Genealogy, so time consuming, much to look at, and often nothing to find. and then hurray, a little treasure of information presents itself. In my case it was discovering that my Irish Greenwich based Bartholomew Sugrue was godfather to another families child. Bartholomew the Godfather. Godparents are never, as yet, included in transcriptions, for which this was really quite a find. Getting to such a find involves a whole lot of detective work which could lead nowhere. Here, it was from looking at the lives of those who had been godparents to Bartholomew's own children and looking up their own family records. The Graney family, also from Ireland and settled in Greenwich, had been godparents in 1860 to Bartholomew's daughter, Catherine, registered in the baptisms of the Roman Catholic records of Our Lady Star Of The Sea, at Greenwich, when she was just over a year in age. And then, such joy for me, like really, to find that the very next year, in 1861, our Bartholomew was in turn a godparent to the Graney's son, William Joseph Graney. Of this Graney family, friends to the Sugrues, the head of the household, John Graney, worked with Bartholomew in the building trade, and his wife, Mary Graney, née Kane, I saw that by 1881 she was a widow, just about surviving as a hawker on the streets, and interestingly her place of origin was listed, maybe being another clue to the Sugrue families own origins, all being from County Kerry, her hometown being Castleisland at the beginning of the Vale of Tralee, a town surrounded by hills and boglands, atop a vast cave system known as Crag Cave, within which were the underground waters of the Green Lake. Ah, I have tried and tried, and yet have never found a baptism in Ireland for Bartholomew Sugrue, for which I wonder if his family were travellers, not bothering with the system and its obligations; like it's so that Bartholomew never bothered legally registering his children births when living in Greenwich, even though by law one had to do so. And then again, some of the Irish settlers appear to have used alternative names, such as Garrett London, who was a godfather for Bartholomew's son Daniel in 1857 and yet called himself Garrett Barry in the 1851 census. And at the time of the marriage of Bartholomew's grown up son, Thomas (my ancestor), instead of giving his fathers name as Bartholomew Sugrue, Thomas said he was James Seagrove, although we can surmise that by then Thomas wished to disassociate from his fathers scandals. This family continues to fascinate me, and the next day I happily found out more about the Sugrues. I'd not realised it before, but Bartholomew's close friend, Patrick Reardon, who had been best man at his wedding to his first wife Ellen Sullivan, was actually his brother in law, Ellen being none other than Bartholomew's sister, Ellen Sugrue. This and more I was finding out by grace of the Roman Catholic records of our Lady Star of the Sea on FindMyPast, which I had paid a lot to join for a year, but which was yielding anyway these delightful finds for me. Bartholomew's sister, Ellen, was a few years older than him, and this sibling connection explains how it is that these two families were so entwined. It was in looking at a baptism of Patrick and Ellens daughter Mary Ann Reardon, that I saw a side note saying sub-conditional, which at first I though meant handicapped in some way, but actually it referred to a child that may or may not have been previously baptised. Well, it was on that baptism, that I saw Ellen Reardon's surname prior to marriage revealed: she was a Sugrue. I next found that Bartholomew Sugrues first wife, Ellen Sullivan, was a godmother to Patrick and Ellen Reardon's first child, Helen (Ellen) in 1846. It was three months after that baptism that she and Bartholomew married, and then, as I know, having had one child together, Ann, Ellen became very ill in the summer of 1849 with cholera and died. And as for another of Patrick and Ellen Reardon's children, Catherine, Bartholomew's second wife, Catherine Sheehan, was the baby girls godmother in 1855. I happened now to find the Roman Catholic version of Bartholomew Sugrue's marriage to his first wife, Ellen Sullivan, which had more detail than the official certificate, on account of it giving the names and locations of the couples parents. Ellen Sullivans parents were John and Ellen Sullivan of County Kerry. Bartholomew's parents were Thomas Sugrue (I'd already known he had Thomas as a father) and Joanna, which I had not known, they being of County Kerry. So for all of this I could add two new people to my tree, Joanna as Bartholomew's mother and Ellen as his sister. Sad it was to see that his sister, Ellen, died in 1865 aged 45. Interestingly, in one of the census's Ellen gave her place of birth as Church Hill in County Kerry, at last the best clue yet as to where Bartholomew himself may have been born. The Roman Catholic residents of that village, at the time when they would have been there, attended an old and dilapidated chapel, in nearby Chapeltown.. This was due to the original medieval Roman Catholic Church of their own village, on its splendid old hill, with its fine views of the sea, having been long been supplanted by a protestant church. Back in the 1700's, this whole area had been a place of smuggling and the village itself was a protected archeological site. Eventually Church Hill would have a Roman Catholic Church again , but not till after the Sugrue's would had left for England, the church to be St Marys, Star of the Sea (like the church in Greenwich). Tralee, from where was the lovely folk song I used to sing on the piano, was the nearest sizeable town, 10 klms away. Patrick Reardon himself was from Waterville in County Kerry, and we see now another of the family friends, Mary Kane was from Castleisland. And it's fine enough to piece together information once these folk were in England, but Irish records are still as vague and untraceable as ever.
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I found something of interest, looking again at Roman Catholic baptisms for my Sugrue family in Greenwich, which I'd formerly at last accessed from, yes, FindMyPast at Kew Record Centre. What I now found was another baptised child of the family, hitherto unseen, Carmelita Jane. This baby must not have survived so long. What a super name Bartholomew and Catherine had chosen for her, Carmelita, which derives from Mount Carmel in the Holy Land, which means a beautiful lush garden, essentially the beauty of nature. I do wonder if they had been inspired by the lovely grand gardens of Greenwich, the Greenwich hill being nicknamed by them, and maybe others of the Irish community, Mount Carmel, or so I imagine. Even the godmother chosen for Carmelita had an unusually colourful name, Concetta, a name referring specifically to the immaculate conception.
Back to the time travel/avatars, I now got pictures made, thank you AI, of my great granny Mary Seagrove, alias Nanna Bane.
It's a very interesting story, that of my great great aunt Catherine Sugrue, for her husband Joseph Read proclaiming to be Jack the Ripper, and not only that, and so I made a tikok about her. The story: my great great grandfather, Thomas Seagrove, had a sister, Catherine Sugrue. They were of a very dysfunctional family, totally, in the newspapers for thefts, in prison and in the workhouse. Their father Bartholowe was in and out of the workhouse and died there, coughing up blood from tuberculosis. Catherine got in trouble as a girl, when she saw coal by the riverside and took some, because it was cold and she wanted her family to be warm, they being very poor. Because of this she was taken for the rest of her childhood to a Roman Catholic school for wayward girls run by Saint Francis nuns, a place where destitute children could be guided to a better future. She's a beautiful lady and hers is the only photograph I have of my family from that time. Catherine's life was tragic. She worked in a lead factory and died from the lead poisoning. She herself had described it as 'killing work' and that was what it was indeed. Catherine's husband, Joseph, said there was white powder in his food, which could well have been the lead powder that Catherine would have brought home on her clothes. Joseph went completley crazy and believed himself to be Jack the Ripper. Maybe Catherine believed it too and that's why the white lead was in his food. Joseph was obsessed that he was Jack the Ripper, and that was in 1888, when all those girls were being killed by him, and when Joseph went into the asylum that was the end of it, so who knows. I'm contemplating resuming book writing now and that Bartholomew's Garden should not be about him after all, but about his children and specifically the friendship between brother and sister, Thomas and Catherine, and all their struggles, and yes this Jack the Ripper theme. Well, my astrology hints that I can write books. But can I really?! Even I made a tiktok briefly putting my writing ideas out there, hopefully by this to find motivation, encouragement, guidance, anything by which inspiration may come. For this idea about writing a book, I've had it for a long time now, having the ideas but now knowing how to solidify them into something that would really work as a complete story. As I share on tiktok, I am a genealogist, and I'm finding social history so fascinating, and of how my family had really been in it with their poverty and all the consequences of that, which were quite dramatic. Like I do think this could be an interesting book. I've got two families who became connected in Greenwich. Grandfather Barton was a war hero, from the battle of Trafalgar to Egyptian sea battles, and he ended up his life at the Greenwich hospital and his wife Hannah was a nurse there. It was their daughter Eleanor who was put into an orphanage in Whitechapel in London. She would die of tuberculosis as a young mother, and it was her daughter, Maria, who would make friends with another family, the Sugrue's, who were Irish settlers and who were very scandalous. they had come to England during the potato blight that just was tragic for Ireland. So they'd come to find a new life in London. But their life was full of scandal, really big scandal, one of the littlest children dying when their mother was in prison for theft, and the father being blamed for that, for neglecting his family, the children then being put into the workhouse. The children of these two families, Thomas Sugrue and Maria Harrison, ended up in love and making a life together. Thomas's sister, Catherine, as we have seen, died from lead poisoning in the factory she worked at and as I have also said, her husband was talking of being Jack the Ripper. Despite my inspiration to write a book, it is yet again genealogy work that I deeply immerse in, whereas the book writing I postpone. The fascination for genealogy that I have needs to envelop this book project too and to be non-different from it. On researching a little about Jack the Ripper, looking through old newspapers of the time, one theory proposed for the identity of the killer is that he was a Russian, who before the London killings began, had been doing much the same in Paris, for which he'd been put into an asylum, and upon his release moved to London, which is when the killings began there. His belief was that prostitutes could only atone for their sins by being killed. This theory had been presented in a Russian newspaper, the Novosti, and the man they'd named as Nicolai Vassilyeff. He was born in Tiraspol, it is said. Well I see there were two Tiraspol's, one in Belarus and one in Moldova, but the Moldova is more likely as that is nearer to where he studied in university, at Odessa, in Ukraine. It is said that he was a 'fanatical anarchist'. In the 1870's he had moved to Paris, where he'd become crazy and was placed under restraint. But before being lodged in an asylum, Nicolai murdered several unfortunates in Paris under conditions somewhat similar to those of the Whitehchapel crimes, for which he was arrested and thereby ended up in the asylum. This had happened 16 years previous to the Whitechapel killings. Nicolai, known as the 'Mad Russian', had been dismissed from the asylum as cured, after which he moved to London, moving in with the lower classes of his fellow countrymen. After the first Whitechapel murder Nicolai was lost sight of. This subject I made a popular tiktok about. I was on a roll with this tiktok creativity, making another one talking of Jack the Ripper, again in relation to newspaper articles I was seeing. Jack the Rippers identity is an unsolved mystery that has captivated the imagination up to the current day and in it's own time too. So many crazy stories I was discovering from way back then. One article was about four Spanish sailors being out and about with knives and attacking a woman, who in response was calling out 'Murder', for which four other men came to her rescue, who also got attacked. I read of a Whitechapel gang apprehending one woman, who on coming out of a concert had the company of a man walking along with her for a while, who then grabbed her by the throat and pulled her to a place where there was a gang of both women and ruffian men, the first man holding a knife up against her throat and they all stealing her things. In regard to the article about the Russian possible Jack the Ripper, it is believed by researchers that maybe the story was fabricated or elaborated upon. It's actually difficult to know what information shared at the time was authentic and which was put out by journalists to keep the interest of the public and which was sensationalised.
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 am perusing more the story of my ancestor Bartholomew Sugrue, a life that never stops fascinating me, regardless that it was so tragic. I am so near to completing a great write-up on him, and yet there is always more here and there to discover. When all is full and done then I can begin the book writing. But the Sugrue genealogical presentation naturally takes for ever, so it seems, as such things do. In gathering together workhouse records, I found one I'd not accessed before. This shows how important it is that we go back again and again, looking for any relevant records, and revising and updating accordingly. My Sugrue's had much association with the slum boarding houses of Deptford during their time of destitution. I had seen reference to them as being at 'Pesters', a boarding house run by William Pester, and now by this new record I saw that earlier on they were at 'Freaks', a lodging house run by Charles Freak, all being on Mill Lane. In between these two addresses they were at the Mitre, not the pub of Greenwich I realise, but another Mill Lane boarding house which doubled up as a place selling beer. The total poverty and destitute situation is what led Bartholomew Sugrue to spend most of the rest of his life, from the age of 57 upwards, in workhouses. He and his wife Catherine no longer rented their own home, but were in effect homeless, moving from one boarding house to another. Only the poorest of the poor would ever frequent such places. Despite working so much on expanding Bartholomew Sugrue's write-up, when I print it out, it still seems so lacking. More is needed. I see on Bartholomew's marriage certificates, and who he took in as as lodger, who were his friends, fellow Irish labourers, as is often the way with ex-pats, mixing with their own kind and not integrating with the traditional people. Those surnames of his friends, Reardon and McCarthy, there was much trouble in the community incited by men of such names. Maybe they were brothers of the friends, or cousins. Maybe they were Bartholomew's cousins, all related. These men were often in the papers for their drunken antics, when fights would break out and mobs of hundreds would surround them. This was the company Bartholomew kept, of the wild untamed Irish. He may not even always have been one to drink, but the people around him did that. And, even, with all the deaths from cholera abounding, alcohol was believed to offer protection against this, for which Bartholomew may have encouraged his wife, Catherine, to drink too. There are maybe three other sons they had, who had died when little, which needs checking out: Bartholomew junior and his twin Daniel, and maybe a Michael, being a twin of Edmund. When I feel the grief of losing my sister and how deep that is, then how must it have been for the ancestors who tended to lose at least one child. As such, grief is a normal human experience. For all such troubles, with the ancestors being so poor and but subsistence living, they had not the time nor space to contemplate and self heal from such pain and grief. Their quick solutions were, one, the church, and two, alcohol. Rents needed paying and hungry mouths feeding, for which one had to work, work, work. Parish relief could sometimes be called upon, maybe a medicine for ones ailments or shoes for children's bare feet. I find myself understanding more Bartholomew's years in the Poplar workhouse, as times were changing. When it is illegal to beg for ones needs, and naturally stealing is not an option, and yet there is no work available, one has to turn to parish aid. There were indeed times of sickness and lack of work when the Sugrue's resorted to asking for help, and not least when son Edmund was dying from pleuritis, in which instance the workhouse officials took a full day to get to the lad, despite it being an emergency, as I have now seen. And Edmund was in the care of the workhouse for the last four days of his life and still died. I wonder if there was that old equivalent to our concern that if you send vulnerable souls into a hospital or old peoples home they'll likely not come out again. Bartholomew was certainly quick to get his other children out of the workhouse, despite the struggles facing him as a lone father, as if they were safer with him than under such a regime. Well, fast forward, and the time had come when Bartholomew was so in need of parish relief, but no longer was there any out-help on offer, for there had arisen the Poplar experiment. Any money to help out the family now had to be earned at Poplar workhouse in a prison like situation, with hard labour, and a fare of only bread and water. However strong a constitution Bartholomew may have had, years of this wore him down, and close association with the sickest of society contaminated his health with tuberculosis. The Poplar experiment was a terrible one, a destroyer of families, a punishment for being poor. The new way was a response to greater and greater numbers of people needing assistance, for which those in need were not now individuals, but one mass of unruly poor. To weed out those taking advantage of potential freebies, the real destitute had to pay the consequences. I sense the unheard frustrations of my ancestors, due to their being misunderstood, accused and judged. Beneath all struggle and external perception, there was the heart of a family, who loved and cared about one another, their genuine humanity, their joy and playfulness, their innocence. I guess that's what I'd like to portray in a book, though I don't know if I am able. Maybe I should first try writing short stories or children's books, to kind of warm up to the big task. A compendium of ancestral tales could inspire children to find an interest in genealogy. AuthorAuthor Susie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. I have it in mind to write a book, nothing new for me really as ideas have often come and yet don't practically manifest. Bartholome Sugrue's tragic life as an Irish immigrant in Greenwich, with all his dysfunctionalism, is inspiring me now. This would be a historical novel. Although, with their not having been a happy ending I'd need to explore the jollity and love and depth of positive life experience inbetween all the sufferings. And do I tie in the parallel Harrison and Barton families, also of Greenwich, who had their own tragedies. Between these two families have been a bucket load of difficulties. There was Eleanor Caroline Barton growing up in a London orphanage, away from her mother, and dying so young of tuberculosis; her mother Hannah taking care of the old and wounded seamen in the Greenwich hospital where once Eleanors own father had lived; and Eleanors partner John William Harrison's brushes with the law, his imprisonment and then joining his daughter Maria in the workhouse, his temporary insanities and ultimately dying from cancer of the tongue; Bartholomew Sugrue's first wife dying from asiatic cholera, and his second wife Catherine going to prison for trying to conceal her daughters theft of a purse; exposure in all Britains newspapers when he is prosecuted for the manslaughter of his own child, revealing their poor standards of life and his drunknness, the child really having wasted away in a refusal to eat out of upset for losing his mother; later, their squatting with other Irish in tumbledown cottages with the authorities trying to throw them out; their residing at Pesters boarding house for the poor in which Catherine worked as a servant in return for lodgings, where also lived for a while one of the prostitutes murdered by Jack the Ripper; Bartholomew eternally in and out of the workhouse, being sent onwards to Poplar for hard labour and severity, and his demise from tuberculosis, dying while coughing up blood; Catherines stroke which paralysed her down one side; young Maria Harrison in and out of the workhouse and into the arms of their son Thomas, himself all too familiar with the workhouse and for a fresh new start they changing the surname from Sugrue to Seagrove, and then their own exposure in newspapers for their dirty home and scruffy children running wild. So, how does one weave a story through all that? And of happier times, hop picking adventures in the Kent countryside, romantic strolls in Greenwich park, for 'there is always the garden', the gaiety of the Greenwich fair and arrival by boat (sailed by my ancestors) of grand functionaries and aristocrats who would feast in the Greenwich inns on whiting (fished by my ancestors) and champagne, rich benefactors joining the workhouse poor at xmas for seasonal celebrations, the songs my ancestors may have sung and the music they danced to. 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 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. ![]() Having returned to France, I check out the info presented in the new certificates, learning of the overcrowded Roman Catholic chapel in Clarkes Buildings, Greenwich, used by my Irish Sugrue's, the illnesses they died from, Bartholomew vomiting up blood as a consequence of having tuberculosis, and his wife Catherine suffering a stroke while working as a servant in a Deptford lodging house, for which she was paralysed through half her body. So it is that I learn of their final struggles. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. |
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