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.
0 Comments
I took bread and kombucha as a gift to Mac and his son Elvis who were staying in a red van in the village parking. Mac told me one of his ancestors was a Red indian. Ah, a new genealogy project for me then. I did find the said ancestor, Mac's great grandfather Herbert Lee Thomas, of Barrington Passage in Canada. It did indeed say on his earliest census that he was adopted. Apparently Mac's mother and aunt had travelled to Canada to find out anything of this mysterious forebear. Not only did Mac busk Beatles songs, but he was a McCartney and my own son was a George Harrison. And yet, interestingly, from the first moment of working on Mac's genealogy I was not able to even find Mac's birth, let alone anyone else on his paternal line. The said Red Indian was on his mothers side, all standard enough to look into. This was rather strange, to put a known birth with location and name into a search engine and yet nothing coming up. This I resolved eventually by using only Mac's first names 'Derek Alan' minus a surname, but with the place, date and mothers maiden name 'Thomas' and what came up was not a McCartney at all but a Murphy! Mac, although not having confessed it to me, had at some point changed his surname, and I'd sussed this! As I saw his own father had died still a Murphy. This paternal side was Irish through and through, they being settlers in Cleator Moor's 'Little Ireland' in the Lake District, being refugees from the potato famine. So Mac was really a Derek Murphy! And he was so very Irish, regardless that he had a cultured English accent. There was one ancestor born in Bangalore in India, but into an Irish family, they having for long served in the British army. This particular ancestor, Robert Colclough, spoke fluent Hindustani and on settling in London became the keeper of the maze at Hampton Court. Roberts aunt, who had survived the Indian mutiny, was in London too, she being a member of staff in Queen Victoria's household. Robert Colclough had quite a reputation for his knowledge of Hindustani, he having conversed with ease with the Indian troops when they were stationed at Home Park during Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and during the coronations of King Edward and King George. Roberts family had lent ten of it's members to the British army, spanning four generations and totalling a service of 167 years, the others being his grandfather, father, four brothers and three of his sons. One of the sons, James Colclough, was Mac's great grandfather, who was in Egypt as a drummer in the Dublin Fusiliers.
![]() I brushed up on my Irish-Greenwich matriarchal project file, happily absorbed in what I do, writing, researching, making collage, cutting and gluing; 'my school work' as I call it. A Passion for Genealogy - The Research of Susie Harrison. The london-Irish Ancestry part of my grandmother Isabelle Bane's family tree. I made a Kerry Irish collage and looked more at the story of the famine that my ancestors just had to escape. Accounts I find do have a certain watered down perspective of oppressor versus oppressed, but I feel there are two more considerations, one being that historic times always had a certain ruthlessness and in-humanitarian influence, non-acceptable today and so all the more shocking to us; but also, there were vicious circles here at play, clouding the part of any supposed innocents, with the existence of heavy drinking and all its family, social and financial consequences. No more brutal on Roman Catholics were the overlords in Ireland, than had been so in Britain, where the old religion was purged completely. Naturally, stern divisions had come into being. But, also, the personal self-destruction of alcohol afforded little hope for the greater community to ever gain respect and credibility, whatever the root differences. It's easier to just blame and be angry and continue drinking. Local Roman Catholic landlords, not even Protestant, were as bad as any absentee Protestant aristocrat, the latter being out of touch with the real world on an earthy level, and so were maybe worse and more culpable. I did find a more honest account by an actual Irishman on the alcoholic problem the Irish have such a propensity for. I looked to find out more about this. I was curious. The history I'd so far found said that the Irish, before the potato famine, simply drank water, and elsewhere it was stated they had a soured yoghurty drink. There was no mention of alcohol. So I had put this in my file, thinking the drink problem the Irish were famed for thus arose in consequence of the horrors of the potato famine. And it takes an Irishman to be honest about it all and say such alcoholism and its destructive effects had long gone on. Potatoes were not only the sustenance of the peasants, but also their peril, as from it they distilled hard alcohol. This drink was home distilled 'poiton'. If one removes the t, and replaces but one letter, one gets 'poison'. Gallons of such Irish whiskey were made, every second cottage or so manufacturing it. They drank to their detriment. When one is poor, it does always amaze me, that important finance or nourishment gets put into alcohol, for which there is a neglect of children and or wives, although women drank hard too. With large families, plenty of unemployed single men were up to no good, the 'bachelor group' as they were called, defining their manhood with hard drinking and fighting. Communities even expected this of them and supported them in it. Evicted tenants formed early guerrilla groups, such as the White Boys, carrying out terrorist activities in the nights, fuelled by their plentiful consumption of poiton and aggressive bravado, targeting landlords and any others suspected to collude with the British colonials. And, yes, they were born into abominable conditions, as peasants were pretty much in any part of the world. They were exploited as tenants, or cottiers, at any moment to suffer eviction. Sufferings make a path to drink, so that even by this the imagery is fulfilled of a people who are vulgar and uncivilised. They chose panacea in something that would not give them that, which would make all even more dreadful. With the catastrophic appearance of the potato blight starvation and disease now preyed upon them. There had already been such precarious balance in their ways of life. The lumper potatoes yielded high, but didn't mature until the autumn. Though stored potatoes kept families going right up till the end of spring, the crop then became inedible, and so began what was known as the 'summer hunger'. Those who had a little wherewithal would buy from dealers oats and barley to see them through to potato harvesting time. Those from poorer families sought different solutions, their menfolk seeking temporary work in the fields of England, while their women and children stayed behind begging along the roadsides. I can't know precisely what my own Sugrue's and Sheehan's experienced in all these regards, but I see in their new life in Greenwich they were far from finding a utopia, bringing along their own habit to drink and to inadequately function as families. The British both let them down, by bad policy in Ireland, and welcomed them, both friend and foe. Not in any of the newspaper articles of their dramas was it ever mentioned that they were Irish immigrants. They could have assimilated better if not for chronic drunkenness. For this, Irish families had a long hard journey ahead of them. It is almost as if there has been a biological propensity to drink, regardless of circumstance. All the Irish expats I have met in France are atrocious alcoholics. Alcohol is no way but the sole path of the Irish, but as a report has shown, 54% of Irish admit to harmful or risky drinking, compared to a European average of 28%. The Irish blood is in many of us, which I know from all the genealogy I've done for friends. I have long been teetotal. I have always wondered at the Irish and their heavy drinking. It's so stereotypical that we are not really supposed to by fairness ever mention it. But maybe this story requires some honesty. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. So I have ancestral places to visit, Greenwich in London, as well as County Kerry in Ireland. It was the infamous potato famine which drove my Irish ancestors, Bartholomew and Catherine Sugrue, away from their homeland, there where the poor people were starving, diseased, thrown out of their tenancies, for which they'd paid far too much rent anyway to their blood sucking Anglo Irish landlords. The Irish lived in hovels, with no beds, no blankets, and only potatoes to eat. Of course we do love potatoes, but the blight came from America and the potato crops were ruined. The older people stuck it out through such famines, whereas younger family members fled. These masses of famine fleeing Roman Catholic Irish, arriving in England, had never a birth registration system, and were illiterate and so poor, and even in England they didn't get their children's births registered, although they would have been baptised into their own faith, hence why there are no birth records for any of Bartholomew's children, including for my Thomas, which explains the never ever findable birth certificate. Learning of the Sugrue's permits me to aknowledge more, and accept, a greater part of myself. I feel it, understand, how in my own life I have made friends with 'lost souls', have accepted handouts, and been so 'laid back' and undisciplined. The living conditions of my ancestor Bartholomew Sugrue did shock, but what of mine? I am the eternal student, unconcerned with societies normal neurotic rules, natural I would say. And sleeping on a floor with a cover, what's really so wrong with that. Illnesses come, fevers, and one trusts the body to get through it. I feel Bartholomew was harshly judged by busy-bodies. Yes, he drank alcohol, and so does most of my village. His wife had been dragged off to prison for something her daughter had done, and anyway children do go through phases of stealing, some of them. I did. She likely did not know the purse was stolen till Hannah handed it to her, then just had to try and protect her child from the consequences. Another daughter, young Catherine, she saw coal and took it for the cold. Young James mucked about with some rope another boy had lifted. The Irish way was far more natural and earthy and unfussy. In England life was different. I shall make excuses for my ancestors. I know well how hurtful it is to be judged and condemned, like them. In taking a mother away from her children the powers that be also created this tragedy of Edmund's loss of life. And this at a time when disease was more rife and children died so much more easily. So though I have found shocking write-ups in the papers I shall not look on it with the same eyes, I shall be more understanding. These people had already been through so much, with their extreme poverty and famine in Ireland. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. |
AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Categories
All
|