If you have impoverished Victoria ancestors, don’t miss these two articles.
Dave Annal, in his article Poverty, Illegitimacy and Lies, about Stoke-on-Trent, quotes from “Mrs Gaskell’s groundbreaking novel Mary Barton, available at the Internet Archive.
You went down one step even from the foul area into the cellar in which a family of human beings lived. It was very dark inside. The window-panes many of them were broken and stuffed with rags, which was reason enough for the dusky light that pervaded the place even at mid-day. After the account I have given of the state of the street, no one can be surprised that on going into the cellar inhabited by Davenport, the smell was so feetid as almost to knock the two men down. Quickly recovering themselves, as those inured to such things do, they began to penetrate the thick darkness of the place, and to see three or four little children rolling on the damp, nay wet brick floor, through which the stagnant, filthy moisture of the street oozed up; the fireplace was empty and black; the wife sat on her husband’s lair, and cried in the dark loneliness.
Patricia Sears’s article, “Queen Catherine Court, Ratcliff: an East London Slum,” is a deep dive into the appalling conditions in which its residents lived. Catherine Court, with five privies for sixteen houses, had a majority population of Irish origin. The clean lines of a couple of Ordnance Survey maps contrast with artists’ impressions.
Not as grim a read is Richard Tolson’s article Works of Historical Literature: Medieval Records for the Genealogist and Local Historian. It includes a timeline of interest in the unlikely event your known ancestry extends back into the period from the Battle of Stamford Bridge (1066) to the end of the War of the Roses (1346).
Always worth reading, in Revisiting Research, Chris Paton reflects on his “spectacular errors” to remind us that family history research is never truly finished. He describes a common beginner’s trap: making assumptions or following “gut feelings” rather than hard facts. He shares personal examples of how he once attached the wrong parents to an ancestor for years and missed a murder investigation because he didn’t understand a specific archival notation. He advocates applying the Genealogical Proof Standard and argues that revisiting old research is a fundamental part of the process, not a sign of failure.
I’d have to add that making errors is fundamental, it’s how we learn.
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I stumbled across this ad for 50% off Ancestry.ca until 12 January. It’s undoubtedly for “new” subscribers only.