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.
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I had again been looking at my Forest of Dean ancestors who long lived on a hill called the Lonk between Joyford and Berry Hill just a little north of the market town of Coleford, at a time when little children too often burnt to death, having been left unguarded in their homes, and girls got gang raped in the forest byeways, and petty criminals roamed about with notorious reputations and fearsome sobriquets such as The Rough, The Giant, and The Lion. Many catastrophes befell the minors who worked underground. And all such things I was discovering from trawling through old newspapers. In 1836, at the Bennets coal mine, six men were ascending from the depths, in a lift known as a skip, when the rope pulling this upwards broke and the skip went hurtling down. Two Harold brothers and two Blanche brothers died on the spot, their corpses mangled in a shocking manner. For several years afterwards this incident aroused pain in the people of the Forest. Many more incidents would follow, generally of massive rocks falling upon the miners and crushing them, and one man even being scalped by the sharp edges of one such rock. Of girls being gang raped, concern was expressed in the Gloucestershire Chronicle, that 'we sincerely trust' the rapists 'will be made an example of and this species of offence, so rife in the Forest, will recieve so wholesome a check that innocent females may once again walk forth on the highways of her majesty in their accustomed safety and confidence in the proper feeling of the locality and the protection of the laws of our happy constitution and country.' And of little children catching fire: 'Such frequent repetitions of melancholy accidents of of this nature show the necessity of extreme vigilance on the part of those who have the care of children.'
![]() One of my projects right now is a friend Debbie's genealogy, in which there is a sudden discovery of the early tragedies of her ancestral coal miners. Her ancestor Ralph Waggett perished with his grandsons in Wallsend Colliery, Northumberland, fourteen years after two of his nephews had died in the same pit, all explosions being from seeping gas, back in 1821 and 1835. So much detail is there in the newspapers, including of how the dead were laid in their homes with flowers and evergreens upon them. I researched so much about the Wallsend Colliery for Debbie's genealogy, still so interesting. There were many mining accidents, and other events, and as I had guessed this place having a name such as Wallsend, this was the place at which ended the ancient Hadrians Wall. One game of the feisty young coal miners, when they had to much drink in them, was Apple Snack, for which a group of men would fight one another with their hands tied behind their backs, biting at chins, lips, ears and noses and thereby causing such damage. One lady of this coal mining community was still going strong at the age of 104, all her faculties intact and being maintained by parish handouts. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. ![]() Chatting with Mr Kinsey on Facebook, I offered to do his genealogy; well, that's the kind of thing I do. I've been keen to get stuck into a new challenge. Some family history he already knows, which his sister has looked at, though there are places where she'd got stuck. Like me, he has Shetlanders, who had moved to Scotland and then England. So, now I absorbed myself in his tree. He was so surprised that while we were still chatting, I could come up with his town of birth and his mothers middle name, in which I was blowing his mind, it being as if I had magic powers. Mr Kinsey was a Derbyshire lad, from Shardlow, 'of peasants' he says. The next day, and I'm blowing Mr Kinsey's mind yet again, as I had quickly discovered so much about his Scottish side, which the research of his family members had not. For his great great grandfather, Ninian Jamieson, there had been a terrible lime quarrying accident, from which he died, which was well recorded in the Scottish newspaper. His son Thomas, Mr Kinsey's great grandfather, was also in the accident but had survived. One of three explosives had not gone off and after it had been rained on, deeming it safer to approach, father and son were hacking at the explosive with metal tools, when by fluke a spark generated by the striking of the metal blasted the gunpowder. I carried on working out Mr Kinsey's genealogy and but a couple of days later had discovered, incredibly, yet another fatal lime-works accident in his family history, this time at Breedon on the Hill with his great great great grandfather Benjamin Hart, who along with three other men had been trying to unblock, with sticks, the contents of a lime kiln, when all fell upon them, a cloud of fire and sulphur, burning off their clothes and just about burning them alive. So, it is that both his paternal grandparents Benjamin Hart Kinsey and Mary Jamieson are descended from people who died in terrible lime works accidents. Mr Kinsey now reveals that he is an artist and would like to do a painting for me in gratitude for what I have done for him. On Saatchi Art are displayed great works of his, of urban, peeling posters, and portraits of blues singers. He'll be the first person whose tree I've done who has offered me something in return. He is inspired by the loneliness and isolation to be found within cities and some of his work is on permanent display in Paris, Marseilles, and Lyon. Researching more for Mr Kinsey, he who I now see has descended from people of fatal mining accidents, I find some story from olden days which is somewhat strange. The father of Ninian Jamieson, or rather the potential father, of right surname, time and place, in the hamlet of Craigie in Ayrshire, well, this Jamieson man, whose name was not specified, he had been paid to demolish an ancient cairn, known as the Witches Stone, and this having been as a sacrilege, the farmers wife who had demanded that this be done went blind, and Mr Jamieson himself had fallen into alcohol and ruin. How uncanny. The curse of the Witches Stone, so it may appear, had passed to his son, in that dreadful recorded quarrying accident. What coincidence. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. ![]() I have buried myself into the research of my daughters friend Rosie's genealogy and am doing well, breaking past walls with good detective work. This I started as the girls sat at the table by me, or rather enriching what I had already begun looking at before. As I looked at it, I asked Rosie what she knew of her family, and the girls were quite amazed, as that very day they had been discussing asking me to look up such things for her. A couple of days later, I messaged Rosie a newspaper clip about one of her ancestors having bred a four legged chicken, this having been enough to get him in the papers. These Mosses on her fathers side were long time traders of Liverpool, and one of the family, an uncle, Alexander Mosses, was a famous portrait artist there. There were sailors in Rosie's family too. One article that I found was of a Davies who married a Mercer, good detective work here. She'd been a widow already when she married, and patiently I tracked down that she was originally a Williams. Her first husband, a Davies, was a sailor who died at sea aged only 28, washed overboard in a gale somewhere between Newfoundland and Lisbon. The supplementation of newspaper research is such an invaluable bonus to genealogy research, bringing all so much more to animation. I am totally fascinated by all such things. Reabsorbing myself in Rosie's genealogy, I found a scoop, as one might say, paying off for all the hard work, a death too early of a Kellett, and what from, but a coal mining tragedy. There in the newspapers, in all it's detail, is the story of him being run over by fast descending corves. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. |
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