![]() Along the 'lanes' of Dovercourt, glimpsing the football match, my mum showed us the old door where she used to sneak for free into the football. The Harwich and Parkeston football team was known as the Shrimpers, and when my mum was young they got to the final of the FA amateur cup. They played Pegasus at Wembley and the family went along, two trains and coaches having been put on, so that almost the whole town went, all knitting scarves and hats in black and white stripes, and losing 6-0. Back home my mum talked of her memories of her grandparents for my genealogy projects. Rosina sent me info from some certificates that had arrived in France, like Bartholomew Sugrue having died in Greenwich of tuberculosis, and his first wife having died from Asiatic cholera. Bartholomew's fathers name was Thomas, also a labourer, back in Ireland. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees.
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![]() I brushed up on my Irish-Greenwich matriarchal project file, happily absorbed in what I do, writing, researching, making collage, cutting and gluing; 'my school work' as I call it. A Passion for Genealogy - The Research of Susie Harrison. The london-Irish Ancestry part of my grandmother Isabelle Bane's family tree. I made a Kerry Irish collage and looked more at the story of the famine that my ancestors just had to escape. Accounts I find do have a certain watered down perspective of oppressor versus oppressed, but I feel there are two more considerations, one being that historic times always had a certain ruthlessness and in-humanitarian influence, non-acceptable today and so all the more shocking to us; but also, there were vicious circles here at play, clouding the part of any supposed innocents, with the existence of heavy drinking and all its family, social and financial consequences. No more brutal on Roman Catholics were the overlords in Ireland, than had been so in Britain, where the old religion was purged completely. Naturally, stern divisions had come into being. But, also, the personal self-destruction of alcohol afforded little hope for the greater community to ever gain respect and credibility, whatever the root differences. It's easier to just blame and be angry and continue drinking. Local Roman Catholic landlords, not even Protestant, were as bad as any absentee Protestant aristocrat, the latter being out of touch with the real world on an earthy level, and so were maybe worse and more culpable. I did find a more honest account by an actual Irishman on the alcoholic problem the Irish have such a propensity for. I looked to find out more about this. I was curious. The history I'd so far found said that the Irish, before the potato famine, simply drank water, and elsewhere it was stated they had a soured yoghurty drink. There was no mention of alcohol. So I had put this in my file, thinking the drink problem the Irish were famed for thus arose in consequence of the horrors of the potato famine. And it takes an Irishman to be honest about it all and say such alcoholism and its destructive effects had long gone on. Potatoes were not only the sustenance of the peasants, but also their peril, as from it they distilled hard alcohol. This drink was home distilled 'poiton'. If one removes the t, and replaces but one letter, one gets 'poison'. Gallons of such Irish whiskey were made, every second cottage or so manufacturing it. They drank to their detriment. When one is poor, it does always amaze me, that important finance or nourishment gets put into alcohol, for which there is a neglect of children and or wives, although women drank hard too. With large families, plenty of unemployed single men were up to no good, the 'bachelor group' as they were called, defining their manhood with hard drinking and fighting. Communities even expected this of them and supported them in it. Evicted tenants formed early guerrilla groups, such as the White Boys, carrying out terrorist activities in the nights, fuelled by their plentiful consumption of poiton and aggressive bravado, targeting landlords and any others suspected to collude with the British colonials. And, yes, they were born into abominable conditions, as peasants were pretty much in any part of the world. They were exploited as tenants, or cottiers, at any moment to suffer eviction. Sufferings make a path to drink, so that even by this the imagery is fulfilled of a people who are vulgar and uncivilised. They chose panacea in something that would not give them that, which would make all even more dreadful. With the catastrophic appearance of the potato blight starvation and disease now preyed upon them. There had already been such precarious balance in their ways of life. The lumper potatoes yielded high, but didn't mature until the autumn. Though stored potatoes kept families going right up till the end of spring, the crop then became inedible, and so began what was known as the 'summer hunger'. Those who had a little wherewithal would buy from dealers oats and barley to see them through to potato harvesting time. Those from poorer families sought different solutions, their menfolk seeking temporary work in the fields of England, while their women and children stayed behind begging along the roadsides. I can't know precisely what my own Sugrue's and Sheehan's experienced in all these regards, but I see in their new life in Greenwich they were far from finding a utopia, bringing along their own habit to drink and to inadequately function as families. The British both let them down, by bad policy in Ireland, and welcomed them, both friend and foe. Not in any of the newspaper articles of their dramas was it ever mentioned that they were Irish immigrants. They could have assimilated better if not for chronic drunkenness. For this, Irish families had a long hard journey ahead of them. It is almost as if there has been a biological propensity to drink, regardless of circumstance. All the Irish expats I have met in France are atrocious alcoholics. Alcohol is no way but the sole path of the Irish, but as a report has shown, 54% of Irish admit to harmful or risky drinking, compared to a European average of 28%. The Irish blood is in many of us, which I know from all the genealogy I've done for friends. I have long been teetotal. I have always wondered at the Irish and their heavy drinking. It's so stereotypical that we are not really supposed to by fairness ever mention it. But maybe this story requires some honesty. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. So I have ancestral places to visit, Greenwich in London, as well as County Kerry in Ireland. It was the infamous potato famine which drove my Irish ancestors, Bartholomew and Catherine Sugrue, away from their homeland, there where the poor people were starving, diseased, thrown out of their tenancies, for which they'd paid far too much rent anyway to their blood sucking Anglo Irish landlords. The Irish lived in hovels, with no beds, no blankets, and only potatoes to eat. Of course we do love potatoes, but the blight came from America and the potato crops were ruined. The older people stuck it out through such famines, whereas younger family members fled. These masses of famine fleeing Roman Catholic Irish, arriving in England, had never a birth registration system, and were illiterate and so poor, and even in England they didn't get their children's births registered, although they would have been baptised into their own faith, hence why there are no birth records for any of Bartholomew's children, including for my Thomas, which explains the never ever findable birth certificate. Learning of the Sugrue's permits me to aknowledge more, and accept, a greater part of myself. I feel it, understand, how in my own life I have made friends with 'lost souls', have accepted handouts, and been so 'laid back' and undisciplined. The living conditions of my ancestor Bartholomew Sugrue did shock, but what of mine? I am the eternal student, unconcerned with societies normal neurotic rules, natural I would say. And sleeping on a floor with a cover, what's really so wrong with that. Illnesses come, fevers, and one trusts the body to get through it. I feel Bartholomew was harshly judged by busy-bodies. Yes, he drank alcohol, and so does most of my village. His wife had been dragged off to prison for something her daughter had done, and anyway children do go through phases of stealing, some of them. I did. She likely did not know the purse was stolen till Hannah handed it to her, then just had to try and protect her child from the consequences. Another daughter, young Catherine, she saw coal and took it for the cold. Young James mucked about with some rope another boy had lifted. The Irish way was far more natural and earthy and unfussy. In England life was different. I shall make excuses for my ancestors. I know well how hurtful it is to be judged and condemned, like them. In taking a mother away from her children the powers that be also created this tragedy of Edmund's loss of life. And this at a time when disease was more rife and children died so much more easily. So though I have found shocking write-ups in the papers I shall not look on it with the same eyes, I shall be more understanding. These people had already been through so much, with their extreme poverty and famine in Ireland. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. 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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