Adventures in Genealogy

      It is time I write a new blog entry, 

     I have always found genealogical research fascinating. So much is written about the wealthy and powerful but I wonder about the lives of ordinary people doing their best to navigate a turbulent world with their families intact. With little to do during the pandemic, I was helping people do their own research and became obsessed with two family histories.

     One was about a father and grandfather who went missing 115 years ago near London, England. He had 5 children with his French wife and his disappearance/death left them destitute. Eventually, they were sponsored by a charity to come to Canada, specifically Montreal, where the mother had work lined up as a domestic and her three eldest children went to work immediately as well. English do gooders were trying to clean up the slums of the UK by shipping their poor to Canada and Australia to work as farm labour or servants. Inner city boys were not well suited to the work.

     I did a deep, depressing dive into poor houses and charities trying to find this family in hopes it would reveal what had happened to the father. Were they abandoned? Did he die? Why couldn't I find a death record? Was he in jail? I had heard of the Home Children, after all 'Anne of Green Gables' was one. Anne was fiction and while some of the children found good homes, others went to abusive homes and were beaten to death and buried in some back field or raped. No one ever vetted the homes or checked up on the kids after they were placed. The poor houses were not any better.  It was a long look into how awful human beings can be to each other.

     While researching the other tree of which I will say more in another entry, I discovered how easy it was to change own's name and simply disappear in 1908. Nobody had identity papers, not even for foreign travel. You could just move to a new city or country and use a different name, lots of men abandoned their families in this way. There was a column in the newspapers of just men who had run away and were being sought by police for this reason.  I mention this because in the end, that is what he had done.

     The subject had been taboo in the family. There were rifts between siblings and cousins over the question of what had happened. You were not allowed to ask. The woman whom I was helping was in her 80's and she just wanted to know. Her father died without knowing what had happened to his father. The elder three came to Canada first with their mother, leaving him and his younger sister behind in the care of a charity, the name of which I never discovered. He was seven and his little sister was five when their turn came to cross the Atlantic alone on a ship. It is incredible to think of in this day but equally incredible that Margaret's grandmother held her family together and never allowed any charity to separate them.

     The grandfather was a telegraph operator who married his French wife in Tehran while working for Reuters in the 1890's. I would guess he met her while travelling to Persia for his new job. Their first two babies died of some unfamiliar illness so she moved back to France for the third pregnancy. The boy survived and eventually dad came back and they all moved to London and had four more children.  Telegraph operator was a skilled profession and the practitioners made a decent wage. It was not likely that poverty lead him to leave.

     I searched for months. It looked hopeless. I had found a fellow researcher online who shared his research with me. He was married to Margaret's cousin.  His father in law had really wanted closure, like Margaret's father, but had passed away without them ever discovering what happened. I became obsessed. There wasn't much to do during the pandemic and the few resources I could have accessed in the real world were closed. Many nights I would just put quotation marks around the man's name on google search and press enter. I got different results every time for some reason.  And then one Sunday night at 11:30, I decided to it was time to go to bed and I did a random search but this time a marriage record in Newcastle on Tyne came up. I decided to click on the link. Looked like him. I sent the link to a friend who I knew was still up and said that I think I found him. She looked and agreed. I didn't want to wake up Margaret for something I wasn't certain about so I waited but I could not sleep that night. Could it be after all these years? My other friend was awake all night too.

     I messaged Margaret in the morning but I also messaged her cousin's husband. Had he ever seen this record before? His response was "I think you found him". Anyway after that with that lead, we both tried to fill in everything we could and found his death record as well. He ran off and married another woman in Newcastle after his family had moved to Canada. Incredibly, he committed bigamy in his real name but then so did the other woman. They had one son together who never married or had children that we could discover. He was never included in the census after he ran off, making himself harder to find.

     Margaret did the dna test to see what would come up but no surprise relatives showed up. The only surprise really was that ancestry dna never uncovered anyone who was related to her through her grandfather's family. Her great grandparents got married after they had been together for about 20 years and five children of which only two seemed to make it to adulthood. I was never sure.  Grandfather's oldest brother was almost an adult when he disappears from the record and there is a long gap before more children were born. Eventually great grandfather died in a work accident and great grandmother died from alcohol. Grandfather and one brother were taken in by a cousin on their mother's side.

     My thoughts are that great grandfather was not actually grandfather's biological father. I think he was in prison for a while although I couldn't find any record of that. The baptism records for the children of that 'marriage' were recorded as legitimate by the Catholic priests who baptized them so the couple had no problems lying to the priest. Their only daughter was born in an Anglican poorhouse and baptized there. She did not live very long so it was probably just as well.

     Although I found where he had gotten to, I never figured out the why. I don't know when he met his second wife or where. He was living in London when he disappeared and she was in Newcastle. I think the reticence to speak about the past in the older generation came from the shame of being in the poorhouse or at the mercy of charities. People who found themselves in those circumstances  were treated as though they deserved the poverty since they were inferior beings. It was all so necessary.

A Rabbit Hole

      Once in a while, I have need of reading historical newspapers for some research project or other. I enjoy it but it is time consuming. Not just because the difficulty of finding the information sought but because I become distracted by some of the news articles I spot as I am scanning pages.

     Like this one, from the North Devon Journal, published on Thursday 12 May 1853; "May 10th-(Before the May and Robert Budd, Esq.)-Eliza Boatfield, a prostitute with a wooden leg, was charged by Policeman Chanter with using obscene and abusive language in Joy-Street, on the preceding night.-Committed for 14 days." I think most people would be curious about a one legged prostitute but the fact that she worked on Joy Street and not delivering was mildly amusing too. So then, I became curious about Eliza. Who was she? How did she lose her leg? What happened to her when she got out of jail?

     Unless the archives in Devonshire or in the Barnstaple area have more information, from Canada I was only able to fill in her story a tiny bit. I do know what happened to her leg from another article in the Exeter Flying Post, published on Thursday 24 January 1850. A young woman of 19 was operated on at the Torrington Union workhouse. The operation was noteworthy because it was accomplished while the patient was sedated with chloroform. It was Eliza Boatfield, who had been living in the South Molton Union workhouse and had been suffering from an unspecified disease for 9 months. She was brought to the workhouse in a very emaciated state, where because of the extensive disease (again unspecified) in her leg, the medical officers deemed it necessary to remove the limb above the knee joint. Everyone was pleased with the success of the operation. Eliza of course was not given an opportunity to say what she thought.

      Now I feel really bad for Eliza because she is at such a young age alone and living in one of those awful workhouses and her leg has been cut off. How can she support herself? Clearly we know it did not have a happy ending but how did this begin even? I could not find a baptism record for Eliza although I found her on the 1851 census living in the South Molton workhouse. She said she was born in High Bickington where there are numerous Boatfields. Without a birth register I cannot figure out who her parents were but I believe she lost them at a young age. There are three or four Eliza Boatfields from that part of Devon, born within 10 years of each other but I believe our Eliza is the 9 year old who, in the 1841 census was living at a farmhouse working as a servant. 

     Poor Eliza. I was unable to find out what happened after her arrest on Joy Street. There was an Eliza Boatfield who was married in 1857 in Barnstaple but without knowing more about her I can't say for sure which Eliza Boatfield it is but I feel it is her. I am sure a one legged former (or not so former) prostitute who has a criminal record would not be marrying a great guy but I hope he was a decent guy. 

     And while trying to find out about Eliza, I came across a John Bawdon, who was in the same workhouse, referred to by the newspaper as the notorious John Bawdon, and who was thrown in jail because he refused to do his workhouse chores. I kinda like the sound of this Mr. Bawdon and I wonder why he was so 'notorious'. Truly, reading old newspapers is like taking a long trip down a rabbit hole

A thoroughly modern fable

 With all the issues in the world and lack of trust in news media in view, I was having a conversation recently with my son and I told him a story. It went like this:

Once upon a time, there was a man. His name was Walter Cronkite and he was called 'the most trusted man in America' and it was true. He earned that name, people trusted him. He was the most trusted man in America and he was a journalist.

That was the punchline. My son thought I was being funny but it is a true story. There was a time when people trusted the news. Imagine that.

Thoughts While Sitting at Home Bored.

      In the early days of quarantine, I thought it might be fun to reread Camus' The Plague and compare the global pandemic to what they experienced. I reread the book but got sucked into a lethargic rut. Many of the emotions in the book and today's reality are similar with several distinctions. The first, covid-19 is not as deadly as pneumonic plague or as easily transmitted. Secondly, there was no point in trying to escape since there is no place to go to. Ah well, here's hoping there will be a return to some kind of sanity soon.