Home Sweet Home

Recently I heard an exert from a book called My Life In Houses by Margaret Forster.  I think it has been serialised on Woman's Hour but I only heard one.  Maybe I can get to the rest on iPlayer.

However, it did get me thinking about my own "life in houses".  The other day my children were questioning me about where I had lived when I dared to live a life without them, how many addresses I have had and why, which houses I rented and which were "mine".

Over the last couple of years, I have worked on a couple of projects to do with the history of buildings and I do find it completely fascinating to look at who has lived and worked in a place.  Strangely enough though, for the first time in my entire life, this year I moved into a newly built house.  My family are the first people to live here and it is great to think that we are starting the history of a new building.  Not sure it will be as interesting to future researchers as Victorian buildings are to us but then the Victorian school inspector, who was the first occupant of my previous home, would probably not have expected to be investigated a hundred and twenty years later!

What about our ancestors' house choices?  On Who Do They Think You Are? they often manage to find the addresses of their subjects' ancestors and to take people to the relevant places or to see similar homes (Brian Blessed in the last series was a hilarious example of this!).

I have written before about the ten year gaps in census data.  About somehow we expect to see our relations still living happily in the same places as they were ten years previously.  Actually, we do often, in the nineteenth century, see our ancestors remaining if not in the same properties but at least in the same localities.  So we tend to assume that they are still doing ok.  What WDYTYA shows us though is that a bit of research into the addresses can give more clues about the conditions in which our ancestors were living.

Our last family house was a good example of this.  A large-ish Victorian townhouse, three floors, servant bells still on the walls when we bought it.  And when I looked into the history of it, there were middle class occupants.  However, the house was built twenty years or so after its immediate neighbourhood - composed of small terraced houses to house factory workers.

So you cannot assume that same neighbourhood means same condition when you look at census addresses.  What is going to be interesting in decades to come is how census data will help or hinder researchers in this respect.  We move so much more, so much further.  So many larger houses are now flats, so many old houses are now student properties.  I personally have lived at fifteen addresses in my life - parents' homes, student homes, moving to London and skint homes!  Then my own family homes and now we are starting the history of a brand new address.  An interesting thought - if I can prevent the puppy from chewing it down around our ears!

Where will we be and who will be watching?

 

 

How do we imagine our species' future?  Where do we think we will be in one hundred, two hundred years times or even longer? 

 

We have been marking the centenary of the start of the First World War this year and the last soldiers from that have only just died.  Next year sees the two hundred year anniversary of Waterloo and the defeat of Napoleon.  I am sure that the participants in Waterloo never envisaged the carnage of the First World War but then, at the end of the First World War it was said to be the war to end all wars and look what happened....

 

I am going to see the new Hunger Games film this week.  My son and his friends are very keen on this whole genre of writing.  Survival, apocalyptic future etc.  When I was their age, I remember starting to read George Orwell and thinking, well he was wrong about Big Brother and all that.

 

Yet this week the media are raging about digital privacy versus the need to keep tabs on what terrorists and others are up to online.  Big Brother really does exist.  We all know it but choose to go along with it, driven by the belief that the spooks are not looking for "people like us" and of course they have not got time to check our online trails of films, emails, shopping, chatting.  Yet we expect someone, somewhere to keep tabs on our neighbours' secrets.  Their illegal porn habits, their illegal film downloading, whatever.  We want someone to police all that.

 

The thing is, what if a "nasty party" gets in to power and the legislation that they need is already in place?  The ability to watch everyone, to detain without the courts, to take passports, etc - all the things that we are told now are needed to deal with the very few.  Could they be turned on the majority?  Or at least, turned on a scapegoat minority like the Nazis did?  In the future, will a party like UKIP (or far worse) be able to convince us that immigrants should be turned away and ethnic communities deported?

 

In terms of a family history link to this, I guess as ever I find myself fascinated with what my ancestors would make of the world in which we live now.  I have vivid memories of watching Tomorrow's World as a child and seeing items about innovations like bar-coding, shopping from home and pocket computers.  And it all seemed quite unbelievable and very unlikely!

 

My ancestors who travelled to India must have found themselves hit like an (as yet mostly uninvented!) train with the difference in culture and could never have envisaged a time when you could fly to India in a few hours; a time when India is as powerful as it is now.  They could not even perceive of India as an independent entity.  Imagining a future like the Hunger Games or 1984 would have been impossible.

 

Wouldn't it be amazing to go back in time and be able to give your ancestor an ipad or something and get them to record their lives in real blinding colour?  How did it feel to be there?  If nothing else, the current obsession with social media does mean that our descendants will not be short of such material, provided it survives.  And survival is the key, as the participants in the Hunger Games know only too well.  Let us hope that it is not too worrying that we can start to imagine a future like that.

The Big Society

 

This is just getting ridiculous now.  I had promised myself to write at least every other day even if I could not manage every day with the new puppy around. Yet here I am over a week later!  I will not bore you with the reasons for my lapse!

 

Anyway, what to muse about?  Actually, I did find a rather interesting tale in someone else's family tree last week.  I was trying to push one of the lines a bit further back and I stumbled upon a lady who had died in an asylum run by her trade union.

Emily Harriet Rumball was born in around 1819 and for most of her early adult life she was listed as a "bookfolder" or "bookbinder" on the censuses.  In 1852 she married James Swygart in Shoreditch.  From what I have traced, the couple had at least four children, one of whom, Emily, is my friend's direct ancestor.  (She married a Sainsbury but sadly not one with supermarket connections!).

James died in 1872 in Holborn and it appears that Emily Harriet returned to working as a bookfolder to keep herself.  Certainly by 1881, she was living with the Sainsbury-married daughter Margaret and her family, though still giving her profession as bookfolder.  This was in Islington.

In 1891 I found her on the census for Balls Pond Road.  And this is where my pure curiosity is so right for this work!  Next to her name was a number and I thought it referred to her house number.  Then I began to notice - by studying the image rather than the transcription - that all her fellow residents were bookfolders, -binders, etc.  Quite a coincidence?

It was not until I flipped back through the images of the previous pages that I realised that Emily Harriet was living in the Bookbinders Provident Society Asylum, shown above.  I had no idea such places existed.  We hear about the workhouses and reform schools when we do Victorian history in our school years but trade union-run asylums?  All full of single profession people with problems?

So I did what one does these days in such situations.  I googled.  Sure enough, the bookbinders formed a friendly society in 1830.  By 1843 there was also a charity for building an almshouse/asylum.  The two societies amalgamated in 1865.  This big society slowly expanded apparently, until 1882.  Eventually, the asylum site was sold in 1927 and the Society relocated Whetstone in London's suburbs, building cottages to run on their new site.

the asylum building no longer exists on Balls Pond Road - which connects Islington with Hackney and is quite sought after now as those unable to live in Islington have gentrified the edges of Hackney.

 

Looking back at this story from our 2014 viewpoint, it seems like an amazing story of charity and the growth of social responsibility awareness.  One does wonder, though, what Margaret Sainsbury, the daughter who was housing her mother, had to go through to get her mother into that charitable institution.  How desperate did things become before they were able to get help with her elderly and presumably deteriorating mother?  Does this all sound a bit familiar?

 

I have friends at the moment who suspect that they have parents with the beginning of dementia.  The hoops to jump through to get help are so high and so numerous that one could be forgiven for wondering if much has changed since Emily Rumball had to be admitted to the Bookbinders Asylum.

Supermarket Ethics

I do not have time to write a great deal today but I found that I could not let the day pass without commenting on the Sainsbury Christmas 1914 ad.  It "premiered" last night (why have we now become Americans with "premiers" and "finales" on our televisions??) and the internet has been awash today with debate on the supermarket's use of the First World War "Christmas Truce", comparisons to the John Lewis Monty Penguin ad, etc etc.

When I googled the truce in order to find the above picture, it seemed pretty clear that most of the press is united in thinking that the use of this incident is, to say the very least, unsavoury (and outrageous if you are the Daily Mail!).  And for once, I must say that I totally agree.

My son showed the ad to me this afternoon - I had not looked at Facebook or Twitter today - and my initial reaction was definitely one of discomfort followed by disgust.

When this ad went out, we were barely twenty four hours from the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.  You can just picture some young pushy ad executive sitting in a brainstorming meeting going "oh yes and if we are going with this theme, here's great idea, let's get it out as near as possible to the eleventh.  Why not on the eleventh?  At eleven?"!

As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, I have little personal connection to the First World War but those millions of men died for all of our futures.  Did Sainsburys think it was doing a good thing?  Did they see the public reaction to the Tower of London poppies and rub their hands, knowing what was coming?

The thing is, the ad is a good piece of film making - for all I know about these things! - and the sentiment "Christmas is for sharing" is an excellent one.  What sticks in the throat is the use of this incident and that sentiment to sell more Christmas groceries and gifts.  Presumably, they thought that hooking up with the Royal British Legion would help to divert some of this discomfort.  They thought we would think it was almost a public service ad, not a supermarket wheeze!

Unfortunately you have to enter one of their stores to buy the special chocolate bars which are giving 100%of their profits to the Legion.  And while you are there, you may as well get a few other things...

Paul McCartney used the Christmas Truce incident in his "Pipes of Peace" video years ago.  At least he had a peace theme and was well known for campaigning against war.  Although he was trying to sell records, so you could argue that one both ways.

I feel that I m ranting so I won't go on.  A final thought, though, is that it is a worrying indictment of our society when advertisements are becoming events in their own right.  Advertisements used to become news stories as people became aware of them.  They were not pre announced into our viewing schedules!  Their makers hoped that the desired effect would be created and word would spread (eg the Levis guy stripping in the laundrette!).

Whatever happens now though, whether the ad continues to be shown or whether public outrage continues to mount and it is pulled, Sainsbury have achieved more column inches and more search engine mentions than one can imagine.  It is wrong to have used such a poignant event to achieve this. And here I am, adding to that publicity.  A good place to stop my rant, I think.  If, by some miracle, you have not seen the ad, just google or go onto You Tube.....

A Big Fan

The above chart is a fan pedigree chart.  I first saw one of these at the York Family History Fair a couple of years ago and thought then that they make a very useful way of seeing your progress.

Typically, I then forgot all about it until I did the recent "Organising Your Genealogy" course which I have blogged about previously.  [See Pharos for course further details.]

This week, though, I printed off a new set of blank fan charts.  You can do this by simply Googling "fan pedigree chart" and choosing your preferred website.  There are also sometimes blanks available to print or download in the "learning center" areas of Familysearch or Ancestry.

The reason I did so was to check my progress with a friend's maternal family tree.  I have been working on this for some time - having to take a break due to not having enough "dog sleeping hours" in the day when the puppy arrived! - and I was anxious to gauge my progress.

It was actually very gratifying because the fan chart enables you to see clearly how many generations you have gone back on each line and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had done six generations on at least three lines and five on most of the others.  I must say, I had not realised, from my pile of notes, quite how many generations I had gone back.  Fortunately, her ancestors were all mostly in the same areas and were devout church goers - handily picking churches with registers that ended up on Ancestry!

So as you can see on the chart, you put the name of the "owner" of the tree in the centre bottom circle.  The fan then progresses outwards with the boxes getting smaller and smaller (tricky if you are hand writing the chart!) as the generations expand.  On the above chart, the main four colours denote the four lines from the owner's grandparents.  Within each colour way, the shading denotes the increasing number of different families per generation.

A simple version of a chart like this - with perhaps four generations - is an excellent way to show family history to children.  My daughter really understood her grandparents' lines once she saw a simplified fan pedigree chart.  You don't even necessarily need colours but a coloured in chart, framed, does look nice - a good gift for grandparents maybe, this festive season?!

The other advantage that this week's exercise has given me is that I can now see where the main gaps in the tree are and I m able to concentrate my efforts on filling these in, rather than just pushing back the lines which have proved easier to follow.  I would like to get all lines to six generations as this means 1700's rather than 1800's.  And I am so pleased to be saying that - the tree is a real testament to all the people who transcribe all these random church registers and other documents.  I salute their efforts.  You try reading some of the "original images" on the websites and see whether you would be confident enough to publish what you have deciphered! 

Find A Brickwall!

 

 

Further to my brief post about the Find My Past freebie weekend, I have tried really hard this weekend to break down some brickwalls in the USA using my extra access.

My Anglo Indian great grandfather, Frederick Jackson Shaller, had a brother named William Charles Shaller who emigrated to the US from India well before Partition.  This much can be definitely said.  However, I could previously only find one marriage certificate for him despite someone else's Ancestry public tree naming two wives.  I was hoping that the US data would help to solve this conundrum.

However, the FMP freebie weekend has actually deepened the mystery rather than beginning to solve it.  I was able to access the transcript and original image for the 1930 US census and the person who I assumed was the second wife is shown quite clearly as having been born in Montana in the US whilst the two eldest of the three children and William himself are shown as having been born in India.

 

The ages given for William and this "census wife" Dorothea are 52 and 37 respectively.  The eldest son is 20.  There is a marriage certificate from Bombay in 1906 which shows William marrying "Effie Moore" but it is "Dorothea" with whom he entered the US via Boston in 1920.

 

The eldest son Leslie was born in 1910 and the middle child, a daughter named Dorothea, was born in 1912 - both, as I said, in India.  The naming of this daughter would seem to point to the "census wife" being her mother, if not the mother of Leslie also.  The third child William Aubrey was on the way when they emigrated and he was born in New York.  He was nine years younger than his sister.  It is one of his descendants who has put a public tree onto Ancestry.

 

So is Effie Moore actually Dorothea?  Or was William married briefly to Effie and then - at some point between 1906 and 1911 - to Dorothea?  Was Leslie born to Effie or Dorothea?  If the age of 37 on the 1930 census is correct, Dorothea would have been 13 in 1906 if she is "Effie Moore".  I do have other relations who married at such an age, in Anglo Indian circles but 1906 seems quite late for this still to be happening.  the others are mostly early nineteenth century.  I have not been able to find a birth or baptism record for Leslie, which might have helped.  It is yet another Anglo Indian brickwall.

 

Funnily enough, when I search various sites for "Dorothea Shaller" in India quite a few turn up - well, not masses like for Jones or something but more than usual for that surname! - and they all appear to be connected to my tree in some way.

 

I have started to think about whether "Moore" is the route to go down.  However, a first glance search proved to be quite disheartening - there are many Moores.... 

 

I hope, if you tried the freebie weekend, you had better luck.  Find My Past is a good service, although its redesigned website takes a bit of negotiating.  I still get confused by its "Record Set" and "Record Collection" filters.  I shall plod away at this brick wall for a very little while longer - the freebie ends at midday today!

 

 

Remembrance and the future

 

 

Earlier this year I wrote a post about how it seemed that I did not have any relations with First World War service, at least not in my direct line. And in fact, not for the Second World War either.  That has not stopped me, though, admiring the huge amount of work which has been done this year in commemoration of the start of the First World War in 1914.  Whether it be record releases by the National Archives, TV and radio broadcasts by the BBC and others or local history events - and everything in between - there has been a wealth of material available.

 

For A Level History, I remember doing "Causes of the First World War" as an essay title.  I wish I still had possession of this document because I seem to remember the most awful row with our history teacher (I cannot remember her name but we called her Gladys because she looked like Gladys Pugh - played by Ruth Madoc - from Hi De Hi....!).  As far as I recall, I wrote a piece - well argued, I thought - about said causes and Gladys took exception to my version of events.  Being, as I was, a bit of a Millie Tant, I probably dug my heels in and refused to rewrite it and I do seem to think that my mother actually backed me up so my paper can't have been that bad.  I thought of it this week though because my eight year old asked me what started the First World War and I could not, for the life of me, think of a way to explain it sensibly for her age group! 

 

There were the years of pre war build up of treaties and alliances; the years of skirmishes and colony grabbing; there was the ego of the Kaiser; the arrogance of numerous politicians; closer to the start, there was the general mobilisation and the train timetables issue; everyone thought it would a brief war to get it all over by Christmas and settle Europe back down again.; and so on and so on.  Eventually, I told the eight year old that after many years of problems and building armies and navies, a royal person was shot which gave everyone an excuse for a war to start properly....

 

Someone on the radio this morning pointed out that these days we assume that during the war, there was a general realisation that the generals were all stupid and the war was futile.  Blackadder and other comedies have not helped this perception but in fact, it did not feel like that to most people at the time.

 

This morning, as I stood at the Remembrance Sunday service for my son's Scout group and we prayed for those still at war as well as those from past conflicts, I began to wonder how my grandchildren will explain the current and recently past  Middle East conflicts to their children.  Britain has been engaged in modern conflict in the Middle East for almost my entire adult life.  We first invaded Kuwait while I was living in university halls.  [It was the first conflict to show round the clock, blow by blow coverage and I remember the uni newspaper making jokes about everyone suffering from Gulf War Vision from staying up too late, watching Kate Adie and the Scud missiles!]

 

Today, at the parade, people applauded the troops and veterans alike.  Tellingly, the active troops were all dressed in desert colours as a matter of course.  There are several large bases near my home and I am sure that most of those troops and their families do not believe the wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan to have been futile or our politicians to have been misguided.  They cannot do so because that would render their experiences and their losses futile too.

 

I do wonder though how these conflicts will be seen in 2114.  There has not been the mass slaughter of our troops but there has been mass destruction of nations and mass slaughter of their peoples.  Where, for example, will the rise of ISIS end?  Religious wars have cursed humanity since the first idols were set up.  We can pray for peace, we can fight back, we can do both at the same time.  I cannot help but feel that by 2114, there will have had to be a seismic shift in thinking or we could still be engaged in this endless "War On Terror". 

 

One of my favourite fiction types is that which rewrites history as we know it.  A novel set in a victorious Nazi Germany or a defeated Britain is a fascinating idea.  We are back to the time travel idea of previous posts, I guess - the well established science fiction principle that even a small change to the past has a huge ripple effect on the times stretching in front of us.

 

The many deaths which we remembered today were not in vain because they made us who we were, whether we like it or not and whether we agree with how they came about or not.  But it is both interesting and worrying to speculate on what the current wars will come to be viewed as in our grandchildren's futures and beyond. 

 

Freebie

Not able to write properly today but I did want to flag up a freebie!

From midday tomorrow, Friday 7 November, Find My Past is offering free access to all of its collections.  Until midday on Monday 10th!  And unusually, there is a benefit for existing users too.  They will get extended access to "world" collections if therapy do not have this already.  If they do, they will get an extra three days in their subscription period.

The article in Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine is here.

Happy hunting! I intend to spend the weekend scouring the US, Australian and Irish records that I have been waiting to see.  So much for not chasing down more leads and getting organised instead....

And who am I am kidding anyway,  I will probably get about an hour of research after child activites and dog walking.... Typically my kids have random training day tomorrow.... 

Mental Family History

 

 

Well once again it is a worryingly long time since I sat down to write.  Between half term and puppy training, I am just incapable of getting off the sofa to sit down and think by the evenings and there has not been a spare minute during the days.  The modern problem.  Every magazine and Sunday supplement seems to have articles about being happier, getting more time, making time for people who matter to you, being more relaxed, blah blah.....

However, since this is a family history related blog, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to be able to understand how many of these "problems" are indeed a modern issue.  Every age must have had its problems.  Maybe it is simply that they did not have names for the problems a century  or so ago.

In part, I wanted to write this post because it was announced a couple of weeks ago that thousands of mental health records, dating back to the eighteenth century, are to be put online.  It will not be via the subscription sites so you may not be aware of it.  This link will take you to the article relating to the release.  From there, you can link to the various organisations involved in this fascinating project.  It looks like there will be a mass of information available eventually - and not just from London hospitals either.

http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/news/over-800000-pages-mental-health-records-go-online

 

On a personal note though, for the past ten years, I myself have battled mild depression.  Sometimes it does not feel so mild, to be sure, but in comparison with what many people suffer, I guess it is mild.  So I do have quite an interest in all the "be happier" articles and I have done a lot of work with a fantastic therapist (now, sadly for me, retired.  I am sure she is quite relieved!).  I have an even stronger interest in the idea of a family link with depression because I was always told that my paternal grandmother was a "manic depressive".  In modern terms, this is now known as Bipolar Disorder and everything I have read points to a strong genetic link for the condition.  Family history is very important in diagnosis.  Stephen Fry, above, is bipolar and has done a huge amount to publicise the condition. He is president of MIND.

I have always wondered about my great grandparents and even further back on that side.  Certainly my grandmother suffered quite extreme symptoms in later life - the main characteristic of the condition is mood swings - and was then subjected to quite extreme electric shock treatment in attempts to ease her situation.  [She died very suddenly of a heart attack at a relatively young age - I also wonder about the link between that and the stress that the shock treatment must have put her heart under but I need to really understand the treatment more...]

Unfortunately, at first glance, it does not look like I will find my grandmother's records in the new release.  I don't think her era will be released - too modern.  And my age old problem, as regular readers will know, is that my paternal side were Anglo Indian so finding their medical records in India is not going to be easy - in fact is probably impossible unless they were in the army.  The relevant paternal great grandmother did die in the UK though, so maybe I should start with her death certificate and see if that holds any clues.  I did meet her when I was very little but I have no clear memory of her.  (Although I do recall being given an old handbag of hers when her things were cleared out - it was red and it was in my dressing up box for years!)

 

Sadly for my grandmother, these days Bipolar Disorder is much better recognised and is treated mainly with various medication, therapy and lifestyle advice to deal with drink/drug/sleep/weight issues.  It was only in the 1980s that she was properly diagnosed, I believe.  There is reference, in the articles that I have read about the disorder, to recognising "triggers" which would bring on episodes of extreme behaviour - be it mania or  a real low.   I do recall mention of "triggers" when my parents tried to explain to me about Nana's illness.  I think her own siblings were a major trigger but I have never properly asked my father about this.  I think I need to get brave and find out.

 

I suppose, given my own recent history, one could be worried that one may develop Bipolar, given the family link.  After all, we do worry about our own future's if a relative is diagnosed with cancer or heart disease.  However, I do believe that Nana suffered so much in part because of ignorance of the condition. Maybe, for example, like myself, symptoms started years before - post natal like my own or even before.  If mild symptoms had been treated, maybe the condition would not have gone as far as it did.  Sad but highly likely, I believe.  Nana certainly had huge life changes in her time - children, issues with her family, leaving India after Partition, to name but a few - and I know only too well that for some people, change has to be carefully managed.

 

So maybe there is a place in the modern age for all the self help articles.  We do now have names for things and we do have an awareness of lifestyle choices and how they affect our mental well being.  That does not, of course, mean that we always follow the "path of good".  Personally, I self medicate with Maltesers quite a lot of the time.....

Be My Guest

 

 

This last week, every time I have sat down to write, something has interrupted me.  Stuff completely beyond my control but I do apologise for the silence (although maybe you were relieved). 

 

However, I have been attempting to write a post about my great great great grandfather Edward Guest.  I was even going through my notes as I sat waiting in A&E after my son sustained a footballing injury - not serious incidentally, I am not completely heartless!  So here, finally, is the tale of Edward Guest... 

I knew that one of my paternal great great grandmothers had been Annie Jane Guest and from her marriage and baptism details, I knew that her father was called Edward.  Until last year, however, I had not pursued this line of inquiry very far.  Reading a back copy of a  Families In British India Society (FIBIS) journal though, I came across a mention of an Edward Guest.  The article's author Dorota Walker was a British Library employee and had been engaged in research in areas of the library's resources outside of the India Office collections.  [These are the collections that relate to the entire period of British rule in India - the East India Company, the Empire and all their records.  Follow this link for details.]

Anyway, she had stumbled upon two volumes from the papers of a Sir Charles Napier relating to his time with the Indian Army.  Some related to the 22nd Regiment of Foot and amongst them was a permit for a Private Edward Guest.  From her description of him and from the follow up work I was able to do, I am sure that this was my ancestor.

Edward Guest was born in Belfast in 1808.  A labourer by trade, he signed up for the army in 1825 and joined the 41st Regiment of Foot.  He served in Burma, Afghanistan and Madras apparently.  There are records relating to him in the National Archives though and these concern three court martials.  Two in 1834 for drunkenness and theft.  He served three months in solitary the first time.  The theft charge brought a sentence of fourteen years "transportation" but this ruling was overturned for, as yet, unknown reasons.  Makes one wonder what he stole!  The court martial papers for these two appearances can be seen at the FIBIS website.

 

The third was in 1839, again for drunkenness.  According to the FIBIS article, this resulted in the loss of a Good Conduct badge - I could not find this note.  In the meantime, he had married, in 1837, an "Indo Briton" (ie an Anglo Indian) woman named Amelia Emsley.  The marriage record states that she was fifteen - her baptism record suggests that she was probably thirteen... shocking to us now but not unusual then.  Her father Joseph Emsley had also been in the 41st Foot and the Emsleys were a large family.

Between 1838 and 1861, Amelia and Edward had at least eight children - I suspect there may be others as yet untraced as there are some long gaps between them.  Five children were living when Guest made his first petition in around 1850.  He had been discharged from the army in 1846 (having transferred to the 22nd Regiment of Foot in 1843 in order to remain with his family when the 41st returned to England).  "Extreme ill health" was cited.  He then managed to get a permit to open a stall in the bazar [market] of the 22nd Foot - selling anything but alcohol!  The pension award is also shown on FIBIS - 26 April 1846.  However, in 1848 his pension was withdrawn - it looks like drunkenness is given as the reason for this....

Ex-Private Guest must have been desperate at this point.  He obviously had issues with alcohol - a common problem in the army in India in the nineteenth century as it was not exactly a stimulating posting - Billy Connolly's Who Do You Think You Are? gave further details of British India army life recently and it left a lot to be desired!  He managed for two years but then tried and failed to get his pension reinstated in 1850.  In 1854 he wrote to Sir Charles Napier and even to the Duke of Wellington [hence the tenuous use of his picture above! - I could not identify the correct uniform for Guest - when you Google, you get lots of re-enactment society snaps...].  There are no records pertaining to the result of this second attempt.

At my great great grandmother Annie Jane's birth in 1858, Guest is listed as "a discharged soldier of the 41st Regiment of Foot".  Then in 1860, he died on 10 September of "ebritas".  If you were watching the  Billy Connolly WDYTYA episode, you may remember that this is alcoholism.  He was buried a day later, aged around 52.  [As an even sadder postscript, his youngest daughter Isabella Bedelia was born in 1861.  Her father is listed as the "late Edward Guest".  She herself only lived for a year.]

By my calculation, my 3 x great grandmother Amelia was then left with at least three children who would still have been dependent, including my toddler great, great grandmother.  In 1860, Amelia also lost her father Joseph, then aged 72, to dysentery.  Her mother had died in 1841.

 

In a move typical of the times in which she lived, Amelia Guest almost immediately remarried.  Another soldier, Daniel Liffick.  He had been widowed only months before he married Amelia in June 1861 but it would seem to have given both of them a form of security as he too had young children to cope with.  However, in 1870, Daniel Liffick - by then working as a guard on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway - died of "an accidental gunshot wound to the chest" according to his death record.  I am still looking into this - not that he is directly related to me, of course but as previous readers of the blog will know, I find it hard to resist a detour when an interesting story awaits!

 

So it just goes to show what information is out there about apparently lowly relatives.  We can find chapter and verse about the Duke of Wellington of course (although I prefer to think of him as Stephen Fry played him in Blackadder The Third!) but Edward Guest, Joseph Emsley and Daniel Liffick were in the lowest ranks of the British Army and there is far more available to find then I ever thought would be possible.  Incidentally, if you want to make a start with military records, the National Archives are the best place to begin but the various chat forums such as Victorian Wars are also very good.

My Kingdom for a Boy

 

 

This weekend my adored nephew was staying with us.  Apart from the fact that he was born nine weeks early and is none the worst for it, he is no different to any other child.  All children are by turns adorable and frustrating - particularly your own - and all children are special.

However, my nephew appears to be the last holder of my family name - Shaller (see previous blog posts!).  Me being female and married, my children bear my husband's name (we were terribly traditional about the whole thing).  My cousins on that side of the family are all female and married and likely not to use their maiden name for their children.  So my brother is the one male on our horizontal tree line and his son too is the one male.  My sister in law having no nieces and nephews, my nephew/her son is also the only child on his horizontal line on their tree.  No pressure then, kid!

When we look at our family trees, the general trend is usually for families to have dwindled in their numbers of siblings since birth control became possible.  No longer did a woman have to risk having six children when she actually only wanted (and could cope with!) two.  Of course, big families were not seen as a bad thing in, for example, the Victorian age.  Partly people aspired to the standard set by Victoria and Albert's huge brood of prince and princesses, partly (sadly) not all children were expected to survive childhood.  A woman may go through eight births but only half of these children might survive.  And for the poor, a big family was both a blessing and curse.  Many mouths to feed and people to clothe but later, extra workers to contribute to the family pot and live-in childcare for those children still too young to work.

It is unimagineable to us - brought up with the NHS and medical breakthroughs and knowledge of infection and so on - that you might lose a child every couple of years.  But on my Anglo Indian family tree, there are a number of examples where a couple have produced three or four children and none or just one have survived.  I have not looked as closely yet but I imagine that there will be similar situations on my maternal side.

 

There are still cultures in the world which prize male heirs above female.  Even in the UK, it has only just become possible for a first born royal female to inherit ahead of a younger brother.  Of course, William and Kate have obligingly managed to produce a boy first time so this is probably not ever going to be an issue anyway!  But our long reigning queen was actually the bottom of the heap - no more boys to inherit instead of her - the same with Elizabeth I and Victoria.

 

If I was to imagine that my family tree were heirs to a great estate or a throne (!) and these principles still applied, my father would be king, followed by my younger brother and then my nephew.  Despite being the eldest, I would be bypassed, as would my children and grandchildren unless something awful happened to my brother's line.  This is where you can begin to feel sympathy with all those medieval princesses, Tudor queens and various princes for their scheming (although not for their methods!).  Sometimes they must have been so close to the throne that they could almost feel it and then another baby would come along and  oh, not your turn next, sorry.....  Of course, the flipside of this was, as with the Tudors, the pressure to produce male heirs....

 

And on that note, to return to my lovely nephew, I have gone through most of my family tree now for five or six generations (at least) of the Shaller name and I suspect that the nearest holders of the surname who are related to us are in America.  I have not yet got access to US records (Ancestry and others charge separately for this typically - don't get me started...) but we believe that one male may have died in Vietnam.  It remains to be seen if there is another line.  My grandfather had three sisters but his father had brothers and one of these seems to have emigrated to America well before the Partition of India.  A whole new mystery to explore.  But not until I have the current mass of information under control (see previous posts!)....

Who were the Peaky Blinders?

My current favourite viewing is Peaky Blinders on BBC2.  I watched the last series and it is now three episodes into the second series.  I am not a TV critic and I dread to think how I would come across on Gogglebox but I have to say that Peaky Blinders is, my humble opinion, excellent television.

It is dark, gritty, violent.  The whole thing is set to fantastic modern music which despite its setting in the 1920s seems entirely appropriate somehow.  And the cast are fabulous.  There, that's my review!

I have started to wonder about the historical basis for the series though.  As ever, I was also thinking about the family history aspect.

The Peaky Blinders did indeed exist in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Birmingham.  The name Peaky Blinders first came to national notice in around 1890.  It has long been thought that the name referred to razor blades having been sewn into the peaks of the caps worn by the gang, for use in slashing victims or rivals.  However, a new book by Birmingham historian Carl Chinn disputes this.1.  Chinn himself discovered, during his research, that his great grandfather had actually been a Peaky Blinder!  He knew that he came from a line of illegal bookmakers but it turned out that, another generation back, there was a violent and abusive gang member.

Apparently, many of the descendants of members of the Birmingham gangs - the Peaky Blinders were definitely not the only one - are unaware of their ancestors' criminal pasts.  Their deeds were not discussed, whether from shame or guilt or whatever.

Carl Chinn actually began his research in the 1980s and 1990s, well before the current interest in the gangs obviously.  He was lucky enough to manage to get some first hand testimony from people who had lived through the period when the gangs were prevalent. 

In terms of family history, this is a major point of good practice.  Always question as many people as possible, especially elderly relatives, as a starting point.  You never know what snippets of information you might come across.  I wish that I had asked more questions when my own grandparents were alive, that's for sure.

There was a character referenced in the first series of  Peaky Blinders called Billy Kimber.  Kimber did indeed exist and ended up as a wealthy man in retirement in Torquay (sorry, now biting down on the desire to reference the view from Torquay hotel bedroom windows... love Fawlty Towers...).  He had made his money as a big hitter of British crime though.  The television series portrayed him as a Londoner but he too was actually a Brummie.  Chinn also traced a descendent of Kimber:

Justine said: “My family had thought of Billy Kimber as a criminal, we knew that much, who had done time in Winson Green.
“But we had absolutely no idea just what a major gangster he became. We had assumed he was simply a local thug.
“We are not particularly proud of his career, but of course it is rather exciting knowing one is directly related to a godfather of organised crime.”

Good grief, the producers of Who Do You Think You Are?  would probably fall over themselves if a celebrity subject could be proved to have such an ancestor.  Can you imagine the "journey" that they would be taken on?  Through the streets of modern day Birmingham, probably into Winson Green prison, a list of victims for them to shed a tear over.... maybe that's what they will do with Carl Chinn's book about the real Peaky Blinders - start tracing them forwards to see if they have spawned any likely celebrities!  [There is a long running joke - urban myth? - that Michael Parkinson's family tree was done by the programme but his roots were considered too boring!  One can't help thinking that the stories which are shown are the tip of the research iceberg...]

Another aspect which piqued my interest is the fact that even if we find a criminal record for an ancestor, this is not necessarily the whole story.  On last night's episode of Peaky Blinders, Tommy Shelby (played by the lovely Cillian Murphy - see above) ordered two gang members to get themselves arrested in order to avenge the death inside Winson Green prison of a stooge who had been paid by the gang to go to prison (to give the police an arrest for bookmaking and keep them off the real criminals).  So if that had been real life, three men would have criminal records.  One for no reason other than his family were promised money and two for some minor offence when they were actually violent gang members!  You can see how descendents became less and less aware of what happened, as the years passed.  Below are the pictures of some real life Peaky Blinders.  Their listed offences are actually things like stealing bicycles...

 



I must say that the violence shown on the television series is quite extreme.  But somehow because of the setting, it does not feel that it is shown gratuitously.  Although I could have done without watching Cillian Murphy being beaten to a pulp... far too lovely for that...  Sadly, 1920s Birmingham, many people could not just change channel when faced with such violence.

1.  The Real Peaky Blinders: Billy Kimber, the Birmingham Gang and the Racecourse Wars of the 1920s - Carl Chinn (paperback, 10 October 2014)

 

Being Anglo Indian

Not sure I will get chance to post today but here is a great article that I found last night, to keep you busy!  Really interesting insights.

http://www.tasveerjournal.com/ai/#.VD0PyR_nYAE.facebook

Pandemic

As you will have seen on the news, the world is currently facing an outbreak of the Ebola virus, centred in Africa.  It is a terrible disease and governments are right to be concerned.  It is a pity, though, that they were not concerned a lot sooner.  As so often is the case, the rest of the world has to feel threatened (or totally shamed - see Band Aid circa 1984!) before serious situations in Third World countries get the attention they deserve.

 

Today, the BBC news website carried an article about Spanish Influenza.  I can see why they did this - it was at the end of the First World War that the pandemic took hold plus it is an easy comparison to the Ebola outbreak.  The article is very informative.  I certainly knew very little about the outbreak in 1918/1919.  I definitely did not know that it is estimated to have killed fifty million people worldwide.

 

The most recent modern day media reference to the Spanish 'flu outbreak was in Downton Abbey, when it very conveniently took away the fiancée who was getting in the way of the Lady Mary/Matthew Crawley, will they/won't they plot.  [There she is above, poor Lavinia.]

 

I had been going, in this post, to question the wisdom of putting out the Spanish 'flu piece on the BBC website, for fear of stirring people up - after reading it, I felt informed but disturbed, to say the least.  It made me cross with the Beeb  and want to rant about tabloid style scare mongering.  However, when googling to write today's post, I stumbled upon a piece about how accurate Downton Abbey's portrayal of the 'flu had been. 

 

This article about Downton Abbey argued that the rather sanitised view of the 'flu shown in the episode was bad for public health information as it would lead people to believe that there was no need to be afraid of such pandemics in the future.  It mentioned the lack of fear apparently shown by others in the house towards those who had succumbed.  The willingness to visit, the willingness to nurse the patients, the lack of face masks.

 

So maybe the BBC have it right and are starting to make people aware of how a pandemic actually works.  Let's just hope that they have jumped the gun and we will not ever find out truly how a pandemic works.

 

In terms of family history, I suppose the main point of interest for 1918/1919 would be to identify which relations, if any, we have who succumbed to the Spanish 'flu.  It only occurred to me as I was writing that I do not have cause of death for a number of ancestors at that time.  And therein lies the financial rub.  As mentioned previously on this blog, it is not cheap to order death certificates in bulk.  We need to be very sure that we have the correct person before we do so and we should have, in my view, a definite reason for wanting to know their cause of death.  Perhaps the ones "worth" spending money on are our direct ancestors - the great, 2xgreat etc grandparents.  Many of them will have come from very large families so it would be expensive to order certificates for all siblings.

 

However, if you have relations who died in 1918/1919 but were not killed in the First World War, it may be worth finding out if they died in the pandemic.  After all...

 

“It really was a major event in modern human history........Outside of wars, there weren’t many events seen like it. So to downplay it at all is wrong." (MNN Post article)

 

We can only wait to see and hope that such an event will not be seen again.

 

You can donate to the Red Cross battle against Ebola at http://www.redcross.org.uk/ebolavirus

CVs for All

There are so many themes whirling in my head today, not sure what to talk about!  I missed Wedding Wednesday yesterday - apologies.  Child and dog issues caught up with me again.  Really, it is not a lie to say that a puppy is like a third child.  I truly feel like I am back to the time when my eldest child was a toddler and I had no idea what I was doing and I felt like a constant failure.  My hands are chewed to death, the house is trashed and don't even speak to me about the state of the garden....  On the plus side though, the puppy is always delighted to see me, eats everything that I give her (and much else besides!) and is gradually allowing me to meet people in the village where we now live.  It is taking a toll on my time for writing, research and general pondering though!

 

So, today I think it would be interesting to think about jobs.  This is prompted by eldest child last night saying "I still don't know what I am going to be!".  I pointed out that he hasn't reached secondary education yet but unfortunately, he has a friend who is in a football academy and a friend who is swimming at county and regional level so he feels that he is a little behind! I also pointed out that these friends' achievements now by no means give a definitive idea of future career.  Many things can happen to budding sportspeople.

 

I did start to think, though, that occupation is something which it is far more difficult to pinpoint for our ancestors than we might believe.  I have written before about the benefits of internet searches and I gave the example of having found "cordwainer" as an occupation on a census and discovering that this was actually shoe making/mending.

 

Another example which I recently came across - when writing my post about the creation of the censuses - is that of "Ag Lab" given as occupation.  A tree that I worked on for a friend in the summer had many generations with this as "occupation" on census returns.  It stands, of course, for "Agricultural Labourer". Apparently though, it was standard practice to stick this down for a wide variety of countryside work.  The census teams were short on time, they often had to assist people with filling in the forms and there was little space for a full description of what someone actually did.  So Ag Lab may mean someone who lived hand to mouth, possibly as an itinerant and picked the seasonal produce, scythed fields, helped with ploughing etc as required.  Equally it might mean someone with a steady farm job, a tied cottage and an established family.

 

It makes one ponder on what the modern day censuses will reveal in a hundred years time.  I cannot now remember the categories for occupation in the 2011 census obviously.  But I am sure that there will be job titles and descriptions which will cause much hilarity to 2111 researchers...  Maybe all job titles will have vanished by then and everyone will simply have a number?!  And technology will have moved on so much that they probably simply won't believe the number of telephone engineers, IT specialists, call centre workers and so on.  To say nothing of the trend in recent years for "multi careers".  Model/Actress/Whatever - what on earth did they write on their forms??!

 

Eldest has plenty of time to decide though.  And if I look at my own employment record, I can see that it looks different for every census I have taken part in - I have been lucky enough to have a wide variety of experiences in my working life, from politics to the City to cooking to teaching to stay at home parent!  Good luck with that, future researchers!  I guess that brings us back to my post about keeping some things on paper for future generations to find.  We cannot all write memoirs but maybe we should write something down about our lives.  Otherwise we may end up as the Ag Labs of the twenty first century.  We will be defined by the category that we ticked every ten years.

 

 

A New Life and New Chores

 

 

Today I was listening to Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4.  I am not a daily disciple of Woman's Hour.  I don't know why as I usually enjoy it when I do listen.  Anyway, today was the start of a week of discussions about the results of a survey on household chores "division of labour".  Who does what in the home in the twenty first century, that sort of thing.  It has been conducted jointly with Mumsnet, as those who have logged onto my blog via Mumsnet will undoubtedly be aware. 

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4xsS4Nqzhn21v52xYdMPQqJ/womans-hour-chore-wars  will take you to the interactive pages.  You can find the programme on BBC iPlayer.

My own division of household labour seems to be fairly typical (me doing most of it, swinging from happy to have the option to be at home with kids to resentment at said kids and their father for taking advantage of me!) and I don't propose to add to the debate which this survey has started.  [See today's Guardian, for example.]  There will be plenty in the media as the week of programmes progresses.

As usual though, I found myself wondering how the debate would apply in times past.  We all know that, for example, marriage in the 1950s meant women mainly giving up work outside the home and devoting themselves to house and family.  And before the advent of modern labour saving devices, housewife duties were hard work.  I cannot bear to think how I would cope with the washing that my household generates and no washing machine.  A day without it, if it has a breakdown, induces near hysteria about the building clothing mountain!

However, the thought that caught me with regard to my own ancestors was my paternal grandmother's entry into British society in the 1940s and 1950s.  She, my grandfather and father along with her own mother and her disabled brother arrived from India in 1949.  They came from a hot country to a British "summer".  But more to the point, they came from a relatively easy lifestyle, with domestic help such as an ayah to look after my toddler father.  See the sideways picture above! [I have tried every which way to sort this and have not given up, sorry!  Previous readers of my blog will be aware of my dodgy IT skills...]

They were grateful to be away from the rioting and bloodshed in the aftermath of the Partition of India, I'm sure.  But it must have been more than daunting to arrive to a small terraced house in Coventry with few belongings and little furniture.  No help and no idea of how daily life in a grimy British city went on.

I am sure this is not how my grandmother envisaged married life progressing when she married my grandfather in 1943.  Of course, no one who suffers great setbacks in life ever envisages them - or such set backs would never actually happen; our lives would continue exactly as we would wish if we had crystal ball style technology!

I know that my father has memories of using crates to sit on at their first house.  I also know that within months of their arrival in the UK, my grandfather was sent abroad to work.  He did not return again for almost a year, I believe.  So my grandmother set up home in England and learnt how to run it with little help and with a toddler into everything.  Little division of labour there!

No washing machine, probably no fridge to start with, no central heating equals a lot of labour.  Makes me feel guilty at complaining about my own chores.  In fact, perhaps we should wonder how, given the amount of labour-saving devices we have these days, our chores do not seem to have diminished...

My father having been so little at the time and me not having had the presence of mind to ask such questions when my grandmother was alive, I have no idea how she managed for cash.  She was always someone who prided herself on keeping up appearances though so I can imagine that she and my father were as well turned out as possible, even if, unbeknownst to neighbours, they were sitting on orange boxes and eating baked beans!

I am proud to think of what they achieved.  They followed that well worn immigrant path and managed to establish themselves in a new country and culture.  Fairly sure, though, that the division of home labour was non existent!

You Never Can Tell

Given my blog's frequent mention of my Anglo Indian heritage, it would be a crime if I were not to post about the wonderful episode of Who Do You Think You Are? last night where Billy Connolly, the quinessential Scotsman, discovered that he too has a little Anglo Indian blood.

Thanks to the amount of research that I have done for myself in the last four years, I guessed which way the wind was blowing for his tree but it was still amazing to watch.  In particular to see that the brilliant researchers had managed to find such a huge amount, by British India records standards, of original documentation.  Many of those researchers can be found on Twitter if you would like to see more of what they do - eg Kirsty F. Wilkinson, @GenealogyGirl.

And who would guess, from Billy Connolly's appearance and immediate family tree that such a secret lay buried?  From his tree, it looks as if the Anglo Indian relation (that is, the offspring of a white British soldier and an "East Indian" lady then actually married a white British soldier herself.  So the Anglo Indian blood line did not continue in the way that many, including my own, did.

For as British rule tightened and the rules pertaining to society got stricter, Anglo Indian people were gradually squeezed from British society without feeling that they had a place in full Indian society.  They were generally employed in jobs where their loyalty to the British could be used to the best advantage of the British government.  Civil service and vital services such as the telegraph and railway services.  Not allowed to climb, in general, too high in the ranks but high enough to persuade them of their superiority to the Indian workers and thus have a vested interest in British rule.  On my own family tree, it is a succession of railway workers - mainly drivers and station masters - with the odd school master or doctor.

It was lovely to see Billy Connolly's reaction.  He clearly enjoyed being in India and had visited before.  And he was so amazed and delighted by the results of his journey.  Times do change, don't they?  A century and a half ago,  a person would have gone to great lengths, if they were as European looking as Billy Connolly, to hide any connection with an "East Indian"...  Even my own grandparents preferred no mention of their true antecedents.

As usual, WDYTYA made the whole experience of looking for family history and documentation look rather easy.  In actual fact, I can imagine a whole heap of work went into Bily Connolly's story, to say the least!

A few days ago, I briefly mentioned FIBIS, that is the Families In British India Society.  This is a wonderful volunteer-led self-help organisation.  They have a fantastic website and wiki at fibis.org  and you can find them on Facebook and Twitter.  It is a great place to start your search if you come across or suspect a British India connection.  You can use the site without taking membership but I would urge you, if you find yourself using the site regularly, to take the membership or to make a donation.  These things do not pay for themselves even with volunteers running them!  As an ex PTA co chair, I can test to the economics of this!  Apparently their Twitter feed went crazy after last night's programme.  I hope that Billy Connolly's story will be of benefit to them, they deserve it.