In genealogy I was back to looking at the 1921 censuses, seeing as I had Findmypast membership which had a monopoly on this, focusing on my Maxteds and their extended family members. And why did William Maxted's Irish wife Mary Dolan, on the 1921 census, say she was born in Cork, rather than Westmeath? Those parts of Ireland were so far apart. Notes online about this giving of different birthplaces suggest that this information gets more accurate as one gets older. Had Mary sought to hide her origins? Skeletons in the cupboard? Could there have been a single mother born babe at a convent, she being either the mother of the babe? This remained a mystery. But, yes, babes out of wedlock were there in her family, with her granddaughters Norah and seemingly my nanny Eileen. So this looking at various 1921 census for Maxted descendants was my own personal detective challenge of the moment. My Maxteds had originated in the apparently haunted Kent village of Pluckley, at some point relocating into London, and then ending up in the Hampshire town of Eastleigh. That was where William Maxted and his Irish wife Mary Dolan were living in 1921, where William worked as a boiler maker for the railway. The families married daughter who lived on the same road, Market Street, Mary Green, had begun by 1921 naming all her daughters after flowers. Another married daughter, Florence, my own ancestress, was far away in Parkestone, Essex, at 2 Bridge Cottages, for which I found a picture and recalled in this even having been there as a child when my nanny friend Nina (?) lived there, a time I'd been made to sing for everyone, where pigeons were kept at the end of the garden and all manner of home made wines were being created from fruits, barks and flowers. For all such censuses I thereafter tracked down I sourced if possible accompanying pictures of where these families had lived or pictures connected to their occupations. Some of the Maxted family had remained in London, such as William Maxteds brother and sister, Matilda and Henry, still in Nine Elms where they'd all been born. Henry worked there as a crane attendant for the railway. Other family members had moved to Brighton, Luton, Plymouth and the Isle of Wight, one of Williams brothers Frederick Maxted being an armourer of rifles, pistols and machine guns at the Admiralty supply depot in Plymouth. Back in London, at Islington, two of William's cousins, the Arnell sisters Molly and Minnie, who never married, worked worked for the animal food business of Joseph Thorley Limited at Kings Cross, specifically for the cattle foods department. And two brothers John and William Maxted, who were nephews of our own William Maxted, being sons of his deceased brother John, worked in Fulham, London, for the biscuit manufacturer Marfalane as dispatcher and packer. Of those who had moved to Luton, one cousin, Henry Pratt, the grandson of William's deceased sister Sarah, worked as a painter of the cars of the famed Vauxhall Motors long situated there.
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I focused once more on my genealogy, for my Forest of Dean people, the presentation I'd already worked on for them delighting me. The Forest calls to me, to see the places I never went to previously, like the red ochre caves of Clearwell, mined by the ancients of the Forest and associated with my own ancestors. Despite the locals having been treated as 'squatters', frequently being evicted from the Forest, I just know they were anciently of the land, because my archeogenetic dna has considerable tribalism connected to this area. So what more was I finding out about my Forest of Dean ancestors. Specifically I focused on my Foxes, Aston's and Dobbs. John Aston, one of my ancestors, was a 'squarrer', and I know not what that was, and as was indicated in the 1851 census he was also blind, and it was by looking in old newspapers for any information about him that I found out why. Back in 1830, on a summers day in July, John and a work colleague, Thomas Phipps, were preparing to blast part of a rock near Coleford. Thomas was holding a bag of gunpowder for the job, equalling 3lbs of the explosive, while smoking on his pipe, oh dear, and a spark from that pipe fell among the powder, which exploded, throwing the men to a distance of several yards. Naturally they were severely injured and although they recovered well they were left blind. Not John's error then, but rather the carelessness of his friend. As for John's wife, Elizabeth Smith, I'd not sussed her ancestors before, but now was discovering them, three generations of Henry Smith's of Newland, with their wives Jane Evans, Susannah and Anna. Continuing with this genealogy a day or so later, I was looking at the plague, which my ancestor Benjamin Aston died from back in 1613. Plagues, they were many since the 1300's, and were far more deadly than our covid pandemic, for which many of our ancestors would have sickened from this. Obviously some were survivors, for which we are thankfully here now. Recent research has shown that a genetic mutation helped our people to survive, one for which we'd since had to cope with autoimmune diseases or at the very least over-active immune systems. Likely this mutation helped with covid too, but anyway could also explain why I have so many sensitivities to foods and smells; at last something to make sense of it all; my wonderful plague survivors. Benjamin, born in 1563, and his father John Aston, his sister and brothers, lived at Whitecliff, and its interesting that the surname Aston was given to people who lived at rocks or by ash trees, as Whitecliff was indeed a place of a rock cliff. In my imagination I see them even further back as cave dwellers; that does appeal to me. Far enough back it is so that we were all cave dwellers. Back to my genealogy, I was marking on a map areas of the Forest of Dean associated with my ancestors. And as for those Smiths I was descended from, in accordance with such a surname they were likely of the original metal working communities thereabouts. One such ancient blacksmith community even got a mention from the Romans, being at Ariconium and many coins and fibula brooches, which they likely fashioned, were still being found by treasure seekers, as well as a dancing goddess figurine made from brass and found in one of the old cinder piles. One of Britains oldest fibula brooches found as yet came from a ditch near Cirencester, upon which was a snake design, a face and those spirals I love. Again I absorbed myself in my Forest of Dean genealogy, finding some remarriages I'd not noted before and finding out that these ancestors of mine were freeminers, that is locals, born of the Forest, being aged over 21, and having worked a year and a day already in the forest mines; now by rights (from time immemorial) permitted to dig anywhere their own 'gales' by which to mine for coal, iron and rocks. I worked on a write-up on my site about my Aston's, Dobb's and Foxes of the Forest of Dean, my people of the forests, which started off quite patchy, as I researched more and more, but slowly began to flow and become an interesting read. In 1846, just as in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, and indeed in much of Northern Europe, the potato crops failed, the people having forsaken their traditional diversity of foods for the foreign potatoes that used less land while feeding more people. For such reliance on one food the blight upon the potatoes was disastrous. And yet the foresters coped well at such a time, because they were capable foragers of all that the forest naturally yielded, such as chestnuts, crab apples and blackberries, a tradition my family continued with and which still I did to this day, all those chestnuts we'd roasted and the gathering of blackberries for bramble jelly. Even as a child I remember collecting winberries in the Welsh hills. Always testing times would now and again arise, like in 1814, in the Forest, when there was a plague of mice. All attempts to eradicate the mice, with cats, traps and poisons, made little impact, until one of the freeminers, named Simmons, pointed out that the mice died when they fell into the wells and pits, for not being able to get back out again. Hence, now, many holes, two feet deep, were dug, and the mice fell into them in great numbers. Simmons and the other men were paid for the amount of 'tails' they brought from those pits, amounting in all to 100,000 perished mice. In 1795 the Foresters rioted, women and children joining in, in what were known as the Bread Riots. There had always been an honourable exchange between foresters and farmers of the surrounding pastures, fuel from the forest in return for flour for bread. This was disrupted when Britain, as a nation, engaged in wars against revolutionary France, with our government redirecting that corn into feeding the army and navy. For which, in consequence, the foresters, in need of their daily bread, took to raiding passing carts of corn, forcefully taking the food to be divided among their own people. The authorities sent in the calvary to stop their interests being sabotaged. And again, when boats were transporting corn along the river Severn, the locals raided them too, and again the calvary was sent in and the ringleaders caught and executed. It was thereafter, at last, taken heed of by the authorities that they had put these people into a state of famine and that they must therefore help them, for which the Crown acquiesced and distributed £1,000 worth of grain to the poor distressed locals.
In the new subject of epigenetics it is noted that our maternal grannies were the ones to create the eggs we ourselves came from, so which, as it is posited, the experiences of the granny closely tie in to who we ourselves become. This naturally interests me, and yes, I've borne my own spiritual genealogy ideas and contemplated already how we are impacted by the experiences of our ancestors. So this becomes more of a subject nowadays, gets discussed and becomes a scientific study; slowly, slowly. It is so that I am more like my granny Isabelle than my mother is, and that my mother is more like her granny, at least in some regards. My granny Isabelle was schizophrenic and never wished to leave her house, not once she developed an anxiety about the outside world. Although, this had not developed in her when she created my egg within my mother in the womb. At those times she was so very much in love with her dashing romantic Scottish husband. This was during war time, during which he sometimes had leave to be with her, and when not would write romantic letters and poems. We were first borns, me and my mother, not my granny Isabelle though, although her own mother was a first born, when experiences are fresher. My granny Isabell ended up so wounded by love, her dear Lyall leaving her for another woman. But, yes, when my egg was created their love was blooming, along with plenty of separation due to the war. My granny Isabelle's own granny, Maria Harrison, for sure had a tough childhood, seeing her mother die too young from tuberculosis, her father being in prison, and she herself in the workhouse. Those trauma's would have been passed to my granny Isabelle, and they ultimately broke her; whereas for all my own trauma's in life I have been a survivor. Still, I have some of the traits of my granny, which my mother cannot bear, the messy chaos for one, which itself was born out of Maria Harrison's very tragic and difficult life in London poverty. Anxiety too I had inherited, socially; nevertheless I could go out into the world, which my granny could not. We ourselves heal the past and adapt. My granny travelled with her imagination in books about other lands; I travelled in reality. It is in recognising the vestiges of genealogical trauma that I have come to accept more my own impracticality and messiness. Ancestrally, the lineage of my grandmotherly journeying, versus the grandmotherly journeying of my mother and daughters, always skipping a generation, does throw up in some ways an intense story of similar scenarios. My granny Isabelle and her granny Maria, both of whom my influence is from; well in regard to Maria there was a certain dynamic with her own daughter, Mary Ann Seagrove, who would be my mothers granny. Maria was the messy impractical one, getting into an awful muddle, and Mary Ann had to herself play a more adult role, working hard and with great practicality, to basically stop the authorities removing her younger siblings into the workhouse and casting Maria into prison, all for her laziness and inefficient ways. Those siblings, ran about barefoot and scruffy, but happy, with no bother for school, everyone free to be who they are. All was put onto Mary Ann to salvage this situation, her father being away at sea, she cleaning her brothers shoes daily, and going off young into the workplace with her hair in a bun to look older, trudging miles through snow back and forth. Maria's inactivity was surely for her own traumas, seeing her mother die before her very eyes and being put into the workhouse. Such energies, and I believe this for all the work I have done with research of the family, simply fits so neatly, having still some reckoning with us, so that all my family have been hard on me, as I represent Maria, and they are all Mary Ann, who herself was a fireball and full of resentment. In knowing all of this, can one not then understand that what happens now is not just to do with present day concerns, but is borrowed from the past. In all current dramas one should entertain that this has seeded from a real life scenario that has been most traumatic in our ancestry and which in some way gets replayed. And yes, I muddle through life often enough, but I am a survivor and I am happy. I often like to be alone, so others shall not trouble me and create needless drama. This was my granny Isabelle's way indeed, but she was crazy and I am not. We adapt; we find wiser perspectives. My own daughters are so reluctant themselves to be mothers, and it is they who carry the eggs I created, deeply connected to who I am. I so wish they will not end our matriarchal lineage. Like please, please, have babies; but all rests with them.
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AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Categories
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