Ruth A. Symes - Family First: Tracing Relationships in the Past

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
PEN AND SWORD HISTORY
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Copyright Ruth A. Symes, 2015

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Contents

Dedication

To my mother, Olive Symes,
who has always put her family first.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For general encouragement and recent interest in my writing thanks to Andrew Chapman, Mairead Mahon, Naomi Symes, Helen Tovey, Philip Watts and Sarah Williams. Thanks to the staff of Manchester City Archives; and Emma Marigliano of the Portico Library, Manchester, for specific information relating to that city. For information on club records, thanks to Stuart Halsall and Jim Spence of the Manchester Geological Society, Nick Bryam, Dartford Workings Mens Club; Mary Sharp, Assistant Secretary, Administration and Membership, The Carlton Club; and Colin R. Merton, Hon. Librarian, The Savile Club. Thanks also to Pat Morant for the story and images relating to Ellen Clementina Higley.

Finally, thanks to Zainul and Ruby Sachak for their unfailing love and support.

INTRODUCTION

A Sense of Family 18001950

For our ancestors, family came first. Whether rich or poor, from the North or the South of Britain, Protestant or Catholic, indigenous or immigrant, the relationships between spouses, parents, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and the older generation were the chief structural ties of everyday life in the period 18001950.

Between the censuses of 1831 and 1901, the population of England and Wales rose rapidly from around 15 million to 32.5 million. Those millions of individuals were significantly grouped into small clusters the families and extended families of our ancestors. A particular forebear might fascinate us because of the exceptional life he led, the aspects of individual personality and character that made him stand out from the crowd, but crucial to his identity will have been the fact that he was a relational being at one time or another, a son, a grandson, a brother, a husband, a son-in-law, a father, a cousin, an uncle or a grandfather. In large families with many branches living close by, your nineteenth- or early twentieth-century ancestor might have exercised all these roles and interdependencies simultaneously in a life very different from the highly individuated existences of today.

It is the task of establishing the genealogical ties between people that keeps all family historians busy, but such ties were, of course, never just lines on a diagram. The bonds between family were biological, legal, moral and emotional, in various combinations, and as we come to learn more about them through our research, they almost vibrate off the page with emotion the passion, sorrow, animosity and even tedium that characterised those relationships in real life. As we all know, the branches and twigs of our family trees were often supportive and nurturing, sprouting forth new foliage in every generation, but they could also be desiccated and rotten, cracking and splitting or producing nothing worth harvesting.

Genealogical records, of course, everywhere back up the strength and subtlety of these ties of blood and marriage. Wills are one written source where the intricate and endlessly fascinating matter of relationships are made most apparent, not least in the bizarre wordings of the bequests left to different relations. Witness, for example, the will of Elizabeth Brew of Lezayre on the Isle of Man in 1808 who bequeathed to her daughter Jane Brew, the sum of one hundred and fifty pounds British, a feather bed, bedding, the cow and the desk above the parlour to [her] son Thomas, the feather bed with the blue and white check [and] the desk in the factory, and to [her] daughter Elizabeth, one of the feather beds in the room above the kitchen. (see: http://brew.clients.ch/willslezayre.htm). Were Jane, Thomas and Elizabeth to inherit beds of different quality (not to mention other assets) because of their respective ages, their marital status or the good deeds that they had done for their mother? We shall never know, but the will points us fascinatingly towards the shadows of the family connections and the possible tensions and rivalries between the three siblings.

And the same is true, to one degree or another, of many genealogical records. The most personal (including cards, letters and diaries) might spell out these relationships painfully clearly. Other official records ask us to read the hidden qualities of the relationships between the lines: Bastardy Examinations, for example, in which unmarried mothers are coerced into naming the fathers of their children; letters of application for widows pensions in which the good reputation of the woman in question is paraded in front of the authorities in a bid to secure her entitlement to funds; or court records in which brothers or neighbours denounce each other for supposed transgressions. And finally, there are the many other records which seem, at first glance, to be simply statements of fact but which hint at the quality of the life and the relationships between those documented: the census returns which evidence how a mother must have given birth every couple of years from her late teens into her early forties; the workhouse registers which show a family of three young children admitted together and then separated the same day; and the school attendance logs, which consistently show a boy present whilst his sister is absent, kept at home perhaps to look after the youngest members of the family.

Family Size

It is a fascinating thought that most of our nineteenth-century ancestors will have had experience either of being a child in a large family, or of being the parents of numerous children, or both. Until the third quarter of the nineteenth century, unrestricted childbirth was the regime for the majority of married women. For many generations in the distant past, indeed, your family tree probably resembled a pyramid with couples tending to have more children than their parents. Broadly speaking, for most of the nineteenth century creating a family was seen as the only proper end of marriage and constant child-bearing was considered the only natural role for women of all classes. Family numbers reached a peak in the 1860s as medical knowledge, developing public health facilities and a better diet improved fertility and reduced infant and maternal mortality.

At the same time, there was an intensity of connection between what we now call the nuclear family and its other branches. Aunts, uncles and cousins may have been almost as much a part of your nineteenth-century ancestors life as parents and siblings. Grandparents, great-grandparents and other elderly relatives might have lived nearby or within the family home. The social circles of these people (their friends, neighbours and the people they associated with in clubs and organisations), which are also investigated in the last chapter of this book, were generally localised, and interconnected with family life.