Family Ties in London's East End

Whitechapel High Street 1905

Family lore ties part of my East End ancestry to a pub that no longer stands. My grandmother wasn't born in the East End and first came to the Dock Street location in 1911, when she and her husband, Henry Booth, took over the running of the pub, The Hearts of Oak. Henry died in 1913, leaving her with the pub to run and four living children ranging in age from 5 to 16.

In 1915 she remarried. Her new husband, Charles Cavanagh, was a bachelor and clerk who lived close by. Was the Hearts of Oak his usual watering spot? Still, even with a going business, it would take a special man to take on a ready-made family.

My grandmother may not have been born in the East End, but her new husband had been. In fact, the Cavanagh family had deep roots in that part of London. And, although I never met my grandfather, what I have been told about him leads me to believe that he had a strong sense of family, a quality ingrained in many of the inhabitants of this, the poorer area of London.

I wonder if a strong sense of family was something that the Irish brought with them to London, or if they learned it when they morphed into poor Londoners? Hopefully they brought it with them. Maybe widening my research to include family networks will give me some clues as to where in Ireland this Cavanagh family hailed from. 

Sources:

Young, Michael and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London. Penguin Books, London, 1962. 

Image:

Whitechapel High Street 1905 Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3847601