Family tragedies come in many forms and none of them are easy to come to terms with. But you would think that time can distance the pain even more so when the relative is someone you have never met and died when Queen Victoria still had eight years left to reign.
This is a cautionary tale for the family historian. The experts warn us that in searching for long lost relatives we will come up against the work house, that awful place nicknamed the Poor Law Bastile and feared and hated by any who might one day end up in one.
Any family living on the margin of poverty could expect to spend some time in one. Unemployment, ill health or old age could pitch any but the comfortably off into its grim walls. Once inside the inmate surrendered much that we take for granted. Married couples were separated, children taken from their mothers and menial tasks were demanded in return for food and shelter.
The quality and quantity of the food may not have been as Dickens would have you believe and there were rare glimpses of humane treatment on the part of the authorities, but for most if the words “abandon hope all ye who enter here” were painted on the entrance door they could do little but confirm the sense that the inmate had reached rock bottom.
My family like many can point to at least two relatives who spent time in the Derby Workhouse, one of them my great grandmother had her last child there in 1902. She had returned north from Gravesend with her three surviving sons, pregnant with my great aunt, leaving my great grandfather behind.
So as the family stories go all went into care and she fought hard to bring them back together. It was a hard struggle. Nine years after my great aunt was born in the workhouse the children were all still in institutions and she was working outside Derby as a domestic servant.
They were all reunited but when is lost in time, all I know was that by 1921, her daughter and eldest son were with her in Hope Street, her youngest son had reenlisted after the Great War and the remaining son had been packed off at the age of 16 to Canada in 1914 from where he never came back.
These are tragedies, but all of them recovered. My great aunt emigrated to Canada, and my grandfather and his brother having survived the Great War went on to get married, raise families and live decent and fulfilling lives. My great aunt even came home briefly in 1968, and died with her children, grandchildren and great children around her.
Now the Workhouses have all gone. A few survive as hospitals, a few more became hostels for the homeless, but most now have been demolished or are empty and abandoned, waiting for time and neglect to bring them down or in some cases to be remade into loft conversions.
My family workhouse story was not what upset me. I had already done much research on the fate of paupers and was ready for the worst.
It was instead when I began to look into the life of the brother my great grandmother that I came up with my own personal slap in the face.
He was born in 1876 in Whiteman’s Yard and at the age of 24 married Mary Ellen Taylor who was just 18. They lived in Carrington Square off Carrington Street just behind London Road, and but a few minutes’ walk from the place of his birth.
Family historians can get quite blasé about their research and on the Saturday that his death certificate arrived I was laid back about the arrival of another family document. That is until I read the cause of death. By now I was used to descriptions of slow lingering deaths which were the result of poor diet, poor housing and long working hours. And I took it for granted that many of my relatives would leave their mark rather than write their names, or that the areas they lived in had long been cleared away. Poverty and its fall out were bedfellows for my family.
So there was the death certificate of William Boot who died aged just 26 years old, by his own hand.”Suicide by cutting his throat with a razor during a state of temporary insanity”, February 14th 1893.
That is what family historians should be aware of. Not the stigma, or the embarrassment of the action but the sheer waste of a life, and its awful impact on his wife and child and above all a sense that you have intruded on someone else’s grief. For the first time in my family research I felt like a voyeur and it was not a comfortable feeling
The inquest was reported in a factual enough way by the Derby Mercury four days later. He had it seemed been “low spirited” feared having to undergo an operation at a time “when work was scarce.”
It was sometime before I could go back to the story and it has taken a full three years before I felt I wanted to write about such a personal event.
Like any historian I know I should do more to place the suicide in the wider context, question the conditions that led him to do it, and search for any family clues that explain why he did it.
But some family tragedies are best left in the shadows, even when you are so remote from the event. Family history can be both rewarding and an important vehicle for understanding what your relatives lived through and what shaped their outlook but maybe we should tread with care.
Picture;
extract from the marriage certificate of William and Ellen 1891 from the collection of Andrew Simpson
