Falling through the cracks or how to be lost to history Eliza Boot known also as Hall 1872-1963

Detail of Eliza's birth certificate

It remains one of those big mysteries to me that some people just fall through the cracks and are lost to history.

Now I am not talking about the dim distant past when few people could write and official records were kept to the minimum.

This is the story of a woman who was born in 1872, who had five children, four of which were taken into care and who had at least one brush with the law.

She died aged 91 and in all that time there are just ten references to her and even some of those are incorrect. So her death certificate gives her age as 89 when she was two years older and her husband as John Nelson Montague who she never actually married.

This of course is something which anyone engaged in family history is all too well aware of.

Detail of Eliza's death certificate, 1963

Even so Eliza Boot seems to have been unlucky.

Apart from the records of her birth and death, she appears just three times on the census and once registering the birth of her last child born in 1902.

Her medical records along with everything connected to her stay in the Workhouse have long since been destroyed and the only reference left to her children being taken back into care does not even mention her by name.

A newspaper report from 1894

All of which leaves just one listing in a street directory two brief comments in letters and a newspaper report of a drunken brawl when she was 22.

There must be more but I fear it is well buried.

Part of the problem is that she did just fall through the cracks.

She never married my great grandfather so that record does not exist and she did not qualify to be registered for National Insurance in 1911 and I doubt that she subsequently got on to any work related register, and she seems to have evaded the 1891 census.

If she did bother to register for a Parliamentary vote we won’t be able to locate her till after 1928 and even then it will be difficult to know where she was registered.

Added to that she manages to muddy the search by alternating between the family surname of Boot and that of my grandfather who was called Hall.

Eliza's address in 1921, Court 5, Hope Street

Of course there will be those who knew her but even here the search is all but over.

My mother never mentioned her, nor did her son who was my grandfather.

Both died in the 1970s and since then so has anyone who would have had a direct connection with her.

There is one brief entry in a letter written by her nephew in 1941 asking after her health and the comment from her daughter that “I only lived with my mother for about six years and she was in the change then and rather moody, so I did not get much information from her.”

Sadly we never picked up on that clue and that trail is now also closed down.

It would be easy to speculate on the character and life of my great grandmother from the little we have.  The drunken brawl, the separation from my great grandfather and the fact that her children spent much of their young lives in care could all be woven into a colourful story.

The birth certificate of Eliza's dauggter, 1902

Add to this that one of her sons deliberately preferred to give his aunt as next of kin when he enlisted in 1915 and that Eliza never featured in my childhood.

Now that is strange given that I was born in 1949 and regularly visited my grandparents up to 1961, a full two years before she died.

But to write such a story would be to slide into the realms of fantasy.  I did not know her, and there is not enough to conjure up her life in all but the barest details.

So for now and perhaps forever she will continue to fall through the cracks.  Not the best of outcomes.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson