The Treasures at the Bottom of the Suitcase

Research trips are so much fun! Well, maybe not the preparation; figuring out which archives to visit, how to get there and if they are open when you need them to be, can be daunting. Even being there trying to understand how the archive works and what the best use of your time will be, can be challenging. A first quick visit and then a longer second one can be more productive. That was my strategy for the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) and I think I will do even better there on repeat visits providing they don't make major changes in the meantime.

As the LMA has agreements with Ancestry, many items are actually available online. A really detailed look at their catalogue is necessary to make sure you are accessing items that would not be available online so that you make the most of your in-person visit. My preparation was a bit lacking in that respect this time but I did come up with some interesting negative info on my Arment family line. For some reason their young children were buried at Wycliffe Congregational Church. I checked the roll of church members for 1827 to 1867 as the children were buried in the 1840s but their parents didn't show up as members. There were some other family names that may be clues as to why the children were buried there. That mystery deserves a closer look.

That is one of the hardest parts about a research trip, actually unpacking the suitcase. By that I don't mean just taking all the painstaking notes you have made and putting them with the other notebooks amassed from other research trips, but actually going through things to see what treasures have been found and how they fit into your overall family history. Do they hold clues to possible new research? Or maybe they refute something you have long held to be true. Whatever those facts are they deserve to be evaluated and worked on. You spent a lot of time and energy to find them!

(This was actually a pep talk to myself but maybe I am not alone in needing it?)

Past Homes

 

Was that how the street looked when my family lived there in the 1800s? Was that even the building they lived in or had it been replaced sometime back in history? Finding numbers close to street doors was difficult but judging the era of the street fronts they were attached to was even harder. It was obvious that some ancestral places had been razed and new places put in their stead. Goodmans Fields was not an upscale area of office blocks when my family lived there and, while there was a building at 82 Wentworth Street, it was doubtful that it was the one my Cavanagh family lived in for decades. It seems that even the street use had changed as surely Petticoat Lane Market was more than a few blocks away in their day.

 Visiting old family addresses is de rigueur for family historians. If you are lucky the places where your ancestors lived may still be standing and there might even be a chance that you could get inside. If not, just being in the area where their home once stood can give you a better idea of the lay of the land, which can help with the understanding of family stories or written accounts. It can also help you to picture their everyday lives. 

But there is nothing as sure in life as constant change. It happens in our lives all the time and it did in our ancestors lives as well. Many of them moved up and down the social scale as time and age changed their circumstances. Some of them moved from village to village, or village to town then city or even to different countries.

Did they keep fond memories of home in their minds as they pursued new lives in distant lands? But maybe the vision of home they held dear was no longer a reality. This came to mind after a conversation I had with someone who had lived in Halifax in his youth. It was a place we shared in common. Our memories stumbled over the street names but we recalled some of the geography, like the cemetery on the main street and the Public Gardens across the street from the Lord Nelson hotel. One of his fond memories was of sitting on the lawn in front of the library with chips from the food truck parked nearby. I told him things had change, that the city was proud of its new library but it was on the opposite side of the street and there was no lawn in front. He was sad he can only sit on the library's lawn in his memory and not look forward to doing that in person again one day. 

Did our ancestors have dreams of walking down the streets of their old homes one distant day in the future or did they embrace their lives in new lands and forget about what they had left?

A Channel Islands Legacy

A view of St Peter Port, Guernsey

So close and yet so far. My cruise ship stopped at Guernsey but my family links were to Jersey. Time to plan a future journey to that other Channel Island. All was not lost, however, as, even though there is a rivalry between the two islands, they have much in common.

The islands are closer to France than they are to England although they are British Crown dependencies. My search for family information online at Jersey Heritage https://www.jerseyheritage.org/collections/archive

brought up family records written in French although the heritage website was in English. I wasn’t sure which language would be spoken. No worries, our driver/tour guide sounded like a London cab driver. 

Given the history in living memory, this made sense. With German occupation eminent, many of the islands’ children were evacuated to Britain. There they would have picked up the language and accents of their hosts. The story of the occupation from the islanders’ point of view was brilliantly depicted in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. There were tours on offer which followed the episodes in that book but, as much as I enjoyed the story, I chose a more general tour which took in scenery, colourful sights and signs of German occupation.

When building their bunkers, the Nazi forces had no concern for the archaeology of the area and, the sources that I read blamed them for causing irreparable harm to the historical record. I hope that similar harm was not done by them or through other attempts at modernization when I search for traces of my family on Jersey when I finally get there.

My family’s stay was a short one, at least for the living.. My 2 x great grandparents left Dorset sometime in the 1870s, when the Channel Islands were opening up to more people from England. They settled in St Helier for a time and it was there that their daughter, my great grandmother, came to get married. As she and her future husband lived in Birmingham it took me a while to find that information through a newspaper notice as the marriages on the Channel Islands are not included in the entries at the General Register Office for England. 

 Some of the leftovers from the German occupation

 

 

A History in Peril?

Memorial at Bombay Street, Belfast

No where was I more aware of history being a blink away than in Belfast. Our black cab tour took us to many of the spots that were scenes of violence only a matter of decades ago. The hardest thing on our tour was to get close to the murals and memorials which see clusters of cabs and buses trying to get their passengers close to the scenes of past action.

It was difficult to relate the busy peaceful scene to the newspaper and TV news coverage of the troubles. Squinting hard it might have been possible to equate the current scene with the war torn streets where people had to take their lives in their hands to carry out their daily activities. No one was covered in glory over that conflict.

Things were peaceful in May when we were there. It probably seemed that strife was in the past until 2016. Now it remains to be seen what will happen when Ireland’s current borders become further divided in the long drawn out lead up to Brexit. 

 Never again!

 

Absorbing History

 

Street in Rouen

  

To many their surroundings were everyday things that they probably took for granted but walking down the street in Rouen to see the cathedral was like walking back in history. Not that it was easy to follow our tour guide through the crowded cobblestone streets. It probably didn’t help that we kept stopping to take photos and ended up far behind our group.

There was more space for the crowds in Rouen than had been available when we went to visit Monet’s house and gardens. There were so many people there that we didn’t have enough time to go into the house. The gardens were magnificent and almost made up for the people blocking some of the view. Another day might have been different, but it was a sunny Sunday, the first nice day in a while, a very good day for a walk to take in history. 

Notre-Dame de l'Assomption de Rouen

 

That one day was a teaser and the first time I had stepped foot in France. It showed me that finding out about history on a tour is a limited overview at best and can turn out to be hard to access because of weather, crowds and other distractions. The tour only covered a limited number of places and my friend who wanted to see Rouen was unable to visit the church significant to her family history as it was too far away. Mass market tours might not be the best thing for family historians on the hunt. The moral of the story is that historical tours are fun and informative for the average tourist but if you want to know more it would be better to spend time tailoring a visit that fits in the history you want to absorb.

Monet's Japanese Garden

Links to Ireland

The Potato Famine of the 1840’s caused an unfathomably enormous loss of life in Ireland. The famine was also the cause of a huge wave of Irish immigration to many countries but most particularly to the new world. The statues of famine victims on the shores of the river Liffy as shown in the image above are a commemoration of this chapter of Irish history.

While the famine is the most famous episode in Irish history, it didn’t include my direct Irish ancestors who left Ireland before the 1840s. But the Irish have been leaving the country for generations. The exhibits in the Epic Irish Immigration Museum covered many more times in Irish history when people left in droves due to famines, wars or other momentous events. Perhaps some other historical event caused my ancestors to leave their native land.

I hoped that advice from the Family History Centre in the Epic building would get me further ahead in my search. Unfortunately not, although I was advised to book a consultation with an expert on London ancestry at the Society of Genealogist in London. I will have to see if I can get an appointment for the time that I am in London. I am determined to find out more about my Cavanagh line. We’ll see how that works out.

Tenement Tours

Hallway at 14 Henrietta Street, Dublin

Want to know more about how your family lived? Why not visit a museum that tells you more about dwellings like those they may have lived in? While in Dublin I went on a tour of their tenement museum. The tour and exhibits there focused on 14 Henrietta Street’s history. Like many other buildings in inner cities, it started its life as the home of the well-to-do with well appointed rooms for the public eye and more basic accommodation for the necessary offices, such as kitchens and servants’ quarters.

But times and neighbourhoods change and what was a fashionable address in earlier years may fall out of favour. What happens to those once great houses? They get repurposed and go down in the world. A lot of them end up to be tenements in slums like those on Henrietta Street in Dublin. After the fashionable set moved on, 14 Henrietta Street was taken over by businesses, then housed soldiers for a while. It wasn’t until an enterprising man thought to partition the rooms and rent out every part of the building that Henrietta Street became a true tenement. As many people as possible were squeezed into the place.

There was even a family of thirteen occupying the area of what is now the reception area of the museum. It was smaller but less dank that the basement they had occupied and offered more light. Lack of light was a problem in the buildings. There was no lighting on the stairs which made coming home after dark tricky. Hallways must have been gloomy places but maybe it was better not to see the walls painted in their distinctive red and blue and notice the true state of the place or the vermin which shared the accommodations.

I still haven’t been able to find out where my Cavanaghs came from in Ireland. I am not sure if they lived in Dublin but looking at the changes that were wrought in the building on Henrietta Street gave me a better idea of the surroundings my ancestors in East End London found themselves in.