Foundation myths are important for exiles, and some stray quite a distance from the probable facts. In the 1970s, when I first began to deal with people interested in their family history, there was a strong contrast between North Americans and Australians. Many Americans were convinced they were descended from the Gaelic aristocracy and sought confirmation of large-scale dispossession. Australians regarded descent from convicts as a badge of honour and sheep-stealing as a perfectly legitimate activity in 1840s Ireland.
Genealogy has been democratised by digitisation. A fascinating pursuit that used to be the preserve of those whose ancestors had money, title or property has now become something most ordinary people can aspire to. Ordinary lives have assumed importance through mass digitisation of census records, parish records and vital records (births, marriages and deaths).
The way material is digitised has consequences for its users and for the diversity of ways in which it can be used. Pay-per- view websites, which only allow searches for individual names, may result in the discovery of that name, but uncontextualised, isolated and dissociated from the community to which that person belonged. Free-access websites, as has been the practice of Ireland, allow users to browse. So if your ancestors lived in a 10-family tenement in 1911, you can find out about their neighbours, the rooms everyone lived in, the religious and occupational composition of the house, and lots more.
The same applies to inhabitants of small rural townlands with perhaps eight households: browsing the neighbours gives you a sense of a small rural social and economic infrastructure, with blacksmiths, dressmakers, tradesmen, teachers and all kinds of people adding to the texture and functioning of life in a small rural space.
Alison Light is a passionate advocate of family history as a way of illuminating the landscapes, buildings, occupations, religions, systems and infrastructure that shaped and affected ancestors’ lives. She combines the sometimes fascinating story of her own family – none rich or powerful, most poor, some destitute – with an illuminating account of the social history of England from the mid-18th to the early 20th century, a time of cataclysmic change.
Light investigates both her father’s and her mother’s families. Her father’s antecedents were bricklayers and needle-makers whose fortunes rose and fell depending on demand for their skills. An underlying motif is movement: as the Industrial Revolution progressed and land enclosure intensified, people had to move to cities to find work.
Light couldn’t find an ancestral place that would stand as a home of origin. Her ancestors moved from piecework to domestic service to factory work, from local rural bricklaying to work in a town to being part of a large gang subject to the vagaries of large employers. Those who could not survive ended up “on the parish” or, after 1834, in the workhouse or lunatic asylum.
One of the most poignant and beautifully contextualised lives in the book is that of Light’s great-grandmother, Sarah Hill, born in Cheltenham Workhouse and destined to remain there as an orphan for nine years after her mother’s death at the age of 27.
No diaries or letters
Like most people in this situation, Sarah did not leave letters or diaries to tell us about how she felt as a child growing up in this inimical atmosphere, but Light compensates by giving us a powerful chapter on condition in the workhouse: the terrible diet, the vermin and disease, the harsh disciplinary regime, the corruption of the authorities, and the prevailing mindset that blamed the poor for their own poverty and the resulting misery of the inmates.
Light laments the lack of registers of the inmates, alas all too prevalent, particularly in Ireland, where widespread destruction of such vital records took place. But she uses material from the minute books of the “Guardians” to illuminate the lives of some of the “paupers”, among them John Turner, “who destroyed himself by cutting his throat”, and William Bunce, a child “who ran away from the garden”.
“My great-grandmother, Sarah Hill, spent nine years in a vermin-ridden, crowded ward of eighty or ninety women and children, of all ages and all conditions,” the author states. This is important, because Light has no time for shame at the destitution of our ancestors. Most people on the planet are descended from the poor, and an honest mass acknowledgment of that fact could have interesting consequences for how we view poverty, both in the past and the present.
Sarah died in Netherne Lunatic Asylum near Epsom in 1911, after “a number of days of mania”. She began and ended her life in Poor Law institutions. “Institutionalisation – prisons, schools, workhouses, asylums – became the state’s answer to solving the problems created by demographic change and urbanisation,” Light writes, “in insecurities and displacements of an industrial society.”
The English navy was a significant employer on both sides of Light’s family, to be expected since her ancestors eventually settled in Portsmouth, a major naval base. Again, she charts the lives of ordinary seamen, stokers and ships’ cooks, even down to the replacement of brandy with grog (rum and water) as the sailors’ ration when rum became plentiful as a result of the trade in sugar and slaves with the West Indies and the southern US.
Politics and economics
Throughout, Light is conscious of how the large questions of politics and economics ultimately affect the lives of ordinary people. Her own family’s resistance to these questions took the form of Nonconformist religion, a strong source of radicalisation in 19th-century Britain. The most successful of her connections, William Light, was a Baptist who built a number of significant structures, including a Catholic church in Portsmouth.
Still, William Light was not a direct ancestor and, she admits, while she was glad to find him, she can’t lay claim to him. (A much poorer great-grandfather, also a Baptist, was a jobbing bricklayer.)
Common People is Rolls-Royce genealogy. It's what you get when a superb social historian with particular interests in gender and labour history does the research on her own family and honestly recounts the outcome, with no holds barred as regards the vicissitudes they suffered. Real pride in a family's survival trumps false shame at their poverty.
Catriona Crowe manages the Census Online Project at the National Archives of Ireland
