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.'
0 Comments
I was so getting into genealogy researach, and not even my own. Rather, as an intellectual challenge, a detective challenge, I was updating my friend' Jare's alias Nitai's tree, pushing back the boundaries. And this was well interesting, for its involvment if early immigration to Australia, of both convicts and free settlers. One of Nitai's ancestors was Jesse Froy, born illegtimate in Hitchin, Hartfordshire in 1819, son of his mother Martha Froy. He was at first a soldier in the 11th Regiment, sent to various barracks, in Devon, Northamptonshire and Kent, the latter place where he met his Irish sweetheart, Mary Malone. From Chatham in Kent the soldiers were sent to guard convicts in Van Diemans Land (Tasmania). Jesse made sure to return to Kent to marry Mary and then took her back to Australia, travelling there on the ship Ramilies, and they making a life together in Sydney, having many children, nearly all boys. Jesse took to drink, spending his evenings in the pub, and in time no more cared for his wife and children, so that he was even prosecuted for neglecting and abandoning them. For this he spent one month in prison, from the records of which we get a detailed description of him. He was a little over 5ft 10, could read and write, had dark brown hair and hazel eyes, sallow skin and a stout build. His trade was gardening, he was a protestant, and he had various tattoos, which included a flower and love hearts. In 1859, one of Jesse's drinking mates, his Irish former convict neighbour, Hugh Glenn, murdered his wife Ann, also an Irish immigrant former convict, in a drunken rage, whacking her hard with his homemade broomsticks. Jesse's wife, Mary, heard all this going on through the wall. Hugh's landlord's son, who'd been staying with the Glenn's while his parents were away, and who had seen the beginning of the attack, ran for refuge to Mary's house. Mary was too afraid to intervene. After killing his wife, Hugh came to Mary with blood on him; saying to come and see that he had found his wife dead, faking that he had just found her like that. But Mary knew well the truth. Instead of going straight with him to his house, she first went to the pub to alert her husband to what had happened, for which Jesse and others of the pub went to Hugh's house and saw that Ann truly was dead. Both Mary and the landlords son testified against Hugh and he was found guilty. It was a year after that incident, in 1860, that Jesse Froy was himself prosecuted for neglecting his family. He was apprehended in the Waverley Tea Gardens Hotel in the act of 'tossing off a pint of ale'. His children had been begging and sleeping rough, 'in the bush', one boy found sheltering in a 'delapidated fowl house', and at another time sleeping in a toilet. They would sleep in the bush, by the roadside and in outhouses. When Jesse was pulled up on this he declared that his wife Mary was as much to blame as himself and that he neither knew nor cared anything about the children. Mary was found to be at home with their latest baby, aged but 4 months. Of Jesses it was said 'he never seemed to have any business to attend to, continually loitering about the pubs' and that he was 'a worthless dissipated fellow'. His family were known to be in a wretched state, begging for food. Jesse and Mary's son George Froy married Jessie the daughter of a convict John Edwards. This John Edwards had arrived in Australia in 1814 from Liverpool on the ship Parmelia. His job in Liverpool was making ropes and he had been sentenced there, at the age of 18, to 14 years transportation for stealing 'silver plate'. Ad records do state, he had a ruddy freckled complexion and sandy red hair, grey eyes, could read and write, was a protestant, and he aldo had tattoos of a loveheart and darts and anchors and stars, as well as a blue ring tattooed on the middle ad fourth fingers of his left hand. He was held at the Australian penal settlement of Port Macquarie. In 1842 John sought permission, as a convict, to marry Agnes Thompson, who was a free immigrant, and three years later attained his certificate of freedom. Agnes was a Scots girl from Glasgow. She had travelled out to Australia, at the age of 22, in the care of an aunt and uncle, on the ship Trinidad. Back in Glasgow she had been a nursemaid, living in with a family while looking after their young children. She could read and write, her religion was 'independant' and she was in good health. Agnes and John married at Port Macquarie, known for its penal colony. This colony's distance from Sydney had made it ideal as a place of punishment for 'convicts of the worse character'. Wheever those convicts escaped into the bush, they were taken back by aboriginees in return for blankets and tobacco. Disabled convicts were also placed here, men with wooden legs, one armed or blind. Really the penal settlement had done its time when John arrived, only 'special's in small number being kept there, and free settlers like Agnes and her relatives were now interested to make a life there. On gaining freedom, John and Agnes lovde to Moruya and then to the McCleay River where they put down roots, John being a tenant farmer at Austral Eden on the Lower McCleay. The Edwards family saw much tragedy. John died of pneumonia at the age of 44 and Agnes drowned at the age of 45. As an orphan, Jessie, aged just ten years old, had to be raised by another family. It was Jessie and George Froy's daughter Agnes Lilian, who married John Edward Young, a plumber of Irish origin who had arrived with his parents, George Young and Jane Gilmore on the ship Pericles in 1878, they being farm labourers from the Bailieborough region of Cavan, Ireland, Wesleyan Methodists who had married in a Presbyterian church, so not your general catholic Irish.
John Young and Agnes Lilian's son, George Gilmore Young, married Mary Jane Barker, who had emigrated from Sunderland to Australia at the age of ten with her family. Her father, Christopher Barker, a boilermaker by trade, served in the first world war, getting mumps while on the ship journey from Australia back to England, and then while fighting in France suffered such bad gunshot wounds to his face that he needed plastic surgery. Ella May was so hoping I could find her a close Irish ancestor, through the man who had adopted her as a baby, who had the Irish surname of Quinn; but, as I did research there and then, there wasn't an authentic Irish birth in this male lineage until as far back as a great-great, this being John Quinn, a prison warden.
Not good enough for a get out of Brexit clause then. Much like my own Irish great-great, Mary Dolan of Westmeath; just a step too far. I got stuck into some new genealogy, having at market offered to do Tim R's genealogy; some one else had done it, he said; maybe I could find out more interesting stuff, I offered. He was mulling on that. So I was eagerly awaiting some detail to get started, but then realised I needed nothing by my skill, after all I knew he was from Beccles and his age, and with but this little amount of knowledge I easily zapped back along his ancestry tree just by myself. Half of T's family was from Beccles in Suffolk, and the other half, the Revells, were from Norwich. Ah, the city I myself had lived in as a child. It was in looking back more and more through the Norwich records that I found one Revell's job title to be 'turnkey of the castle'. Well, what was that? As I discovered, a turnkey was a jailor. T's ancestor was a jailor at the Norwich castle! Fascinating, his name being Robert Revell. One can wonder at people who choose such professions.
During Robert's time at the castle, one of the turnkeys there, no name being given, was accused of having used the cat-o-nine tails on some unruly girl prisoners, although later this was refuted. Later, Robert's name was in the papers for being a local hero, he and other men saving the lives of women and children caught up in a gunpowder explosion. 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 researched old newspapers for details about the Poplar workhouse which my ancestor Bartholomew Sugrue had so often been passed onto for hard labour and strict discipline and a diet of merely bread and water, all designed to discourage the able bodied from seeking parish relief. Some people in those days were saying that prison was preferable to landing up in that workhouse. There were two hard labour tasks at Poplar, indeed just as prisoners in jails were made to do, which was the breaking of rocks and the unpicking of oakum rope. Those who could not fulfill their daily quotas were not to clock off at five like the others, but had to carry on with even extra work added till eight, or else would be hauled before a magistrate to be punished with a short spell in prison. One magistrate, who refused to imprison one lady who had not fulfilled her oakum quota, but rather was feeling pity for her, declared that such punitive degrading work was not right to be given to one who simply by misfortune had come seeking aid. The papers after shamed that very magistrate for his weakness in sympathising with unruly paupers, for those who were part of the 'Poplar Test', which a board of guardians had decreed as an experiment to cut the numbers and costs for those formerly given extra out assistance in their own homes. Of oakum unravelling, Oscar Wilde had written, 'We tore the tarry rope to shreds, with blunt and bleeding nails', his experience being in a prison, not a workhouse but ultimately not so different. AuthorAuthor Susie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. 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 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. ![]() I have been looking up more interesting newspaper articles, this time for my older children's paternal half of their family, and I have found, as on my own side, another trial for manslaughter of a child. How curious that both their father and I should have this. I did recall his family having once mentioned this story to me, that my ex's father John's family were part of a cult called the Peculiar People and one ancestor had been imprisoned in following one of the tenets not to give medical aid to the children, but to trust in God only in such matters. One daughter of the family, having already just died from diphtheria, so then did a young son. All medical advice and concern regarding the boy had been ignored, for which a small prison sentence was in order. And again this was, like my own families situation, a case which interested the whole of Britain, different circumstances, but a similar story all the same. The imprisoned father of these perished children was called Thomas John Whale, a grandfather to my ex's paternal grandmother. I looked more into my ex's ancestral manslaughter charge, laptop before me. I could even see something of my ex in this man, a family trait. Contradictions, the denials of something formerly said, one moment pursuing strategy, another time self sabotaging. Mr Whale presented to the judge that he had flexibility, adapting his beliefs for better effect, but then on being pressed stubbornly contradicted all that, upholding his conscience, or as the judge called it, his 'superstitions'. For his faith in God, even though his children died, nothing would change his conviction or determination. He put out certain tactics to confuse, even calling for medical help, though ignoring it when it came, as it was mere strategy. Thomas Whale was a staunch cultist, an extremist. This is a most fascinating bit of genealogical history. I studied more of my children's paternal genealogy, finding more relevant newspaper articles, one being of Thomas John Whale giving an interview about his intense religious faith, with his wife saying a little too. Thomas's wifes father, William Benton, had a rebellious youth, setting a haystack on fire after his employer sacked him. Though only 12 years of age, he got one month in prison and a whipping. Later, he was involved in an attempted highway robbery, during which the victim managed to stab him in both chest and neck. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. The British newspaper archives have opened up a whole new world. I keep on seeking articles relating to any of my family, and its not so easy, but I did find a story, this time on my Maxted line. It regarded the death of my ancestor George Maxted of Kent, whose native villages of Pluckley and Hothfield I have been to see (I have to see Westwell too). It was in Hothfield that George died, apparently falling from a haystack, which he was thatching, landing onto a big stick which pierced through his leg and into his bowels. I kept on looking through newspaper articles. Both my Irish Bartholomew Sugrue and his wife Catherine were partial to the bottle, I now read. Oh dear, this gets worse. I mean, here I am seeing drunkard Irish expats in my village, mirroring my own ancestors. It's a shock indeed. And yet another of their children had been caught stealing, James Sugrue, during the case of which it was mentioned that another of his brothers was already in prison. It's impossible to gloss any of this over, I have very dysfunctional family roots, part of a vast melange, from royal privilege to utter desolation. I had a browse for my friends genealogies too. For Akila I found family divorces, for Trebha, his grandfather being caught with stolen fish, Jeremy's drunkards, and Liz's posh side. To find all was so compelling. This is time consuming too, as genealogy is anyway. I sought more old family newspaper articles. So long one looks, coming up with nothing, and then a gem flashes up. I found the death inquest for one of my ancestresses, Maria Ann Harrison of Greenwich, already a widow, who had dropped dead after complaining of a bilious attack. Every organ in her body was said to be diseased. This, it was claimed, was in consequence of her intemperance. Oh dear, another one. A heart attack caused her death, such was the verdict. 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
|