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 got back into some serious genealogy, not for the Jehovah's Witnesses, but for myself. One thing I sometimes do is to go back and look at my research and see if there is anything more I have missed there. So I go back to my impoverished Greenwich ancestors and indeed I discover more. The Kentish Mercury newspaper is a great revelation here, as I at last suss that's where many Greenwich stories, scandals and crimes are posted. The traumatic life of my Sugrue's gets embellished all the more, via a report I'd not seen before, of the inquest upon little Edmund Sugrue's death. In this I find out at last that his father Bartholomew's line of work was assistant to a bricklayer, and even who he worked for, a Mr Pound. Because Edmund was so small Bartholomew pretended at the inquest that his son was much younger, but on producing vaccination certificates it was realised he'd been lying. He admitted that he was one to drink and that since his wife was imprisoned this had escalated. And I found out more, from five years later, when the Sugrue family were living in a cottage by the Ship and Billet pub. The cottages there, six in total, were dilapidated, burnt out and vandalised, and were considered dangerous structures, and the people living in them were considered squatters for they paid no rent. Bartholomew Sugrue was specifically referred to as a 'squatter'. These squatters, which included a lone old Irish family, were all ordered to do up their cottages, described as having black walls, broken stairways and smashed in closets, or to vacate their homes, and naturally they were too poor to pay for such things, but still they dug their heels in and refused to be moved. As for Bartholomew's son, Thomas, my ancestor, I have seen that two of his own sons married two sisters, who were daughters of Robert Choat, a night-shift gas worker, who died in his 40's when returning home in a train from the Epsom races, having had a quarrel in his carriage with a well known boxer, Pedlar Palmer, being knocked unconscious by two punches to the side of the face. He died at Purley station, having been removed from the train onto its platform. So, there was a newspaper article all about that. And there were a couple of articles about my ancestor, John William Harrison's boat being stolen, taken for a ride by drunks who afterwards smashed it up. Also I saw that towards the end of his life Bartholomew Sugrue fell over a low fence along the Thames river and very nearly died from the fall. So plenty of family embellishment was there. 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
|