When Death Came Calling, the Workhouse wasn't far Behind.

I'm giving serious consideration to a re-write of my answer to the question 'what have you been doing during the lock-down?'  If I say 'family history' the usual come-back is along the lines of 'Oh, that's interesting, how far back have you got?'  'Family research' might elicit a more appropriate follow-up that is lateral instead of historical.  Genealogy (sub-genus: family reconstruction) is not simply the production of a list of names generation by generation, but a vehicle to find out about past generations and how they lived their lives.

The main sources of information - especially during a period when visits to a record office are out of the question - are the indexes of Births, Marriages & Deaths, and the Census records from 1841 to 1911, these now supplemented by the 1939 Register that was compiled just after the start of World War 2.  These records provide only the basic life facts at a fixed point in time; in the absence of other data that will vary from case to case - and is unlikely to be available on line - everything else is assumption or guess-work and has to be subject to alternative explanations, such as the one with which I concluded my post last week.

I have often quoted the opening words from L P Hartley's novel, The Go-Between, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."  Hartley wrote in 1952, looking back to 1900.  As I look back now to the nineteenth century, these words carry an even greater truth.  We have constantly to recall that the social norms of those days - for good or ill - were not those of the 21st century.

I recently researched a family that started with the marriage of Alan Carman and Alice Ann Meakin in the June quarter of 1890.  Their entry in the census of the following year included Alan, 19, Alice, 22, and two boys, Arthur Meakin, 1, and William Carman, 9 months.  My initial assumption was simply that Arthur had been born a few months before his parents married.  I hadn't considered the needs in those days of a 20-year-old widow, seven or eight months pregnant.  In addition to the demands of the birth itself, unless someone could be found to care for the child, she would be unable to work to support them both.  The workhouse loomed and, looking beyond the birth of her child, the most pressing need would be to find a new husband, and quickly.  This was possibly the situation that confronted Alice in the spring of 1889. 

Having found the Carman-Meakin marriage, I couldn't then trace a birth registration for William Carman with a mother whose maiden name was Meakin;  when I found the entry for Arthur the previous year, I was surprised to see that, instead of the dash that usually signifies an illegitimate birth, the name Clay appeared as the maiden name.  I then found that there was an entry for William Carman with the mother's name of Clay ... and subsequently discovered similar entries for their later children (subject to variations of the name Carman!)

Alice Clay had married Arthur Meakin in the June quarter of 1888, and he had died about a year later.  Arthur's widowed father had two sons living at home in Basford (now a suburb of Nottingham) in 1891 and his only daughter (married in 1885) and her young family lived with them.  Young Arthur's place of birth was shown on the censuses as Basford, rather than Heanor, where his mother was born and my guess is that Alice and her husband had also lived with his father prior to Arthur's death, or at least that they looked after her in her confinement.

How long Alice had known Alan Carman is, of course, unrecorded.  In 1881 she and her family lived in Heanor; Alan's family were in Cotmanhay a little over three miles away.  To have been 9 months old at the census on 5th April 1891, William would have been born soon after they married.  This was a mining area: Alan's father and his elder brother were shown as miners in 1881,  Alan was working as a general labourer in 1891, possibly also at the pit, since he was a sawyer at a colliery in 1901 and 1911.

There is nothing to suggest that Arthur, whose family were in the bleaching trade, was a miner, but if that were the case, he and Alan could have known each other.  In either of these industries - and in many more - there were lethal dangers, or he might have suffered illness - without investing in a death certificate, the cause of his death remains unknown.  Suffice to say that Alan, four years his junior, was there to offer support to his widow.

The census of 1901 suggests that Alan had accepted young Arthur as his own son, since he is entered as 'Arthur Carman', but Alan and Alice were not spared further heartache.  In 1911, she was stated to have been married 20 years, having borne 12 children, 8 of whom were still living but 4 had died.  All four had lived less than a year, two of them dying within the same quarter of their birth.  Alice died at the age of 64 in Heanor in 1933.  Alan was still living there in 1939, along with an unmarried son and daughter; he died nearby in 1941, aged 69.