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!