusement to passing motorists as we made our way by the beam of their headlights and little else, trying to avoid traffic on one side and a muddy verge on the other.
The foregoing highlight apart, the week has offered little excitement - not even the drama of serious winter weather, despite all the gloomy forecasts at the beginning of the week. I hadn't planned to bore my readers with another genealogical post this week but, if I'm honest, I've been doing little else. At least this one is a bit different. You may recall that, during the latter months of last year, I had been researching the families of my father's two eldest brothers' wives, one of whom I had never met, and the other who had died in the 1970s. The former of these two had spent her whole life in Derbyshire and, during last Spring, I had coupled a short break staying with my cousin in the next shire with a visit to the County Record Office in Matlock. She knew that I wanted a few more details that I'd said were only to be found there, and so had suggested a few weeks ago that I might like to repeat the exercise early in the New Year.
Having made sure that my preparations were complete, and that I had all the background information I would need, I set off on Thursday, despite the weather forecast indicating heavy snow that afternoon and evening. The trip was a wet one but the rain turned to sleet for only a few minutes. We woke up next morning to a thin coating of snow but, by the end of breakfast, this had vanished from both car and road. My 20-mile journey over the hills was most picturesque against the stippled backdrop of the snow just tipping the ridges of the fields, and the return was completed in bright sunshine.
I had gone with a list of 30 people, all born in the one village between 1816 and 1906, for whom I sought a baptism record. I found 29 of these, but also 26 more entries, for the complete family of the eldest of these people - a total of 11 siblings - and for many of his grandchildren, whom I hadn't listed. The bonus was the discovery that the next register on the film contained the record of his marriage in 1840.
Once I've processed all these data, I'm hoping that I might get around to dealing with some of the glaring omissions I've recently discovered, dating from some of the earliest entries I recorded. Many that I've found, based solely on here-say, have prompted me to think, 'did I really not look up the record for that?' This could take some while, during which my frontiers will advance little if at all, but at least if there are any really false trails I've followed and characters I've revered as genuine relatives, they can be rooted out before they cause any more wasted hours of research (the false scents that are the 'smells' of this week's title).
Friday 6 January 2017
What Do You Really Want?
With few other demands on my time recently, I've spent a lot of the time with my dead relatives ... another way of describing my obsession with family history. It has led me to, and has reinforced, a New Year Resolution - not that I make many - the keeping to which ought to make me a better person. I resolve that in 2017 I will try to think of others more than I have in the past. That's not just in the sense of not stepping on toes (either physically or metaphorically), or increasing my giving to good causes, but considering their situations, why they behave the way they do, or say the things they do. In the popular jargon, to see 'where they're coming from'.
One thing that brought this to mind was a census record from 1851. A 9-year old boy was shown in a family or five or six, headed by his 51-year-old father, who - like so many in those days - was an agricultural labourer: known in genealogists' shorthand as an Ag. lab. This boy had been accorded an occupation I hadn't seen before; he was an Ag. budkeeper. I checked the original in case the transcriber had been unable to read the enumerator's writing. There was no error; it was as plain as anything, and faithfully reproduced. My first thought was of a botanist tenderly looking after fragile buds on a plant, but this was an agricultural situation; there were no delicate plants in a cornfield ... and anyway, this was a nine-year-old, not a skilled scientist. What kind of bud-keeping work would his father have got him to do?
After a break, I came back to it and thought about it this time in a Suffolk accent. "Wa, yew hatta kip tha buds orf o' tha baarley, dew the'll be a-eatin' on't all up afore thet hev a charnce ter grow!" it said to me. (Translation: 'It's imperative to keep the birds off the cornfield, least they should eat the crop half-grown') The young lad's contribution to the family economy was a few pence a week to scare the birds, to 'keep them away', rather than to look after them. I realised the importance of thinking myself into the life of that family, so that I could understand what was going on.
The father was described as 'married', but there was no sign of his wife; the oldest female was an 18-year-old daughter. Wondering where the wife might be, I recalled the first discovery, many years ago, of my great-great-grandmother in that same census. She, too, had been missing from the family home, although she was back again ten years later. A fellow researcher had spotted the name and asked me casually, 'Is this one of yours?' She was indeed, and had been spotted in the nearby asylum ... presumably unable to cope with the pressures of what at the time was normal life: lots of children, half of them dying at an early age, and little money on which to feed the rest.
Fortunately, this woman had been born elsewhere in the country and so her unusual birthplace helped me to locate her. She was in a house on the edge of a village a few miles away, where her unmarried daughter lived with her toddler. The other members of this household were the 'missing wife', a 14-year-old chimney sweep, son of one woman and brother to the other, and a one-week-old baby. I could imagine the older woman declaring to her family, "Mary Ann's about to have her new baby - you'll all have to look after each other as best you can. My place is there; there's no one else to look after her. I'll take Jimmy along with me ... he can make himself useful, no doubt." No one gave a thought to the census official paying his visit, nor to the confusion I would find 166 years later trying to sort out who was where and why. But that doesn't stop me giving some thought to them.
Another thing that demands some guesswork looking that far down the years is people's ages. Everyone then got a year older each year, just the same as we do, but that didn't necessarily coincide with what was written on official records ... for a variety of reasons, not least because they didn't sometimes know when they were born, or what they'd guessed last time they'd been asked. It was interesting to follow this family from one census to another. In 1841, mother was 47, dad 45, the daughter 9 and a younger daughter 6. In 1851, mother was 62, dad 51, and the two girls 18 and 16. By 1861, mother was 72, dad 68, the girls 27 and 24. The mother lived until 1885 and, at her final census in 1881 she was shown as 93, and the elder of those girls was then living with her - still unmarried - at 43!
I won't tax you with my interpretation of these numbers. I certainly don't have all the answers; indeed I don't have any set of answers that meet all the requirements, considering above all the mother's childbearing years, but also allowing for the 9-year-old bird-scarer, the fact that Mary Ann with the baby was said to be 31, and also the possibility that some of the ages given might actually have been correct!
It's true what they say about this being an addictive hobby; I think it also teaches a lot about life, people, their motivation, and the way that, while in some ways life has changed so much over the years as to be virtually unrecognisable, people and the way they relate to each other have really changed very little.
Here's to a prosperous, rewarding - as well as considerate, understanding and tolerant - 2017!
One thing that brought this to mind was a census record from 1851. A 9-year old boy was shown in a family or five or six, headed by his 51-year-old father, who - like so many in those days - was an agricultural labourer: known in genealogists' shorthand as an Ag. lab. This boy had been accorded an occupation I hadn't seen before; he was an Ag. budkeeper. I checked the original in case the transcriber had been unable to read the enumerator's writing. There was no error; it was as plain as anything, and faithfully reproduced. My first thought was of a botanist tenderly looking after fragile buds on a plant, but this was an agricultural situation; there were no delicate plants in a cornfield ... and anyway, this was a nine-year-old, not a skilled scientist. What kind of bud-keeping work would his father have got him to do?
After a break, I came back to it and thought about it this time in a Suffolk accent. "Wa, yew hatta kip tha buds orf o' tha baarley, dew the'll be a-eatin' on't all up afore thet hev a charnce ter grow!" it said to me. (Translation: 'It's imperative to keep the birds off the cornfield, least they should eat the crop half-grown') The young lad's contribution to the family economy was a few pence a week to scare the birds, to 'keep them away', rather than to look after them. I realised the importance of thinking myself into the life of that family, so that I could understand what was going on.
The father was described as 'married', but there was no sign of his wife; the oldest female was an 18-year-old daughter. Wondering where the wife might be, I recalled the first discovery, many years ago, of my great-great-grandmother in that same census. She, too, had been missing from the family home, although she was back again ten years later. A fellow researcher had spotted the name and asked me casually, 'Is this one of yours?' She was indeed, and had been spotted in the nearby asylum ... presumably unable to cope with the pressures of what at the time was normal life: lots of children, half of them dying at an early age, and little money on which to feed the rest.
Fortunately, this woman had been born elsewhere in the country and so her unusual birthplace helped me to locate her. She was in a house on the edge of a village a few miles away, where her unmarried daughter lived with her toddler. The other members of this household were the 'missing wife', a 14-year-old chimney sweep, son of one woman and brother to the other, and a one-week-old baby. I could imagine the older woman declaring to her family, "Mary Ann's about to have her new baby - you'll all have to look after each other as best you can. My place is there; there's no one else to look after her. I'll take Jimmy along with me ... he can make himself useful, no doubt." No one gave a thought to the census official paying his visit, nor to the confusion I would find 166 years later trying to sort out who was where and why. But that doesn't stop me giving some thought to them.
Another thing that demands some guesswork looking that far down the years is people's ages. Everyone then got a year older each year, just the same as we do, but that didn't necessarily coincide with what was written on official records ... for a variety of reasons, not least because they didn't sometimes know when they were born, or what they'd guessed last time they'd been asked. It was interesting to follow this family from one census to another. In 1841, mother was 47, dad 45, the daughter 9 and a younger daughter 6. In 1851, mother was 62, dad 51, and the two girls 18 and 16. By 1861, mother was 72, dad 68, the girls 27 and 24. The mother lived until 1885 and, at her final census in 1881 she was shown as 93, and the elder of those girls was then living with her - still unmarried - at 43!
I won't tax you with my interpretation of these numbers. I certainly don't have all the answers; indeed I don't have any set of answers that meet all the requirements, considering above all the mother's childbearing years, but also allowing for the 9-year-old bird-scarer, the fact that Mary Ann with the baby was said to be 31, and also the possibility that some of the ages given might actually have been correct!
It's true what they say about this being an addictive hobby; I think it also teaches a lot about life, people, their motivation, and the way that, while in some ways life has changed so much over the years as to be virtually unrecognisable, people and the way they relate to each other have really changed very little.
Here's to a prosperous, rewarding - as well as considerate, understanding and tolerant - 2017!
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