As I was visiting my mother at Dovercourt, I'd decided to develop more the tree of her partner, Brian. She and I had a chat about my genealogy research, as my son played on the beach, although she doesn't really get why I have such an interest in it. Because it is at a cost and uninteresting to her, she won't join the Geneographic Project to have her DNA looked at, oh, woe is me! How I wish... Still, she spoke to me of her family memories. She spoke of Nanna Bane (Mary Ann Seagrove), who apparently had signed the 'pledge' not to drink alcohol, but when my mum was a girl, Mary Ann would sneakily send her out to get small bottles of brandy. 'It's for medicinal purposes' she would always say. When the family tried to send Mary Ann off to a care home she got hysterical. 'Please don't send me to the workhouse' she wailed, and the ambulance man reassured her if she didn't want it then she wouldn't go, for which Aunty Connie had to keep caring for her. in the light of her families real history with the workhouse, her fear becomes more understandable. The care home had indeed been converted from an old workhouse. Uncle Clive was in his lovely old Harwich house, once the Swan Inn, and I tried to guide our conversation to what his cousin Linda and his Aunt Molly had already talked of, about Clive not really being his fathers son. It was only subtly that I tried doing this and my mother caught on and mouthed 'No, no'. But Clive then brought up the matter himself, having twigged on. He feels nothing in common with his father, he said, and nothing in common with the Welsh side. He still had nothing to go on concerning this, and anyway, he didn't care. He was disinterested. Nor could I get him at all interested in the Genographic project. On consideration though, he looks totally like my father, his eyes, his red hair, his intellect, so that it's hard to believe they could not be full brothers. I looked with Brian more into his genealogy, writing out new family information for him, which he will later type out. I learn more of his family, of his son Mark who lives in Beirut and has a cute half Vietnamese son, of a dodgy stepbrother, and in a photo a dodgy uncle is pointed out. I wanted to look at more genealogy for him, but had to get a good nights sleep ready for the next days trip to London. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees.
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I was up so late with my genealogy work. The file is close to completion, temporary completion that is, as the subject goes on and on and on. There are then other branches of the tree to make files of, but this poorer London side has fascinated me lately. I even cry, because our family often suffered so much. I'd never known before what was Hannah Bunney's destiny, her life already being so full, first in London, then Greenwich, three husbands that died on her, and her career nursing at the Greenwich Hospital. But now I have found her in later life, at the Bethnal Green workhouse, and living in one of London's lowest slums, the Old Nichol Street Rookery. After 11 years of living in the Rookery slum a removal order was made, and Hannah was next seen at the Southwark workhouse, in her 70's, and there she died. Poverty and the workhouse is a big theme for my London ancestors. Life was so tough then, hard survival. How can I not weep for all they went through. File Project Ancestral Paupers completed. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. I have another genealogical breakthrough, hurray, this being finding out why my ancestor, John William Harrison, was put in prison for half a year back in 1871. Oh, how so long to find this. But there it was. Being a waterman/bargeman John had crossed the Thames from Greenwich to the Isle of Dogs, whereon he began loading his barge with iron from the Samuda wharf at Blackwall. Half a ton he got into his barge when he was spotted by a man who he then set to wrestling with. As it is said, he tried to throw the fellow in the water and would have succeeded if not for another person spotting the fracas. He was given six months hard labour in prison, hence his daughter, my great great grandmother Maria, having to go into the workhouse at the age of 11, her mother already having died from tuberculosis. And for Maria's deceased mother, Eleanor Caroline Barton, who'd been raised in an orphanage, I found newspaper clips about the Sailors Female Orphan Home where she grew up, of her singing along with the other girls for the public 'Oh Where is the Guide of my Infant Years'. Even back then, when Eleanor was 7, it was reported that one of the other girls of the orphanage had died of consumption (tuberculosis). I researched more, looking at where in London my people lived and what those areas were like. When my ancestors lived at Cock Lane, beside St Sepulchre church, I do think that unlike now this was a colourful and stimulating place to be. St 'Pulchre, as it was known, was right by a prison, the Old Bailey, and the cells of those condemned to die. It was inseparable from those surrounds, tolling the bells and praying for the souls of all those condemned ones who would stop there on the way to the gallows, having a gift of flowers presented to them. But a walk away from there were other homes for my family, in more notorious areas, Field Lane with its plethora of resold stolen handkerchiefs, Plum Tree Court which was an escape route for thieves, and its neighbouring Shoe Lane, being by St Andrews Church, where priests needed bodyguards for this being such a rough place. My ancestress Sarah Bunney died in the workhouse just by there, though of a good old age. She was a survivor, and her daughter Hannah Bunney had by now long gone to Greenwich. 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. I worked on my website, trying to put together a piece on the hardships which my Greenwich ancestors had to experience, which involved having to download supporting papers and documents. There in the workhouse had gone a lineage of my women, Maria Harrison as child and grown-up, Eleanor Barton in an orphanage, Hannah Bunney in the Blackfriars workhouse, giving birth to one of her children there, which I now realise was at the time when her husband had departed central London for the care and comforts of the Greenwich Hospital. So he too had left his family, temporarily, in destitution, after which they came to live by him, living outside the hospital while he was within, as so many ex sailors families apparently did. And I do wonder, was the workhouse always such a rock bottom humiliation of the people anyway. Pregnant girls whose lovers failed to marry them would find a place there to give birth. People were clothed and fed. Sick people were given medical care. The discipline and regimes were hated, but still people in need would go there. When I see Maria's children going in there for but one hour, may she not even have designed it to get a good full meal in them for once. Who is to know what was really in the hearts and minds of all these people. The workhouse was equivalent to the modern old peoples home too, and in that manner it carries on, as too for a free medical facility, like our National Health today. We look back on it all so bleakly and fail to see what an invaluable support it was to those who were passing through hard times. Before the workhouses, the parish's gave handouts to the struggling poor and saw that they were clothed and fed, like the dole now, not even any work being required and no rules to follow. So I understand the workload and regimes were generally an irritating sacrifice one had to comply with, an exchange of sorts. One irritation would be the harsh discipline within the workhouse schools. A poor child would learn to read and write, but would get whacked about in the process. For girls it may have been easier. Eleanor Barton's orphanage taught her to read and write and how to be thoroughly and efficiently domestic, to be a good and valued servant girl, which was the path most women took before they found themselves a husband and became queens of their own household, he working tirelessly long hours, and she creating a brood of children. If he strayed for a while, if he was unable to work, there was the workhouse, the last resort. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. 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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