Marc Sirota turned up to fix some of my broken floor tiles, and while he was doing that, he having in conversation mentioned that his maternal granddad once had had an apothecary in Garstang, I looked up on my iphone what I could find more on this for him. And indeed I came up with much information. The name I first had to discover, Henry Copeland Thomas. Henry was a rich and successful man. As Marc knew, Henry had been a cheat, having children secretly with other women, and he was a gambler who left his family destitute when he died. He had perished young, at the age of 44, collapsing on the bathroom floor. He was a freemason, traumatised in France during the Great War, a cricketer, a pigeon breeder and a fisherman, involved with this and that local association, his uncle being the Mayor of Rochdale. His father, Joseph Thomas, was the breeder of the Lady Egg-a-Day chicken. The apothecary had already been in the family for 100 years, since it was acquired by granddad Jonathan Jowett Thomas. Why was the family left destitute? As I found out from Henry's will, all his money had been left to William Astbury, a retired builder. Such money would have equated to nearly 3 million pounds today. When Marc went I spent some time looking more at this line of his family. I'd researched previously his fathers Jewish lineage, but not as yet his mothers side. One of his ancestresses of Garstang, whose lineage I looked into, came from a family of hatters and felters, descended from Quaker families.
0 Comments
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.'
I met Darren, who was my daughter Eleanors boyfriend. He had some tattoos, both gentle and strong, from Basildon in Essex. As I would see, on beginning to suss out his genealogy, as of course I would, with him phoning his parents for information, he was descended from lorry drivers and even they were from the same areas of London as our own ancestors, that is Greenwich (well, Lewisham really) and Lambeth. There were many Londoners in general in his genealogy. One, edward Ryde of Isleworth, was even an undertaker. One ancestress, Esther York, looked of interest for having had two children out of wedlock. Still single at the age of 30, her youngest child, by then five, at last was baptised. I wonder, did her then husband, Edward Ryde, even know about her children, who certainly weren't living with them upon the beginning of their married life together. These were the days of 'skeletons in the cupboards', when it was shameful of one didn't tow the line with what was considered 'normality'. And there were Stafford ancestors not sending their children to school (which as I have seen was actually pretty normal) and one Stafford lad getting smallpox for which he was shut up in the pest house, as were other smallpox sufferers. There were a couple of drunkard ancestors in Warminster who were much in the papers for their shennagins. One of these fellows even died from fighting with his nephew after a drunken altercation in the pub. The landlord had told them to take their quarrel outside, whereon they had fallen into a quarry and the nehew, Uriah, had savagely stamped on his uncles chest. He was acquitted of murder, though, because the specifically fatal injuries could rather have come from falling into the quarry. Another Warminster ancestor, along with his pals, was into dog drawn carts (which was illegal and for which they all got in trouble). He cared not for societies rules and was in and out of gaol. He was a chimney sweep and even got int trouble for using one of his sons (who was underage) to climb the chimneys (which had also been made illegal). They were a fighting hard-drinking bunch. More scandal I found in Darrens family, there being an ancestor who was a philanderer and an adulterer, Charles William Allett, who had children by many women. One of his ladies was Darrens ancestress, Elizabeth Ann Smith who had four sons with him, all out of wedlock. It was of quite some interest to unravel his story.
I was absorbed in another genealogy, for Ollie, a friend from sixth form days who I had recently reconnected with on facebook. Stuart Alcock was his full name. In his family there was a story about them being related to Howard Carter who had discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun. As I saw from my research, Ollie's was a family full of illegitimacies from way back to a Susan Stagg who had been locked up for being a lewd woman. She had a whole brood of little fatherless kids, being a pioneer single mother. Such rebellion carried all the way down to modern times, with the men of the family marrying girls who already had fatherless children. Even Susan's daughters and granddaughters had followed this trend.
One tragic family story, as always there was at least one, was of Ollie's ancestress, Louisa, newly married with a baby, who aged 20 fell down some stairs and died, which was said to be due to an epileptic fit. Ollie's mother knew of this and had told him that after Louisa died her husband, Robert Carter, caused a scandal by running off with a 16 year old. And there was the usual stuff one finds, like families getting fined for not sending their children to school. The Carters of the family may or may not have been related to Howard Carter who found the tomb of Tutankhamun, but it is to be seen that one member of the family was given the middle name of Phoenix. The only thing was, although all did have links with Swaffham, Howard Carter's people were rich and Ollie's were all pool labourers; so maybe all was but wishful thinking. One could not know, and then were there not plenty of anonymous biological fathers in this Norfolk family, so maybe... 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. |
AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Categories
All
|