It's a very interesting story, that of my great great aunt Catherine Sugrue, for her husband Joseph Read proclaiming to be Jack the Ripper, and not only that, and so I made a tikok about her. The story: my great great grandfather, Thomas Seagrove, had a sister, Catherine Sugrue. They were of a very dysfunctional family, totally, in the newspapers for thefts, in prison and in the workhouse. Their father Bartholowe was in and out of the workhouse and died there, coughing up blood from tuberculosis. Catherine got in trouble as a girl, when she saw coal by the riverside and took some, because it was cold and she wanted her family to be warm, they being very poor. Because of this she was taken for the rest of her childhood to a Roman Catholic school for wayward girls run by Saint Francis nuns, a place where destitute children could be guided to a better future. She's a beautiful lady and hers is the only photograph I have of my family from that time. Catherine's life was tragic. She worked in a lead factory and died from the lead poisoning. She herself had described it as 'killing work' and that was what it was indeed. Catherine's husband, Joseph, said there was white powder in his food, which could well have been the lead powder that Catherine would have brought home on her clothes. Joseph went completley crazy and believed himself to be Jack the Ripper. Maybe Catherine believed it too and that's why the white lead was in his food. Joseph was obsessed that he was Jack the Ripper, and that was in 1888, when all those girls were being killed by him, and when Joseph went into the asylum that was the end of it, so who knows. I'm contemplating resuming book writing now and that Bartholomew's Garden should not be about him after all, but about his children and specifically the friendship between brother and sister, Thomas and Catherine, and all their struggles, and yes this Jack the Ripper theme. Well, my astrology hints that I can write books. But can I really?! Even I made a tiktok briefly putting my writing ideas out there, hopefully by this to find motivation, encouragement, guidance, anything by which inspiration may come. For this idea about writing a book, I've had it for a long time now, having the ideas but now knowing how to solidify them into something that would really work as a complete story. As I share on tiktok, I am a genealogist, and I'm finding social history so fascinating, and of how my family had really been in it with their poverty and all the consequences of that, which were quite dramatic. Like I do think this could be an interesting book. I've got two families who became connected in Greenwich. Grandfather Barton was a war hero, from the battle of Trafalgar to Egyptian sea battles, and he ended up his life at the Greenwich hospital and his wife Hannah was a nurse there. It was their daughter Eleanor who was put into an orphanage in Whitechapel in London. She would die of tuberculosis as a young mother, and it was her daughter, Maria, who would make friends with another family, the Sugrue's, who were Irish settlers and who were very scandalous. they had come to England during the potato blight that just was tragic for Ireland. So they'd come to find a new life in London. But their life was full of scandal, really big scandal, one of the littlest children dying when their mother was in prison for theft, and the father being blamed for that, for neglecting his family, the children then being put into the workhouse. The children of these two families, Thomas Sugrue and Maria Harrison, ended up in love and making a life together. Thomas's sister, Catherine, as we have seen, died from lead poisoning in the factory she worked at and as I have also said, her husband was talking of being Jack the Ripper. Despite my inspiration to write a book, it is yet again genealogy work that I deeply immerse in, whereas the book writing I postpone. The fascination for genealogy that I have needs to envelop this book project too and to be non-different from it. On researching a little about Jack the Ripper, looking through old newspapers of the time, one theory proposed for the identity of the killer is that he was a Russian, who before the London killings began, had been doing much the same in Paris, for which he'd been put into an asylum, and upon his release moved to London, which is when the killings began there. His belief was that prostitutes could only atone for their sins by being killed. This theory had been presented in a Russian newspaper, the Novosti, and the man they'd named as Nicolai Vassilyeff. He was born in Tiraspol, it is said. Well I see there were two Tiraspol's, one in Belarus and one in Moldova, but the Moldova is more likely as that is nearer to where he studied in university, at Odessa, in Ukraine. It is said that he was a 'fanatical anarchist'. In the 1870's he had moved to Paris, where he'd become crazy and was placed under restraint. But before being lodged in an asylum, Nicolai murdered several unfortunates in Paris under conditions somewhat similar to those of the Whitehchapel crimes, for which he was arrested and thereby ended up in the asylum. This had happened 16 years previous to the Whitechapel killings. Nicolai, known as the 'Mad Russian', had been dismissed from the asylum as cured, after which he moved to London, moving in with the lower classes of his fellow countrymen. After the first Whitechapel murder Nicolai was lost sight of. This subject I made a popular tiktok about. I was on a roll with this tiktok creativity, making another one talking of Jack the Ripper, again in relation to newspaper articles I was seeing. Jack the Rippers identity is an unsolved mystery that has captivated the imagination up to the current day and in it's own time too. So many crazy stories I was discovering from way back then. One article was about four Spanish sailors being out and about with knives and attacking a woman, who in response was calling out 'Murder', for which four other men came to her rescue, who also got attacked. I read of a Whitechapel gang apprehending one woman, who on coming out of a concert had the company of a man walking along with her for a while, who then grabbed her by the throat and pulled her to a place where there was a gang of both women and ruffian men, the first man holding a knife up against her throat and they all stealing her things. In regard to the article about the Russian possible Jack the Ripper, it is believed by researchers that maybe the story was fabricated or elaborated upon. It's actually difficult to know what information shared at the time was authentic and which was put out by journalists to keep the interest of the public and which was sensationalised.
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I was back to focusing on genealogy. My genealogy passion website neededa presentation, long due, about the Seagroves of Greenwich. All day I did my genealogy write-up of the Seagroves, all day long, with extra research to bumpf it all up. And I was seeing that but a year after my Maria was imprisoned for two months hard labour, for having a scruffy home and scruffy children who didn't go to school, she was again imprisoned for those same reasons, this time for four months. That makes three prison sentences for her that I am aware of now, the third reference being from when later she and her children ended up destitute in the workhouse, during which time for some unknown as yet reason she was thrown into prison for a further eight months. Dear Maria, whose eyes were all a-twinkle, she had a lifetime of suffering behind her, her mother having died of tuberculosis and her father losing his mind and committing crime and himself being in prison and the workhouse, indeed both father and daughter in the workhouse at the same time. The following day I was embellishing still more on my website write-up about the Seagroves. And what super photos I found of old hop picking adventures in the Kent countryside, our family having been ones to join the many Londoners in this seasonal exodus, their holiday time in effect, where there were men on stilts reaching up to the highest hops, cooking in big pots over open fires, and plenty of laughter and fresh air. This write-up on the Seagroves, I shared a link to on my facebook and as I guessed it would be, this was a shock for my mother to see. And she's never been so interested in this work I here do, but this was close to home, being the family her granny Mary Ann had been born into. A pauper life, the workhouse, prison, scandal, all is there. 'Every family has skeletons' I wrote 'and as a genealogy researcher I uncover what they had long though buried.' As my mum wrote 'Oh dear, so I never did really think we had Downton Abbey connections. I often wondered why there was little mention of Nanna Bane's family when I was a child.'
I have been looking at my diary from back in the year 1987, which is of interest as being the year I first became interested in genealogy research. It was my friends Dale and Audrey who introduced me to this subject, back in the days when nothing was conveniently online and one had to travel up to London to the institutions there, and to visit libraries and the Mormon church. Looking so far back, this was as if now an alien world to me, all that wildness of socialising in the pub and enjoying the attentions of a vast male fan club. My sisters death back then was still something to cry for. From despair at looking back at all the choices I had made, I then felt I was re-emerging into such times, to be present in it all once more and to understand. Sometimes I think certain experiences that we immerse into reflect ways of life our ancestors once knew themselves. We not only experience for ourselves, but re-experience for our ancestors. I was so much back in 1987 that I was lost to who I am now, as in what is my current identity, like here I am as if still aged 25 and yet I have a long established life in the south of France, have four children and a grandson, and one of my darlings is a boy with down syndrome.
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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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