Three Girls

This week, after almost a year, I completed my first transcription assignment for FreeCEN, the project to make all census returns for the nineteenth century available for researchers to search on line without cost.  It was all very interesting, because the places and many of the family names were familiar to me from childhood.  Not until it was finished did I learn that I’d been ‘thrown in at the deep end’, with one of the largest Pieces, well over 7,000 individual entries, covering ten towns and villages.  The last section was the easiest, because there were fewer items of information for each individual, but at the same time it was one of the saddest ... it covered the workhouse at Stradbroke.

It was certainly a place that no one wanted to go if they could possibly avoid it.  It was made so deliberately, to discourage people from taking advantage of ‘something for nothing’; if you’ve ever visited one of the workhouses that have been preserved as sites of ‘educational  tourism’ - for example those at Gressenhall in Norfolk or Southwell in Nottinghamshire - it’s easy to imagine how well they fulfilled that aim.

As I wrote down the names of the 160 people recorded in this particular institution in north Suffolk, and against each one noted their marital condition, their gender and age and the sinister word ‘inmate’, I found myself wondering why it was each was there.   I spotted the odd married couple, but most of them were either widowed or were quite young, or children.  Had they just fallen on bad times, unable to get work, or were there more acute reasons?

One trio in particular stuck in my memory, and once the task was finished and submitted, I decided to do a little digging into the records in an attempt to piece together the story of these three girls named Roberts.  Clara was 4, Mary 3 and (the one that caught my eye in the first place) Eliza, only 12 days old.  There was nothing on the page to indicate that they were sisters ... just the fact that they were all together.  Where was their mother ... their father?  Had they parked their children there because there was no one else to look after them while they tried to provide for their tiny family?  With no obvious answers I came back to the fact that, only twelve days ago, this young woman had given birth.  She wouldn’t be out working .. but she wasn’t there in the workhouse either.

Finding baby Eliza’s birth registration on the GRO’s new birth register search website told me her mother’s maiden name – Moss – and the marriage register index showed that George Roberts and Eliza Moss had married in the June quarter of 1860.  There was no sign of them as a family in 1861’s census, however.  I did find Eliza, living with her parents and two young siblings in the village of Wingfield, conspicuously under her new married name and described as ‘married’, but with no husband present.  She was described as a ‘dealer’s wife’.  I couldn't find any trace of George after his marriage.

I found the family again in 1871, still in the same place: Eliza’s parents, her young brother now a 12-year-old scholar, and an Emily Roberts, described as ‘granddaughter’, aged 9.  This Emily was shown as born in her grandparents’ village, The workhouse entries showed Clara and Mary born in nearby Syleham.  No birth registration could be found for any of these three: Emily, Clara or Mary.  However, each was baptised in Wingfield: Emily at ten days old, Clara and Mary together when Mary was about three months.  In each case the child was described as the ‘daughter of George and his wife Eliza, late Moss’.

Childbirth was a hazardous business in those days.  If Eliza had been living apart from the family with her two younger daughters, making her own living as best she could, her body was probably not in the fittest condition to survive another birth.  I checked the death registers; sure enough, her death was recorded in the June quarter of 1871, aged 29.  The burial register confirmed my suspicions.   It showed that she was buried in Wingfield on 25th March, just four days after her little girl was born.  My guess is that she never recovered from the birth; the workhouse authorities probably had her parents noted as next of kin, and the burial took place as soon as arrangements could be made.  The register gave her home as Syleham.

There is a happy ending to the tale, however.  I decided to see what happened to the three girls in the next ten years.  In 1881, I found them in the nearby village of Weybread at the unlikely - but clearly identified - ‘Holiday House’.  Here lived James and Anna Ablett, tile maker and laundress, along with their nephew, George Leggett, also a tile maker.  Living with them were Mary Jane and Eliza Roberts, aged 12 and 10, described as orphans and scholars.  And who should be visiting on census night but Clara, described as a 17-year-old domestic servant (although she was actually only a month over fifteen .. not an infrequent occurence).  Eliza’s birthplace was correctly shown as Stradbroke, but the other two gave Wingfield, their grandparents’ home ... putting the past behind them?