Now I know that one person’s family history can be another’s yawn but I like reading about family stories because they often give a context to the bigger picture.
But they can also reveal deep tragedies which you sometimes wish you hadn’t uncovered and make you question whether it is proper to crawl over other people’s lives.
And I don’t think the distance of time and place alters that simple uneasy feeling that maybe, just maybe there is more than a littler voyeurism in unravelling their past.
So in the course of my own family journey I have discovered the brother of my great grandmother who committed suicide with a cut throat razor, the shocking medical history of my great grandfather during his time with the Colours in the 1880s, and the birth of my great aunt in the Derby Workhouse. Along the way there are also stories of grinding poverty, premature deaths, illiteracy and my own British Home Child.*
Always the discoveries bring you close up to the darker side of family history.
And so it is with one of my uncles, a man I never met and until just a decade and half ago I didn’t know existed.
He appeared on a family tree drawn up my uncle Fergus in the late 1990s but neither my father nor his brothers would give much away. The best I got was that after an unhappy marriage in Gateshead he moved south and died not long after I was born.
For whatever reason he cut all ties with the family and on the death of his mother, my grandmother Uncle George tried tracking him down only to discover he had already died.
“His hostess told me that he had a heart condition and had been told a week in hospital would put it right and that no other treatment was necessary.”**
A search of the records got me nowhere and as you do I moved on. More recently I found him, with first a reference to his death in 1953 and then his marriage.
But even here it proved more difficult to bring him out of the shadows. His death certificate was easy enough to obtain but that marriage record fell because I had incorrectly supplied the wrong information to the General Registry Office, and not for the first time I pondered on some sort of conspiracy.
Now that of course is pure tosh, so I will check the details and resubmit the application.
In the meantime I have the death certificate which simply states the cause of death as Chronic Bronchitis and Myocardial degeneration, the two are connected and the first appears to be caused by heavy smoking.
He lived in a series of rented rooms around Burmingham and looking at the streets today they seem comfortable pleasant places. I am curious to know who his last landlady was but the electoral roll for Birmingham 15 in 1952-53 is unavailable well at least for me here in Manchester so I shall have to wait.
Either way it was a sad and lonely death. The other occupants in the house could not have been very close for no one could give an exact age and his “occupation [was] unknown.”
The same letter from my uncle talked of him being an engineer which was a job he didn’t like because of the noise.
Not much I know but enough for me to feel saddened at his death and a little pleased that he has come out of the family shadows.
And I think I will try again for the marriage certificate.
*British Home Children were those migrated by charities and the Poor Law Guardians to Canada and later Australia from 1870 right up to the 1970s in the case of Australia.
**George Simpson, 1992
Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson
But they can also reveal deep tragedies which you sometimes wish you hadn’t uncovered and make you question whether it is proper to crawl over other people’s lives.
And I don’t think the distance of time and place alters that simple uneasy feeling that maybe, just maybe there is more than a littler voyeurism in unravelling their past.
 |
| Born in the Derby Workhouse, Laura Hall 1902 |
Always the discoveries bring you close up to the darker side of family history.
And so it is with one of my uncles, a man I never met and until just a decade and half ago I didn’t know existed.
He appeared on a family tree drawn up my uncle Fergus in the late 1990s but neither my father nor his brothers would give much away. The best I got was that after an unhappy marriage in Gateshead he moved south and died not long after I was born.
For whatever reason he cut all ties with the family and on the death of his mother, my grandmother Uncle George tried tracking him down only to discover he had already died.
 |
| Possibly an early photograph of my uncle |
A search of the records got me nowhere and as you do I moved on. More recently I found him, with first a reference to his death in 1953 and then his marriage.
But even here it proved more difficult to bring him out of the shadows. His death certificate was easy enough to obtain but that marriage record fell because I had incorrectly supplied the wrong information to the General Registry Office, and not for the first time I pondered on some sort of conspiracy.
Now that of course is pure tosh, so I will check the details and resubmit the application.
In the meantime I have the death certificate which simply states the cause of death as Chronic Bronchitis and Myocardial degeneration, the two are connected and the first appears to be caused by heavy smoking.
He lived in a series of rented rooms around Burmingham and looking at the streets today they seem comfortable pleasant places. I am curious to know who his last landlady was but the electoral roll for Birmingham 15 in 1952-53 is unavailable well at least for me here in Manchester so I shall have to wait.
Either way it was a sad and lonely death. The other occupants in the house could not have been very close for no one could give an exact age and his “occupation [was] unknown.”
 |
| His brother and my uncle, George Bradford Simpson |
Not much I know but enough for me to feel saddened at his death and a little pleased that he has come out of the family shadows.
And I think I will try again for the marriage certificate.
*British Home Children were those migrated by charities and the Poor Law Guardians to Canada and later Australia from 1870 right up to the 1970s in the case of Australia.
**George Simpson, 1992
Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson
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