Back to the time travel/avatars, I now got pictures made, thank you AI, of my great granny Mary Seagrove, alias Nanna Bane.
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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.'
On yet another day of looking at places of the ancestors I went to Greenwich, heading straight for the church of St Alphege, as that and its surrounding lanes had long been associated with my family. Around the church, St Alphege Passage, my people had lived there, the Harrison's, right by Soames's vicarage, and there was Roan Street, which had been home to both Harrisons and Bartons. They were quiet lanes now and not at all like bustling London just over the river. I passed through Greenwich market where once my Harrison's had sold their fish. I came next to the grand white naval college buildings, this being the old sailors home where had lived Philip Barton and where his wife Hannah née Bunney had worked as a nurse, a beautiful place set among vast lawns. There I roamed, into an old chapel, and around old exhibitions in which could see, for example, a typical sailors room (cabin) in which one would have a bed, chest and seat. Even the robes there one was invited to try on. I tried on the typical tricorne hat, just as my ancestor would have worn. And I looked around the maritime museum. Jack Tarr was a statuette there, a name which the sailors always knew themselves by. I then visited another church associated with the family, Christ Church, where had been baptised some of the Seagrove children. From there I roamed more of our families addresses, where had lived our Seagroves - Lassell Street (their home there was no more standing) and Braddyl Street (still standing) and another of their homes on the Old Woolwich Road (number 57) where I happened to meet the current resident, Sharon, who I got chatting with as she was out in her front garden and who found it interesting that my people had once lived there.
My focus was once more on genealogy research, and oh gosh, I found a newspaper article speaking bad once more of my Greenwich family, and not this time for the elder Sugrue's or Harrison's, but for their grown up children, my great great grandparents, the Seagrove's, Thomas and Maria. I'd been told memories by family about their home life together, of Thomas often being away working on rivers and at sea, and of how he would give his wife and children all they asked for, in return for which the house was to be kept spic and span. Well, as I now discovered, this was not always the situation. Before the days when their oldest child, Mary Ann, had it put on her to do household chores, and to keep her younger siblings smart and clean, their home life had been by contrast untidy and the children unclean, and this had got them into big trouble. Just as the state of Thomas's own childhood Irish immigrant family had been damned in the local community, and all around the country too, so was his adult family life now coming under the spotlight. Not only was there mention that Thomas Seagrove was frequently in trouble for not sending his children to school, but the NSPCC were investigating the children for being dirty and in rags and for living in a smelly unclean home, and for this our Maria was put in prison. And that, even though it was pointed out that she didn't have a drink problem, unlike some local mothers, and that her children were fairly well nourished. Now I know that unconsciously I have tuned into these ancestors and their plight in my own life all the more, twice having had authorities set on me and checking me out. My situation seeded from malicious people around about, as likely it did with my ancestors too. Everyone is expected to be scrubbed clean and to have museum like homes. This was a new Victorian imposed standard, at a time when society was becoming more regulated and more uniform. Officials were butting in, and by doing so, making their own havoc. At that time, a whole bunch of mothers were being outed as neglectful, with all their children's names and ages listed in the papers and their domestic problems revealed and judged. Some of the mothers were alcoholics whose husbands beat them, but not all. For my family, the children, not being paraded off into school lessons, were out playing and getting dirty, because that's natural, that's what children do when left to their own devices, not shoved into institutions. I get that. The children were happy, healthy and free. But they were poor and wore rags. And no fuss was made of the housework, and I get that too. They were from struggling, maybe gypsy backgrounds, making some token adjustments to society, but not entirely. Society, though, had it's own agenda, that all shall be made ship-shape, and if that involves putting a pregnant mother into prison, subjecting her to hard labour, and carting her children off to the workhouse, then so be it. And so families are disturbed all the more, traumatised, the beloved mother taken away, and the children stolen. I totally sympathise with my ancestors. If a child is not being beaten up and sexually abused then f*ck off. And yet still this goes on. On the same day as Maria Seagrove was judged and sent to prison, so was another local lady, Mary Baker of Deptford, on account of one of her neighbours, Fanny Miller, having complained about her children's clothes being torn and ragged, and for them being dirty, as if they had not been washed in a long time. For this Mary got three months hard labour, one month more than our Maria, her worse circumstance being that, on account of her husbands violence, she had taken to drink. As for my own family, a Dr Cable said he hadn't seen such a dirty family in years. For Thomas, changing his name from Sugrue to Seagove, specifically to disconnect from past scandal and public damnation, errors of the parents had been repeated, and embarrassingly all eyes were upon them. For which it is understandable that he would afterwards insist that clean home and family had to be the way, even down to his sons shoes being daily polished. As for now, things were bad enough that the smell of the house was unbearable, and for such things a prison sentence was in order. Öh dear, such skeletons in the closets are what our families consign to be hidden and never revealed. And although my mother is so uppity about standards and putting on a good show for the neighbours, her own mother, my granny Isabelle, more resembled her own grandmother Maria, sitting around eating and getting chubby while the house fell down around her. My mother has the industrious energy of her Shetland grandmother, Helen Inkster, but as for me, really I am more akin to the Greenwich bunch, like, be happy and stop fussing, and if the neighbours aren't going to love you then f*ck 'em, they're not worth the trouble. So, this seeming dysfunctional ancestry comes closer to home, and potentially uncomfortably so, these Seagrove's being ancestors remembered and spoken of by the elders of my family. 'Dysfunctional' really does end up being a key word for my Greenwich bunch and such is one strand of my inheritance. Being like that still, in some ways, I understand. But it certainly doesn't look good. Family secrets unraveled. Mary Ann being the eldest daughter, I know it from her reminiscences to her grandchildren, that at some point while still young she was labouring hard for the family, and now see this was in effect to keep her mother out of prison. At least once after that event Maria was sentenced to another stint in prison, this having been written of on her children's workhouse records. So now I know the reason, because her children were scruffy and so was her house. Ah, the ancestors; more and more I see that my own challenges are not due to personal trauma, but that this is something inherited. My own granny Isabelle was just about a hermit, unwilling to face the critical world, and I myself had social anxiety to deal with from a young age, along with my own unconcerned scruffiness and unwillingness to adhere to the great taken for granted standards. I weave my own philosophies and moral consciousness through it all, finding my solace in nature, in being natural. After all, others strictly imposed world views are not only unforgiving but also potentially dangerous. AuthorAuthor Susie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. ![]() I've been considering the x's, the passing on of the feminine, into both men and women, having been talking rather interestingly of this with my friend Liz at a ladies luncheon, interestingly on World Ladies Day. The subject relates to a realisation I've just had, on contemplating the strong connection I feel to my deceased nanny Eileen, even though she is not of my matriarchal line, like my granny Isabelle, rather being my fathers mother. So why do I feel her so present? My realisation is that it is down to the X. I have two x's, as science has shown us ladies, men having one X and one Y. One of my x's logically comes from my father, naturally having been passed to him by his mother, my nanny Eileen, as from his father had come only the Y. So my x from my father makes sense suddenly of how it is that I feel the strong presence of my nanny Eileen. And as for the X she had passed to my father, thereafter coming to me, this could have had one of three origins, so I ponder. She'd had two X's to select from, one being from the mystery unknown (as is my theory) father, which in turn comes his own mother, a mystery grandmother. The other X would be from Eileen's half Irish mother Florence Maxted, and that in itself would either have come from her own Irish mother Mary Dolan of Westmeath, or from her father William Maxted's mother, the maybe gypsy Sarah Green. Wow, what new world of contemplation does this now open up, the journeying of the X's. Like, what then are the sources of my own two X's? My own four children wouldn't necessarily get passed down the same one, they getting either the one passed from my nanny Eileen or the X from my own mother. This is suddenly fascinating, not something I'd considered before. Distant cousin DNA matches sometimes have an X marked by them, and what the hell was that about, my poor unmathematical brain so far dismissing even trying to understand that. But now I start to see. Matching to those distant cousin x's, theoretically, one can come to know the source of one's own. Like the X I've got from my mother, which may or may not be the same as my sister got, has to be again of one of three routes, either of my mothers paternal grandmother, Shetlander Helen Inkster, or of a direct matriarchal line from half Irish Mary Ann Seagrove, or from her patriarchal grandfather D'Auvergne's mother Hannah Bean (the latter also being a questionable potentially illegitimate lineage). A new angle for me then, and most interesting. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. I could see that a certain dynamic was in my family ancestry from before I was born, my great Aunty Connie having engineered a kind of exclusion against my granny Isabelle and all for reasons of practicality for which it was considered kosher, for it was on account of Isabelle having had a breakdown that older sister Connie became a substitute mother to my own mum, Joey. In this surely Connie had gloried, as from childhood she had resented her prettier little sister. Connie proved herself useful, not only to the children but also to Isabelle's handsome Scottish husband, Lyall.
Great Aunty Connie was similiar to my own mother in some ways, and Connie was very much like her own mother, Mary Ann, who had come from a humble background in London. These were strong assertive women who were capable of much charm, and were eminently practical. Whereas, as my mother had pointed out, I was more like my granny Isabelle. As I saw it, Isabelle was a totally unapologetic individualist outside of the box, so I didn't mind at all the comparison. And Isabelle was rather like her beloved father D'Auvergne, who was a unique soul from a classier background, a lovely man, kind of lost from how life could have been, with so much unrealised potential, and having a silent kind of nobility. ![]() As I was visiting my mother at Dovercourt, I'd decided to develop more the tree of her partner, Brian. She and I had a chat about my genealogy research, as my son played on the beach, although she doesn't really get why I have such an interest in it. Because it is at a cost and uninteresting to her, she won't join the Geneographic Project to have her DNA looked at, oh, woe is me! How I wish... Still, she spoke to me of her family memories. She spoke of Nanna Bane (Mary Ann Seagrove), who apparently had signed the 'pledge' not to drink alcohol, but when my mum was a girl, Mary Ann would sneakily send her out to get small bottles of brandy. 'It's for medicinal purposes' she would always say. When the family tried to send Mary Ann off to a care home she got hysterical. 'Please don't send me to the workhouse' she wailed, and the ambulance man reassured her if she didn't want it then she wouldn't go, for which Aunty Connie had to keep caring for her. in the light of her families real history with the workhouse, her fear becomes more understandable. The care home had indeed been converted from an old workhouse. Uncle Clive was in his lovely old Harwich house, once the Swan Inn, and I tried to guide our conversation to what his cousin Linda and his Aunt Molly had already talked of, about Clive not really being his fathers son. It was only subtly that I tried doing this and my mother caught on and mouthed 'No, no'. But Clive then brought up the matter himself, having twigged on. He feels nothing in common with his father, he said, and nothing in common with the Welsh side. He still had nothing to go on concerning this, and anyway, he didn't care. He was disinterested. Nor could I get him at all interested in the Genographic project. On consideration though, he looks totally like my father, his eyes, his red hair, his intellect, so that it's hard to believe they could not be full brothers. I looked with Brian more into his genealogy, writing out new family information for him, which he will later type out. I learn more of his family, of his son Mark who lives in Beirut and has a cute half Vietnamese son, of a dodgy stepbrother, and in a photo a dodgy uncle is pointed out. I wanted to look at more genealogy for him, but had to get a good nights sleep ready for the next days trip to London. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. My friends Dale and Audrey had begun tracing their family trees, an idea seeded in them by occasional visits to their house of Mormon elders. Dale had sussed out he was from fishermen Topsoms in Devon. Looking in bookshops with them I got into reading a book myself about tracing the family tree. My lover, Andy, knew already that he was descended from George Washington and the Tolpuddle Martyrs. We all visited a Norwich graveyard so Dale could see his grandparents burial place. When my mum phoned she was telling me what she knew of the family history, of crofters from the Shetland island of Burra and of a London tailors son who ran off with the maid. Along with the Topsom's, I was off to London, arriving at St Catherine's house to delve into the past of our ancestors. This was not much help, as one only had access to the indexes and had to pay £5 for each of the certificates, along with correctly supplied information. Still I could suss out a bit, like that my nanny Eileen's parents had to get married, she having been born around the same time that they got married even!!! We looked through lots of books there till it was throwing out time. On visiting Harwich I visited my granny Isabelle and asker her lots of questions about herself and her parents for my family tree quest. At my parents some days later in Burnham Beeches my godparents Chris and Carol came to visit with Great Aunty Connie, my granny Isabelle's sister. Connie had a keen memory, so I questioned her all about her parents (my great grandparents) and their parents too, and got loads of useful information for my genealogy file. I spent the next morning writing up notes on the family history. Back in Dovercourt, I now grilled my nanny Eileen and pop George for information regarding their family trees. Somehow, through nan's partial reluctance, I got to feel her father was not really her father!!! But how to find out for sure!!! Back in London, Audrey and I spent another day in St Catherine's House, trying to suss out more about our family trees. Then we went to the Census House and I found the 1881 record of my great great grandparents house in Plumstead, Alma House as it was called, which told me that my ancestor Richard Bane had been born in Norfolk; how exciting, as it was in Norwich that I currently lived. Back in Norwich I visited the local studies department in the library to check out their genealogy stuff. They had the Mormon register from which I found out more about the Inksters in the Shetland Isles. Visiting my nanny again I got to look at old family photos and I took some to get copies of.
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