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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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 found a whole new genealogical revelation, yet another prison sentence for my ancestor John Harrison of Greenwich. I'd actually been looking up references to Jubilee Terrace where my Sugrue's had lived, when up came John Harrison also living there and his having been caught with suspected stolen wood. He was a 'dredger' it is noted in the newspaper, and he said he'd found the wood, but with mention in the court of his former theft and of at that time his attempt to throw a man in the river, his word was not taken in trust and he was sent back to gaol, his young daughter Maria being left alone yet again. So, more than one of my ancestors has lived at Jubilee Terrace, but a few years apart. I have wondered if the Harrison and Sugrue families knew each other. At some point their children, Maria Harrison and Thomas Sugrue would become sweethearts, and maybe their friendship began when they were still children. Young Thomas may have learnt from Maria's father, John, his skills on the Thames river, for which he would not follow the path of his own father in building work. AuthorAuthor Susie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. I have it in mind to write a book, nothing new for me really as ideas have often come and yet don't practically manifest. Bartholome Sugrue's tragic life as an Irish immigrant in Greenwich, with all his dysfunctionalism, is inspiring me now. This would be a historical novel. Although, with their not having been a happy ending I'd need to explore the jollity and love and depth of positive life experience inbetween all the sufferings. And do I tie in the parallel Harrison and Barton families, also of Greenwich, who had their own tragedies. Between these two families have been a bucket load of difficulties. There was Eleanor Caroline Barton growing up in a London orphanage, away from her mother, and dying so young of tuberculosis; her mother Hannah taking care of the old and wounded seamen in the Greenwich hospital where once Eleanors own father had lived; and Eleanors partner John William Harrison's brushes with the law, his imprisonment and then joining his daughter Maria in the workhouse, his temporary insanities and ultimately dying from cancer of the tongue; Bartholomew Sugrue's first wife dying from asiatic cholera, and his second wife Catherine going to prison for trying to conceal her daughters theft of a purse; exposure in all Britains newspapers when he is prosecuted for the manslaughter of his own child, revealing their poor standards of life and his drunknness, the child really having wasted away in a refusal to eat out of upset for losing his mother; later, their squatting with other Irish in tumbledown cottages with the authorities trying to throw them out; their residing at Pesters boarding house for the poor in which Catherine worked as a servant in return for lodgings, where also lived for a while one of the prostitutes murdered by Jack the Ripper; Bartholomew eternally in and out of the workhouse, being sent onwards to Poplar for hard labour and severity, and his demise from tuberculosis, dying while coughing up blood; Catherines stroke which paralysed her down one side; young Maria Harrison in and out of the workhouse and into the arms of their son Thomas, himself all too familiar with the workhouse and for a fresh new start they changing the surname from Sugrue to Seagrove, and then their own exposure in newspapers for their dirty home and scruffy children running wild. So, how does one weave a story through all that? And of happier times, hop picking adventures in the Kent countryside, romantic strolls in Greenwich park, for 'there is always the garden', the gaiety of the Greenwich fair and arrival by boat (sailed by my ancestors) of grand functionaries and aristocrats who would feast in the Greenwich inns on whiting (fished by my ancestors) and champagne, rich benefactors joining the workhouse poor at xmas for seasonal celebrations, the songs my ancestors may have sung and the music they danced to. AuthorAuthor Susie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. ![]() My mothers ethnic DNA results were in. And, well, I have to say that they quite took me by surprise, because despite already having discovered that my own matriarchal DNA is exotic, the small exotic ethnic DNA percentages I have are not actually through her, but rather they are given to me by my father. She does not have them. The Middle Eastern, Anatolian and African are not at all from her. Our ancestresses leaving the matriarchal homelands, then, was in no way a recent event. What also surprises me is not only does she have less British DNA than me, but also less Viking. This means some of my Viking DNA has to come from my father. Her own Shetland blood must not have been pure Viking after all, but mixed with Pictish types/original island dwellers. The Spanish DNA is not from her, so is of my father. The French DNA, which overlaps into Northern Italy, is from her and she has a huge amount of it, 46%, almost half, which is certainly confusing to me. I only inherited 13% of the French-Italian from her, rather than 23%, sure proof there that what one inherits can be uneven and random and even differ among siblings. So it is that I can now make more sense, or maybe not much sense, of the origin of my own DNA. Oh, and I almost omitted it, that Eastern European I myself have at 1%, well, it comes through her, she having it at 2%. Her British is 35%, and her Scandinavian-Viking is 17%; really, with her inbred Shetlanders I would have expected more like 50% but not so. Having made assumptions about the family origins in light of DNA before, I am lax to go making any more assumptions. But I have to attempt to do so anyway. The huge amount of French-Italian she has, though seemingly equivalent to one of her parents, could rather come through two grandparents, for instance, Mary Ann Seagrove's black haired mother Maria Harrison, could have been Italian, and this would leave D'Auvergne Bane potentially bringing in some French. Even he has the name of a French department! Now, unless his Bane's and Bean's were from an interbreeding of French Huguenot settlers, not much watered down at all, then he could, as I have speculated before, have been adopted or an illegitimacy of his 'big sister' Alma's, and if this was connected after all with the D'Auvergne Barnards, all could make sense, as these colonials of India had, possibly, originated from France and the Channel Islands. By deduction I can speculate the origins more of my own father. Eileen Spencer's, his mother's own paternity, has always been a question mark, and with his British imput being more than my mothers, this would account for my pop George Harrison's Welsh and Forest of Dean, combined with my fathers mothers part Irish. This leaves a bundle of Spanish with rarer exotica and his Scandinavian. I am going to suppose here, with nanny Eileen Spencer having been so freckly fair, that her mystery father was a Scandinavian seaman, her mother having worked in the port; entirely guess work, of course. And I have even more guesswork. The London Maxted-Green-Roberts who I have contemplated previously to have gypsy heritage, well, it seems even more likely now, which would be why Iberian DNA is showing up. Gypsies are associated with a distant Indian tribe, and yet in all their travels did they not mix with locals of the lands they inhabited, did not runaways and people expelled from their own communities join them? Spanish, Anatolian, Middle Eastern, and somehow that bit of African added too... And if not the Maxteds, who may have been Old English mixture with Viking rather than gypsy, at least the Greens and Roberts are surnames associated with gypsy people. And, again, who knows where other illegitimacies have been? So, these are all my first thoughts anyway in trying to make sense of the matter. Certainly these latest results so amaze and give me much food for thought. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Familytree has perfected and updated its ethnic autosomal interpretations. And how crazy it is that, yes, before I was told I had some small Central Asian component, which is east of the Caspian Sea, which had got me all excited for its exotic appeal, but this has now been whacked back west and south of the Caspian to Armenia and Turkey. With a new ability to consider trace percentages I have been told I have Middle Eastern, that is the Levant, and Eastern European, both which I had not known of before. And whats more, to blow my mind all over again, I have some 2% Central South African! I almost feel, on being told this one day and that another day, that this science is too new even to be relied upon. Everything I have felt to believe is really fragile in this regard. And my matriarchal origin, is it really of the Caucasus, when it does seem that an Armenian link is arising, which is to the south of there. Anatolian Armenian Christian, this does appear quite possible. It could be this that has blended with the Levantine, and even the African, which has me confused of what to make of it all. The Africans could have been slaves in the Arab world, or from some past colonial interbreeding with locals. So many potentially fascinating stories are there which I will never know. And even this is not such a vast number of generations back. How exotic could it get, to know discover this ancestral connection to Africa, in the dark jungly south, where is Botswana, Angola, Zambia, and South Africa. And how watered down this is in me already, so pale and freckly, so very English looking. That black haired, ivory skinned ancestress in Greenwich, Maria Harrison; such a mystery resides within her. Was she a combination of Armenian, Levantine and African; is this why her distinct looks? My friend Deepak had once suggested she may be Armenian, with her un-British looks, and maybe he was indeed tuning into something. I need to locate the previous percentages that were given to me, to compare. I recall there had been Mediterranean, which has now been pinpointed to the Spanish peninsula. Other than which there is a whole connection to France, and/or its neighbouring lands, which I'd also not known of. British is naturally my main ethnic make-up with its Viking addition and of European there is in total 97%, though all then adds up to 105% and not 100%. The is the up to date percentages, then, which make up my autosomal ethnic mix: British Isles 55% Scandanavia 21% West & Central Europe 13% Spanish Peninsula 8% Turkey/Armenia 2% Eastern Europe 2% Levant (Asia Minor) 2% African (Central-South) 2% The Eastern European, which is from Poland to the Ukraine, is also a surprise. This is where the Ashkenazi Jews were located, so a link would be there, at least of having lived among them. This would concur with dreams I've had of being pursued by Nazi types and having to escape, and why I so feel to defend Jewish people who have known centuries of persecution even into modern times. Again, there could be an admixture into rarer types of peoples, via Ukraine, where indeed an ancient type of my matriarchal DNA has been found, as my friend Satshanti had recently pointed out to me. So, maybe my Eastern European type is indeed Ukrainian. With such a subject, all can only be guessed or assumed. These are but whispers of a past otherwise lost to us. But Africa, oh, Africa, how could I have know this was not just anciently the mother land, but something so much closer, still in my being. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. ![]() I have another genealogical breakthrough, hurray, this being finding out why my ancestor, John William Harrison, was put in prison for half a year back in 1871. Oh, how so long to find this. But there it was. Being a waterman/bargeman John had crossed the Thames from Greenwich to the Isle of Dogs, whereon he began loading his barge with iron from the Samuda wharf at Blackwall. Half a ton he got into his barge when he was spotted by a man who he then set to wrestling with. As it is said, he tried to throw the fellow in the water and would have succeeded if not for another person spotting the fracas. He was given six months hard labour in prison, hence his daughter, my great great grandmother Maria, having to go into the workhouse at the age of 11, her mother already having died from tuberculosis. And for Maria's deceased mother, Eleanor Caroline Barton, who'd been raised in an orphanage, I found newspaper clips about the Sailors Female Orphan Home where she grew up, of her singing along with the other girls for the public 'Oh Where is the Guide of my Infant Years'. Even back then, when Eleanor was 7, it was reported that one of the other girls of the orphanage had died of consumption (tuberculosis). I researched more, looking at where in London my people lived and what those areas were like. When my ancestors lived at Cock Lane, beside St Sepulchre church, I do think that unlike now this was a colourful and stimulating place to be. St 'Pulchre, as it was known, was right by a prison, the Old Bailey, and the cells of those condemned to die. It was inseparable from those surrounds, tolling the bells and praying for the souls of all those condemned ones who would stop there on the way to the gallows, having a gift of flowers presented to them. But a walk away from there were other homes for my family, in more notorious areas, Field Lane with its plethora of resold stolen handkerchiefs, Plum Tree Court which was an escape route for thieves, and its neighbouring Shoe Lane, being by St Andrews Church, where priests needed bodyguards for this being such a rough place. My ancestress Sarah Bunney died in the workhouse just by there, though of a good old age. She was a survivor, and her daughter Hannah Bunney had by now long gone to Greenwich. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. On checking my emails, I saw that at last my Genographic results were through, oh my, how exciting. And so I found out that I was 1.2% Neanderthal, and just to know that was a joy, and my mtDNA type now had a more sophisticated classification, rather than just being a non-Jewish N1b. It was now an N1b1A2A, a haplogroup which remains a mystery and which being so rare is unresearched - no nearer to it being pinned down to a specific location then. As for my autosomal admixture I am found to be, in total of all components of my DNA, 48% British and Irish, 38% Viking Scandinavian, much of which will be owing to my Shetland Island ancestry, and this also being particularly more than general people of Britain and even Scotland have, 11% Southern European (Mediterranean), and 3% Central Asian. What?! OK, well, aligning this to my genealogy then may be a little confusing. For as far as I can understand the 11% equates to a great grandparent, which means that one of mine then is almost full Italian, Spanish or Greek, and yet according to what I know of my family how can that be. And as far as the 3% Central Asian, that would equate to one of my great great great grandparents. Now if, for instance, this had been where Maria Harrison got her black hair, alabaster complexion and twinkling eyes, then that would be because her mother was fully central Asian. And this is where I begin to wish the location information was more specific and that some raw data had been supplied, which I could over time analyse, but it had not. All was quite pretty but vague, and the zonal areas are so vast. Now, if Maria's mother, Eleanor Caroline Barton, was from west of the Caspian Sea in the classification zone, that would make some sense, in aligning with the Caucasus mountains, or even if south of there, as far down as Armenia. But the zone I'd been appointed was east of the Caspian Sea and north of Tibet, the area of the various 'S'tans', Kazakhstan, Turkestan, etc, historically being of the old Silk Route. Although confusing, this is also exciting and suitably exotic to appeal to me. All was much on my mind throughout the night. It doesn't seem to make sense unless I stray from the map I've so far laid down genealogically. Because I do have Eleanor Caroline Barton's genealogy going further back and all remains English sounding. So one wonders, had a foreign child been brought into the family and adopted as if their own. And as for the maybe Italian or other Mediterranean type great grandparent, I end up thinking of one other possibility, on account of my nanny Eileen's parents only having married when her mother Florence Maxted was nine months pregnant, and with her husband Percy's family having been very lax to accept her: could a Mediterranean seaman, sojourning at the seaport pub where Florence worked as a barmaid, have got her pregnant and then sailed away, never to return. Looking at this DNA result it does now seem quite a possibility. Really, I am stuck when it comes to find out more or being sure of anything. I did dream in the night that my mother was me and I asked her to take the Genographic test too, for then I could make more sense of all, by knowing which half of my autosomal DNA is from her and which from my father. But she had no interest in such things and would not do it. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. I worked on my website, trying to put together a piece on the hardships which my Greenwich ancestors had to experience, which involved having to download supporting papers and documents. There in the workhouse had gone a lineage of my women, Maria Harrison as child and grown-up, Eleanor Barton in an orphanage, Hannah Bunney in the Blackfriars workhouse, giving birth to one of her children there, which I now realise was at the time when her husband had departed central London for the care and comforts of the Greenwich Hospital. So he too had left his family, temporarily, in destitution, after which they came to live by him, living outside the hospital while he was within, as so many ex sailors families apparently did. And I do wonder, was the workhouse always such a rock bottom humiliation of the people anyway. Pregnant girls whose lovers failed to marry them would find a place there to give birth. People were clothed and fed. Sick people were given medical care. The discipline and regimes were hated, but still people in need would go there. When I see Maria's children going in there for but one hour, may she not even have designed it to get a good full meal in them for once. Who is to know what was really in the hearts and minds of all these people. The workhouse was equivalent to the modern old peoples home too, and in that manner it carries on, as too for a free medical facility, like our National Health today. We look back on it all so bleakly and fail to see what an invaluable support it was to those who were passing through hard times. Before the workhouses, the parish's gave handouts to the struggling poor and saw that they were clothed and fed, like the dole now, not even any work being required and no rules to follow. So I understand the workload and regimes were generally an irritating sacrifice one had to comply with, an exchange of sorts. One irritation would be the harsh discipline within the workhouse schools. A poor child would learn to read and write, but would get whacked about in the process. For girls it may have been easier. Eleanor Barton's orphanage taught her to read and write and how to be thoroughly and efficiently domestic, to be a good and valued servant girl, which was the path most women took before they found themselves a husband and became queens of their own household, he working tirelessly long hours, and she creating a brood of children. If he strayed for a while, if he was unable to work, there was the workhouse, the last resort. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Back to researching, I try to order a death certificate for Eleanor Caroline Harrison nee Barton, with no success, after three wrong attempts to put in the numbers my card being withdrawn. And I so want to know why she died so young. Women tended to die young from childbirth complications, so I have thought this, but this is presumption and the need is really there to research. She left her daughter, Maria, an orphan at the age of 5. So, I had found out that this Maria, was as a grown up, destitute, in the workhouse and even in prison. Well, I now discovered she had also been in the workhouse as a child, her own father, John William Harrison, at that time having a spell in prison too. When he was released he joined her in the workhouse. I start to understand that the contrariness of family experiences has impacted on me. The traumatic lives they led, the weight of the world on them, tough survival, and the unfairness of it all, I feel I have come into this world with these imprints. I have royals in my tree and I have destitutes, a total medley, and maybe I am and have been all that too. I carry it all, somehow. The emotion and sensitivity is in me. This is actually very interesting. To somehow understand it, at last, feels so very therapeutic. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. |
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