Postponed, Maybe, but now it's Personal!

Life is full of surprises.  Last week I closed my post with the words, "Watch this space!"  So now I'm going to follow that up ... but I didn't expect to be writing what follows.

For the last few days I have been suffering (typical man-speak here) from a cold.  As usual, it's worst when first getting up in the morning but, for most of the time, it's no bother.  However, I did decide to cancel one or two engagements for the sake of not infecting vulnerable people with my germs.  One of those was my intended help at the Salvation Army's new project for the homeless.  And that's where this follow-up post could stop, suspended until I actually go along.  But read on ...

As regular readers will know (and will possibly be bored by hearing it), I've spent much of the last year first producing, and then catching up behind, a twin family tree presentation for my cousin's golden wedding in March.  This catch-up is almost complete now, and the final phase results from the discovery that the newly-printed latest version of my complete tree does not include all possible birth and death dates.  Many approximations based on baptism and burial dates have been omitted, making the whole appear far less complete than is the case.  To overcome this, I've been examining each page in some detail and so far am about half-way through the exercise.

On Tuesday, I was looking at the page that shows my great-grandfather and his siblings.  He was one of a family of nine: seven boys and two girls. The eldest son died at the age of three-and-a-half, and the third lived only a few days.  Great-grandfather William, born 10th December 1827, was the fourth son and, when the next child arrived on 26th May 1829, he was called Robert, the name of his parents' late first-born.  He was followed by a daughter, Harriet, a son who was named James after the other son who died, a second daughter, Elizabeth, and, on 15th August 1835 came the family's youngest, Cyrus.  The family lived in the tiny north Suffolk village of Syleham; just across the river lie two Norfolk villages, Thorpe Abbotts to the west and Brockdish to the east, and there were many ties linking these three.  One such tie was the attraction to Robert of a girl from Thorpe Abbotts named Elizabeth Flatman.  She was about 19 when they married on 7th December 1850.

Robert died at Brockdish in July or August 1864, and later that year Elizabeth married Alfred Rush.  As I examined this part of the family tree, I could see that Elizabeth had had two daughters, Eliza and Clara, with Robert, and then went on to have a family of seven with Alfred.  Upon closer examination, however, I noticed that the first three of that seven had been born before 1864, so clearly should have been in the other family.  I was about to correct what I saw as an error created by oversight some years ago, when the caution born of several more years of research kicked in and told me to go back to the original records ... or as near to them as is possible.

Now, my records use two entirely separate computer programs, one to produce the printed tree and the other which holds the details, so my first step in tracing this back was to the detail, where I had recorded against all these three Rush children, 'Registered as Evans'.  Why, then, had I quite deliberately recorded them as Rush, and added them to the Rush family?  I looked again at the census records.  The family in 1871 looked quite normal: Alfred and Elizabeth Rush with children William, Charles, Ann, Ellen, Alice and John (the seventh child - another Clara; the first Clara had died aged one in 1857 - was born in 1872). 

I turned to the earlier census of 1861, where a very different family was revealed.  Here I found - as I had when I entered these records to my system - Alfred Rush as the head of the household, and Elizabeth Evans, described as a widow and, where the conventional relationship entry would be 'wife', had been written 'not married'.  All three children, Eliza, William and Charles, instead of sons and daughter, had been described boldly, 'illegitimate'.  This answered my immediate question, and indeed suggested that even a two:seven split of the nine children was in error!

What, then, had happened?  Why did Elizabeth describe herself as a widow in 1861, when Robert didn't die until 1864?  There are many unanswered - possibly unanswerable - questions.  Did Robert have a personality problem?  Had Elizabeth been in a romantic daze when they had married and later found the love she sought with an older man (Alfred was seven years older than Robert)?  Why were there no children of an 1850 marriage until the arrival of Eliza in 1855? ... and she later declared 'illegitimate'!  Whatever had been going on between Elizabeth and Alfred, one question I could address was, where was Robert in 1861?  The answer shocked and saddened me ... and provides the key link for this blog.

The 1861 census for Brockdish ends in the Street, with the blacksmith's shop and two households at the toy shop, one headed by a carpenter, the other by a cordwainer.  But then there is an additional page containing just two people.  The first shows as an address, 'Street - hayloft'; the occupant is Sira Evans, unmarried, aged 27, a farm labourer born in Syleham.  The second entry is 'open air; Robert Evans, unmarried, aged 38, a farm labourer born in Syleham'.  Yes, there are discrepancies in their ages, but in those days many people, especially the labouring classes, were unaware exactly how old they were.  The circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that these were my two great-great-uncles.  When Robert died his age was recorded as 40.  I've not yet been able to find out what happened to his brother Cyrus.

Homelessness may be a problem today, and was probably a far more serious matter for those who were homeless 150 years ago, but the causes then - as now - were probably just the same, and just as complex.