I buried myself into some genealogy, my quest being to try and find out at last what are the origins of my Greenwich waterman great great grandfather Thomas Seagrove. And although I have many times looked into this to no avail, this time I made the breakthrough, which was really quite amazing. My granny Isabelle did once tell me that the Seagrove surname may have been changed from something sounding like Shugrue. Previously I had looked at one character of the right time, name and place, Bartholomew Sugrue, who did indeed have a son called Thomas. But, on Thomas's marriage certificate he had written his fathers name was James Seagrove and that he was a fisherman, not a match then for this Bartholomew who was a labourer. I decided now, regardless of the contrary detail, to look again at this figure, Bartholomew Sugrue. He was an Irish immigrant from County Kerry, who had married another Irish immigrant, Catherine Sheehan. In later years he was in and out of the workhouse, every time being transferred from Greenwich to Poplar to do hard labour, a frequent way to get a small financial means to then send to his family. It was in looking up his workhouse admissions that I then saw it, the defining proof, the missing link. There it was, written on record that his next of kin was a son who lived at 9 Kitsons Terrace, exactly the time that I knew my ancestor Thomas Seagrove had been living there. In another workhouse entry I then saw the sons actual first name recorded, not with a surname: Thomas. So it is that I now know I have Irish ancestry, not only of Westmeath, but of County Kerry too, that part of the country famed for its friendly dolphin at Dingle. This was most exciting and I spent much of the rest of the day researching Bartholomew Sugrue. He lived on the marshy peninsula where now sits the Millenium Dome. It was his son then, Thomas, who married Maria Harrison, and their daughter Mary Ann who married D'Auvergne Bane, who had granny Isabelle, who had my mother, who had me. Returning to look at my newfound Irish Sugrue family, I discovered that not only was Bartholomew continually in and out of the workhouse, but that at one time his children were too, including his son Thomas, my great great grandfather, who at that time was 11 years old and still a Sugrue. And I discover why. At that time their mother, my very ancestress Catherine (neé Sheehan) had been put in prison for a year for stealing from someone. Her daughter Ann had helped her in this theft and had also been found guilty, punished with 14 days of prison followed by four years in a reformatory school. This was interesting to discover as I myself went through a phase of stealing as a child, and there it is in our family history. They lived in such desperate times, in which Bartholomew frequently subjected himself to stints of hard labour away from his family, to enable their survival. I do feel upset for these sentences imposed on Catherine and her daughter, who simply needed to survive and feed a whole brood of children, to keep all alive and healthy, in times of no modern social support system. Bartholomew died in the Greenwich workhouse. It was as much a home to him as anywhere else. He had been married to someone before Catherine, another Irish girl, Ellen Sullivan, but within three years of being together she had died. Maybe Thomas took the name Seagrove to distance himself from the sorry degradation of his Irish immigrant status; maybe Maria his wife had wished that. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees.
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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. My godfather Chris, my mums cousin, sent me photocopies of the wartime passes of my great grandparents, D'Auvergne and Mary Ann Bane. Both blue eyed, he fair haired, she a brunette. And photos of them are on there, wow. A photo of Mary, other than as an old lady. I can see that her son, my great uncle Dick, takes after her in his looks. As the photos were unclear I wrote to Chris asking if it was possible to get clearer ones. Its so good to receive something like this. I was genealogised out though by the end of the day. I need a break from it. My mother is keen to get those wartime passes off Chris to donate to the Harwich Historical Society. On the passes, it had mentioned that four of Mary Ann's brothers were fighting in the war. I sent both mum and Chris information of how one of them had died, Ernest Seagrove, on the continent from war wounds while in action. Trying to find anymore on him or his family, I indeed found information that quite surprised me. Well, firstly I saw that two of the other brothers, Philip and John, having survived the first world war, perished during the second world war, along with Susan, the wife of James, another of the brothers, all on the same day in their homes in Greenwich, being next door neighbours, bombed by the Germans, wartime civilian deaths. And not only did I find this out, I was shocked to discover that Mary's mother, Maria, had in the year of 1900 been destitute, so that she and her children had to resort a few times to the workhouse, with no sign of Thomas whose duty it was to support them and keep them alive. A note was there, in one of the workhouse entries, for young Ernest, saying that his mother was in prison. Oh, what a shock it was to see that. If indeed it was true it could not have been for long, because the next time the children were recorded as being in the workhouse, due to apparently having been home alone with no parents around, Maria turned up but an hour later to take them back home with her. This is all very curious. Like, what was Thomas up to in abandoning them for a year, and how desperate Maria must have been to not only keep going to the workhouse, but also to get on the wrong side of the law. There is quite a story there, if only one could know more. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. |
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