Author: Jamie

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Edward Doty: A History of “Firsts”

Before we congratulate ourselves at having an ancestor who sailed to America on the Mayflower, let’s take a look at Edward Doty’s life in the New World. It may not prove quite as heroic as we’d hope.

“Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor,” by William Halsall (1882), shows ice forming in the bay and frost on the Mayflower as an exploratory party heads ashore in December 1620

It started out well. Eddie was among the first explorers sent out from the ship to find a place to build their colony. A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth relates that, “Wednesday, the 6th of December, it was resolved our discoverers should set forth … So ten of our men were appointed who were of themselves willing to undertake it, to wit, Captain Standish, Master Carver, William Bradford, Edward Winslow, John Tilley, Edward Tilley, John Howland, and three of London, [i.e., Strangers:] Richard Warren, Stephen Hopkins, and Edward Dotte.”[1]

The First Encounter

The exploratory party sailed along the shore in the mid-December cold, where the water froze on their clothes making “them many times like coats of iron.” After landing, the explorers came upon a group of native Americans who weren’t exactly a welcoming party. “Anon, all upon a sudden, we heard a great and strange cry … One of our company, being abroad, came running in and cried, “They are men! Indians! Indians!” and withal, their arrows came flying amongst us. … The cry of our enemies was dreadful … their note was after this manner, “Woach woach ha ha hach woach.” Our men were no sooner come to their arms, but the enemy was ready to assault them.“[2]

The Saints and Strangers survived the attack and went on to establish a settlement at Plymouth, but the conditions were harsh, and almost half of the Mayflower’s passengers were dead within the first few months. The remaining colonists began building houses and farming in the spring, and by autumn of 1621 they had a sufficient harvest to hold a three-day feast with ninety of their now-friendly native neighbors in attendance.

The First Thanksgiving

“The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth” by Jennie A. Brownscombe (1914) shows a gathering of colonists and native Americans

As related by William Bradford in his journal, “They [the colonists] began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty.  For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. ”

An extract from William Bradford’s “Of Plimoth Plantation”

A letter sent to England described the first New England thanksgiving:

“Our harvest being gotten in …  amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others.”[3]

Edward Doty, of course, was among the colonists in attendance, probably in the company of his master Steven Hopkins’ family.

Perhaps less cause for celebration is Eddie’s questionable character. One Plymouth historian, Caleb Johnson, calls him a troublemaker. “He had a quick temper that often got the better of him, and he was very shrewd in his business dealing, to the point of being fraudulent in some cases.“[4] That appears to be a fairly rosy assessment.

The First Duel

His first run-in with the law came in June of 1621, with “the first duel fought in New England, upon a challenge of single combat with sword and dagger between Edward Doty and Edward Leister, servants to Mr. Hopkins; both being wounded, the one in the hand, the other in the thigh, they are adjusted by the whole company to have their head and feet tied together, and so to lie for twenty-four hours, without meat or drink, which is begun to be inflicted, but within an hour, because of their great pains, at their own and their master’s humble request, upon promise of better carriage, they are released by the governor.“[5]

When Plymouth began keeping court records in 1632 we see Eddie made no less than 23 appearances over the next twenty years for welshing on debts, slander, non-payment to his servant, fighting, fraudulent and deceitful deals, assault, trespass, and theft.

Yet Caleb Johnson says that “despite his regular appearance in Plymouth court … he carried on a regular life in Plymouth; he was a freeman with a vote at the town meetings, he paid his taxes, and he accepted the outcome of all court cases and paid all his debts. And all the while, he was raising a sizeable family. The court periodically made land grants to him, just as it did for other residents, and he participated in all the additional land benefits of being classified a ‘first comer’.”[6]

Doty, therefore, was a complicated, and flawed, character. He stayed in Plymouth until his death, contributing to and yet disturbing the common good. From our distant vantage point he probably makes a better ancestor than he made a neighbor to his contemporaries.

In the following and final post, we’ll look at Edward Doty’s family life and his death in his mid-50s.

Part 5: Edward Doty’s Family

Footnote(s)
[1]. Henry Martyn Dexter, ed, Mount’s Relation, or Journal of the Plantation at Plymouth (Boston: John Kimball Wiggin, 1865), pp 43-45.
[2]. Ibid, pp 52-53.
[3]. Ibid, p 133.
[4]. Caleb H. Johnson, The Mayflower and Her Passengers (Xlibris Corporation, 2005), p 132.
[5]. Thomas Prince, A Chronological History of New-England (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, and Company, 1826, a new edition of the original published in Boston by Kneeland & Green in 1736), pp 190-191. (https://archive.org/details/achronologicalh00halegoog)
[6]. Johnson, The Mayflower and Her Passengers, p 135-136.

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Edward Doty’s Family

After Edward Doty completed his indentured servitude to Stephen Hopkins he was free to marry and start a life of his own in Plymouth Colony.

From William Bradford’s “Of Plimoth Plantation”

Apparently his first marriage was short lived. There are no records of the marriage, his wife’s name, or of what happened to her. William Bradford in his journal Of Plimoth Plantation only mentions that Edward Doty had seven children by “a second wife.”

That second wife was Faith Clarke, whom Doty married in January 1635.

Edward was about 36 years old at the time. Faith was only 16, a native of Ipswitch, England, who had arrived with her father at the colony late the previous spring on the ship “Francis.” Together Edward and Faith had nine children between 1836 and 1853.

Their seventh child, Isaac, born in 1648, married Elizabeth (née England) and our family line is derived from that couple.

Edward, who had his share of spats — financial and otherwise — with his neighbors, also had a run-in with Faith’s father Thurston Clarke. In January 1642 there’s an entry in the colony court records “concerning the differences betwixt Edward Dotey and Thurstone Clarke,” stating that Clarke was to pay Doty five bushels of Indian corn and six shillings, though it’s not clear what the nature of the “differences” may have been. Apparently Eddie’s querulousness extended to the domestic front as well.

Nevertheless Edward was a good provider, as evidenced by the will he wrote in 1655 three months before his death in August at the age of about 56. He left behind a dwelling house and three tracts of land in New Plymouth, Coaksett, and Punckquetest to be divided between his wife and sons, “together with all Chattles [oxen, cows, swine] and moveables that are my proper goods.”

I mentioned earlier that when he signed the Mayflower Compact he did so with his “mark.” Had a copy survived, the mark may have looked like the one he made on his will, the two swooping lines highlighted below.

Now, 400 years after Edward Doty landed in New England on the Mayflower, and 399 years after he celebrated America’s first Thanksgiving with his fellow settlers and native Americans, we have something to be especially thankful for too — that we have a personal connection to that historic time in American history.

For those who may want to mark the 400th anniversary with a souvenir, or who have a child or grandchild born in this quadricentennial year, relevant national mints have produced special coins and medals to commemorate the Mayflower’s sailing from England, the Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrims, and the native Americans of the area.

The United Kingdom’s Royal Mint produced a 2020 bi-metallic £2 coin and the United State’s Mint is producing a silver medal with Mayflower-related images. The UK coin is available now and the US medal will be available on November 17th, 2020. [Click on the images to enlarge.]

The U.K. £2.00 Coin

The U.S. Silver Medal

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A Pandemic Story

A century after the Spanish Flu ended in the spring of 1920, the COVID-19 pandemic now has arisen to infect and devastate lives worldwide. Today’s pestilence brings to mind a story from the last one — the story of Helen (née Slonneger) Schrotzberger, a healer from that earlier era.

Helen was born in 1881 in Hamilton, Ohio, the second of three children of Christian K. Slonneger and his wife Emma Mitchell. An 1882 biographical cyclopaedia gave a thumb-nail sketch of her father Christian:

“A history and biographical cyclopaedia of Butler County, Ohio” Western Biographical Publishing Company (Cincinnati, Ohio), 1882

Helen’s mother passed away at age 32 when Helen was three years old and it appears the children were separated and placed with relatives; Helen was living with an aunt and uncle in Illinois and working as a seamstress at age 18.

Meanwhile her father, ever the entrepreneur, worked for a year as a postmaster in Florida, then as an insurance and real estate agent in Indiana.

By her mid-20s Helen relocated to California where she met Fred Schrotzberger and married him in 1908 in Los Angeles when he was 40 and she was 26. Fred and his brother Ted had been in business since 1906 as owners of the Schrotzberger Bros. meat market, working and living together in L.A.

Helen and Fred’s Marriage License. Click on image to see their certificate.

Helen and Fred had a son, Theodore, a year after their marriage. He was undoubtedly named after Fred’s brother, and even considered himself years later as a “Junior” to his uncle, signing himself thus on his World War II draft card.

From son Theodore’s Draft Card of 1940. Click to see card.

By 1913 Fred moved his small family to Glendale on the north side of Los Angeles. An ad from that year in the Glendale directory shows that Helen’s father, Christian K. Slonneger, joined his daughter in California and opened a grocery and meat market with his son-in-law called the Century Grocery & Meat Market, naming Schrotzberger & Co. as proprietors.

From the “Glendale City Directory 1913-1914”

By 1916, Helen and her husband Fred moved 40 miles east to Chino. Fred managed one of the stores in the chain of Weigle Meat Markets, a company he’d started butchering with when he first moved to California around 1904 as shown by this newspaper clip from that year.

It probably felt like a homecoming for Fred. And Helen, too, may have felt particularly at home in the rural farming community where they lived on a tree-lined street in town, reminiscent of the small townships of her childhood in the mid-west. (Chino at a later time became “a popular site for Hollywood crews to shoot ‘midwestern’ settings.”)1

Voter records show Fred registered as a Republican. Helen, however, registered with the Prohibition party, indicating her support for the growing prohibition movement in America. It may also have been a window into her personal sense of sobriety and responsibility.

Now in her early thirties, married, mother of a small son, and reunited with a father who lived near by, life would have looked close to perfect.

Until 1918 rolled around.

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic started in February 1918 and ran through April 1920, infecting 500 million people — about a third of the world’s population — and killing up to 50 million people in four successive waves.

The second wave, more lethal than the first, started in August 1918. It may have been about that time that Helen, while still raising their nine-year-old son, volunteered her services at a local emergency hospital.

Unnamed nurse wearing a mask as protection against influenza. September 13, 1918. From the National Archives and Records Administration.

It was a noble and selfless act.

But one that proved fatal.

From “The San Bernardino County Sun, November 24, 1918, page 13

Victims who battled the disease struggled for breath: “their lungs filled with fluid and they suffocated to death.”2 Despite the horror and danger, Helen joined those fighting the disease in her community.

With Helen’s passing she left behind a son and a grieving husband who never found it in his heart to remarry.

In Albert Camus’s novel The Plague there is a conversation between a local doctor in the pestilence-stricken town of Oran and a visitor who has been stuck in its quarantine. The visitor, who has seen a lot of death in his life, says,

“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”

He goes on to add,

“I grant we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it’s a fact one doesn’t come across many of them.”

I thought of Helen Schrotzberger when I read that passage. She was among her pandemic’s “true healers.”

Today we are living through our own plague. Keeping Helen’s compassion and selflessness in mind, we can decide to “not join forces with the pestilences.” In consideration of others in our communities we can mask up, judicially distance, and receive inoculations when they’re available. We can also refuse to join forces with the ‘social’ pestilences of our age: the prejudice, divisiveness, dismissiveness, selfishness, fear, and hatred spread virally through our media and political cultures.

Helen’s husband Fred moved back to Los Angeles after her death, initially moving in with his brother Ted’s family until he got back on his feet. He continued working as a butcher at a grocery store, raising his son, and sharing his home with him until his death at age 76 in 1944. His son Theodore married at age 33, a year before his father’s passing, and had three sons of his own.

Helen, of course, never got to see her son mature or to enjoy her grandchildren. Nevertheless they are her legacy, as was her example of selfless courage and compassion during a pandemic.

End Notes:
1. Wikipedia, “Chino, California,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chino,_California.
2. National Archives and Records Administration, “The Deadly Virus: The Influenza Epidemic of 1918,” https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/influenza-epidemic/.

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William Estall: What’s in Your Wallet?

Our great-grandfather, William Edward Estall, was born in London’s Shoreditch parish in 1852, the eleventh of Henry and Elizabeth’s twelve children.

Edited extract of St. Leonard’s parish register, Shoreditch, London. Click on image to enlarge.

We know William was poor, based on his living in the impoverished East End. But how poor was he? Was he among the completely downtrodden of the area or was he simply among the common working poor?

We can answer these questions and better define his poverty by looking at  some contemporary sources.

Background

William’s father was a silk weaver, a respectable if not particularly remunerative trade. Many working class boys learned their trades from their fathers. Unfortunately William lost his dad at age 13, but even if William had been fortunate enough to learn from his father, it was a trade in severe decline due to industrialization and the lifting of protective silk tariffs, leaving its practitioners and their neighborhoods in poverty. William and his brothers — left without relevant job skills — became general laborers.

In 1871, when William was eighteen, the census recorded him as a labourer, son of a charwoman.

William Estall as a labourer in the 1871 census. His father had died five years earlier, his mother was 62 years old, William was 18 and Ann was 16. Other than that, the census got the information  right, we presume.

He tried to improve his career prospects by joining the British Army when he was 22 years old. The plan didn’t work as he’d hoped. He was discharged after four years of a twelve year enlistment due to chronic health issues including colic, contusion, fevers, boot ulcer, epilepsy, inflammation of fluids, and palpitation.

With no apprenticeship, no military prospect, and no education, William again turned to manual labor, working at various times as a builder’s, water-side, dock, ground, and general labourer. These occupations were recorded in census, military, marriage, and his children’s birth records.

His residences around Bethnal Green were similarly recorded, both before he entered the Army and after he reappeared in the parish in 1890 at age 37. [After the Army he lived for the better part of a decade in Lower Sydenham working as a labourer and raising a family with a common-law wife.]

With that background, we turn to Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps of 1898-99, specifically to the map of the Bethnal Green area, to see the conditions of the streets upon which William lived.

Poverty defined by his residences

Charles Booth and his staff walked the streets of London’s working classes between 1886 and 1903 in the company of police officers knowledgeable of their patches, making detailed observations on what they saw and heard. The notes they made were the basis of maps in which streets were color coded for the incomes and social classes of their inhabitants.

Color Key to Booth’s Poverty Maps


Plotting William’s residences, we see that the streets he lived on were mostly color coded light blue. Light blue indicated the street was “Poor.  18s. to 21s. a week for a moderate family.” Based on this, it appears William’s weekly wages fell in that range: between 18 and 21 shillings a week.

Edited extract of Booth’s poverty map with green squares showing William Estall’s habitations (annotated in green) over the years in Bethnal Green. Click on image to enlarge.


Poverty defined by his employment

Further clarifying his income is his history as a labourer. In the late Victorian era general laborers made only about 60% of what an artisan or a skilled laborer such as a bricklayer, carpenter, or mason earned,1 meaning William was on a lower rung of the working class.

William Estall’s occupation in 1891 is shown on his daughter’s birth certificate. Click on image to enlarge.

At the time of our grandmother’s birth in 1891 he worked as a dock laborer which paid around 6 pence an hour.2 There were 12 pence in a shilling so he made half a shilling per hour. Doing the math of an 18-21 shilling weekly income (from Booth’s map) means he likely worked between 36 and 42 hours a week, considerably below the working class average of between 55 and 66 hours a week (five 10-12 hour workdays plus a half day Saturday).

His abbreviated work schedule wouldn’t have been of his own choice. As an unskilled manual laborer he was at the mercy of seasonal and economic fluctuations — if ships weren’t available to load or unload cargo, for example, he was out of work. Furthermore, there were more laborers looking for jobs than there was work available. As reported in an 1897 newspaper, “At taking on time [time for engaging men for jobs] at certain wharves, where the foreman would come and stand at the iron gates of the wharf entrance, there would usually be a crowd of from two hundred to three hundred men. Probably seventy or eighty would be required. … The scrambles were frightful.”3

A drawing of men lining a fence looking to work at the London Docks circa 1900.4 Click on image to enlarge.

Nor would William have been favored for steady, full time dock work . . . that would have been reserved for the very fittest. William, being both older (in his late thirties and early forties) and seemingly constitutionally unhealthy, would have fallen into the category of “casual” labor, engaged for a few hours for a particular job.

“This casual labour system became so general that only a small section of port workers had anything like regular employment and the rest had to take their chance of getting a few days or a few hours work as circumstances might call for….”         — from “The position of dockers and sailors in 1897″ 5

William, then, was working both for lower wages and for fewer, unpredictable hours than typical working class men. And given that he had several children and a wife to support he may have been on the high side of Booth’s definition of a moderately sized family and the low side of the income spectrum for the light-blue coded streets of his neighborhood.

Poverty defined by his cost of living

According to “Life on a Guinea a Week”6, the average cost of living for a single male clerk in London in 1888 was about 31 shillings a week, which included costs for rent, food, drink, clothes, candles, soap, and miscellany. William’s estimated income of 18-21 shillings would cover only a little over half of that.

Charles Booth described this level of ‘standard’ poverty (18-21 shillings a week) as “means [which] may be sufficient, but are barely sufficient for decent independent life.” He suggested this income level for a moderate-sized family might keep them going, but they were highly vulnerable to illness, accidents, family size increasing and loss of work or hours.7

Given that William was prone to illness, was rapidly growing his family, and worked at unsteady jobs, speculation on my part is that William’s income may have been supplemented by his wife in order to shelter, feed, and clothe the burgeoning family. Sarah was a seamstress before she married William and may well have continued to do some piece work from their flat to keep the family afloat.

William would have been paid with bronze and silver coins, and if he was lucky, they would have jingled in his pocket on the two-mile walk home from the docks.

Bronze penny denominations on left, with silver shilling denominations on right. Click on image to enlarge.

A couple of pence would buy a pint of beer (I’m pretty sure William and Sarah, like most of their neighbors, were imbibers), and 3-6 shillings would pay for weekly rent in working class housing. Food, including bread, vegetables and fruit, flour and sugar, cost about 14 shillings a week for an average clerk, so Sarah had to squeeze the most out of every coin spent at the vendors’ barrows on nearby Green Street. Their clothing was probably mended if not made at home, further stretching their budget.

Though the money was meager, they apparently made do, as there were no records of workhouse visits or outdoor relief (payments to poor people without the requirement to enter a workhouse) while they were married. Perhaps telling, though, is that William was employed for a considerable stretch by the area council, which may indicate he received some informal relief in the form of pay for ground or general labor.

William’s economic vulnerability caught up with him in 1900 when he lost his wife to disease. After her passing he spent over a year in the workhouse hospital for bronchitis. When he got out he dropped his children off with his former common-law wife in Lower Sydenham, undoubtedly in hopes that she would care for them while he returned to Bethnal Green looking for work. The only records we have of him thereafter were three workhouse visits for more hospitalizations and finally his death at age 53 in 1906.

William Estall’s death certificate. Click on image to enlarge.

Taking the measure of William Estall

By Charles Booth’s calculations, 31% of people in London in 1901 were living in poverty and 30% were living in crowded conditions. Considering the streets William lived on (coded light blue) and the size of his family (a wife and up to seven children at home), he fell within the 22.5% of Londoners who were ‘standard’ poor and within the 4.4% of Londoners who were crowded into rooms holding 4 or more people. By that measure, William was poor — but not among the 8% in the very poor or semi-criminal classes. Nor, of course, was he among the 52% who were comfortable or the 18% in the middle or wealthy classes.

Putting William’s poverty into perspective. From Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps. Click to enlarge.

Despite the meagerness of what was in his wallet, William kept a roof over his family’s head and food on the table, no small achievement.

In sum, William wouldn’t be the subject of an abysmal Jack London story or a broken down character in a Charles Dickens novel. He was just a working family man who doggedly made ends meet on low wages and inconsistent hours.  Charles Booth concluded that the greatest cause of poverty — accounting for 63% of its occurrence8 — was low pay and irregular earnings. William Estall could have served as the poster boy. Yet he wasn’t alone. He was one of many who survived, maybe just barely, on something under a pound (£) a week on the light blue shaded streets of London’s East End.

End Notes:
1. Arthur Bowley, Wages in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century, (1900: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England), p. 70.
See also The Victorian Web, “Wages and Cost of Living in the Victorian Era,” http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/wages2.html
2. Clarion Newspaper Company, “The position of dockers and sailors in 1897 and the International Federation of Ship, Dock and River Workers.”
3. Ibid.
4. George R. Sims, editor, Living London, Vol. 1, (1901: Cassell and Company, Limited, London, Paris, New York & Melbourne), p 171.
5. “The position of dockers and sailors”.
6. The Victorian Web, “The Cost of Living in 1888,” from an article entitled “Life on a Guinea a Week” in The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 23 (1888), p 464.
7. Mary S. Morgan, London School of Economics, Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps, (2019: Thames & Hudson Limited, London, England), p 30.
8. Ibid, p 41. Reproduced from a table from Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London, Poverty series, Vol. 1 (1902-03), p 147. The other causes of poverty were small profits (5%), drink (7%), drunken or thriftless wife (6%), illness or infirmity (5%), large family (9%), and illness or large family combined with irregular work (5%).

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Jack the Ripper

Jack the Ripper

The infamous Jack the Ripper was a contemporary of our great-grandmother Sarah Hutchings.

Jack’s bloody rampage occurred in the autumn of 1888 in London’s East End. At the time Sarah was 28 years old, an unmarried working class mother who was also living in the East End.

Research into Sarah’s life logically invites a look at the story of this famous criminal’s spree — if for no other reason than to get a glimpse into conditions in this sector of London in the late Victorian age.

So it was that I picked up the critically acclaimed book about the Ripper’s victims, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed By Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold. The book examines the lives of the five working class victims, how they grew up, how social conditions affected them and other women of their era, and how their individual circumstances brought them to the impoverished East End.

Their stories provide some insights into Sarah Hutchings’ world as well. Ms. Rubenhold exposes the moral double standards applied to women vs. men, the living conditions in public housing, the difficulties of poverty, and in general the challenges of being a unprivileged woman in Victorian London. The book is a sad, but recommended, read.

The book has another, though indirect, connection to Sarah Hutchings.
A leading newspaper’s interview with the book’s author was written by Sian Cain, who currently lives in the flat that Sarah Hutchings occupied in 1891. The interview is at The Guardian newspaper’s web site.

Sarah Hutchings

As mentioned in an earlier post, an Estall family historian believes Sarah Hutchings was a prostitute — a suspicion based on the fact that she had three children out of wedlock to unnamed fathers while frequently changing residences in London’s impoverished East End.

After reading The Five, I came to realize that Sarah was indeed a prostitute, or at least considered one by many people of her era. Here’s a passage from The Five:

    “From the introduction of the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1860s through the period of the Whitechapel murders, very few authorities, including the Metropolitan Police, could agree as to what exactly constituted a ‘prostitute’ and how she might be identified. Was a prostitute simply a woman like Mary Jane Kelly who earned her income solely through the sex trade and who self-identified as part of this profession, or could the term prostitute be more broadly defined? Was a prostitute a woman who accepted a drink from a man who then accompanied her to a lodging house, paid for a bed, had sex with her, and stayed the night? … A woman who had sex for money twice over the course of a week, before finding work in a laundry and meeting a man whom she decided to live with out of wedlock? … A young factory worker who had sex with the boys who courted her and bought her gifts? … A woman with three children by three different fathers who lived with a man simply because he kept a roof over their heads?
    “Some of these women might be classed as professional or “common prostitutes,’ while others might be called “casual prostitutes’ or just women who, in accordance with the social norms of their community, had sex outside of wedlock. But as the Metropolitan Police came to recognize, the lines separating these groups were often so blurred that it was impossible to distinguish between them.”1

Another author, Judith Flanders (The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London), clarifies that
      “the word ‘prostitute’ was not used entirely the way we would use it today, i.e. to refer only to women who sold their bodies for sex. In the 19th century, many people used it more widely, to refer to women who were living with men outside marriage, or women who had had illegitimate children, or women who perhaps had relations with men, but for pleasure rather than money.”2

Under Victorian mores and definitions, then, it would seem that Sarah Hutchings was a prostitute, though there is no evidence (for example, a criminal record) clarifying whether a professional or moral one.

A Difficult Life

Sarah worked at various times as a barmaid, a stay former [corset maker], a machinist [sewing machine operator], and a fur sewer. These were low paying occupations, though the last three seamstress-type jobs may have allowed her to work from home while caring for her children.

Copy of birth registration showing Sarah’s occupation in 1889. Click on image to enlarge.

George Rosen’s essay, “Disease, Debility, and Death,” from the book The Victorian City: Images and Realities, addresses the vulnerability of women holding jobs like Sarah’s:

Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!  by John Millais, 1876

“The precarious economic situation of women workers, based on low wages, was depressed even further in some trades by seasonal unemployment, particularly in those connection with fashion and dress. Barmaids provided another large contingent of prostitutes, while still others were recruited from among seamstresses, laundresses, charwomen, and factory workers.”3

Sarah also had three children to single-handedly feed, clothe, and attend to while working long hours and making wages likely insufficient to support herself. As explained in Revisiting Dickens,
       “Neither form of seamstress [individual or dressmaker’s employee] would have earned enough on a regular basis to feed her family. Most couldn’t feed themselves, let alone their children.”4

Saved by the Ripper?

As I read these stories and related them to Sarah’s experiences, a question arose:  was Sarah aware of the the widely reported crimes of Jack the Ripper and if so, how did those gruesome articles affect her?

Jack’s murderous spree covered the period from August through November 1888 when he attacked and eviscerated five women. Newspapers at the time covered the murders in bold headlines and graphic drawings. There could hardly have been anyone in London’s East End who wasn’t spooked by the specter of a butchering madman stalking prostitutes.

The Illustrated Police News of 13 October 1888 from the British Library. Click to enlarge.

But it wasn’t just prostitutes Jack victimized. One of the insights in The Five is that Jack the Ripper didn’t appear to be targeting prostitutes per se — Ms. Rubenhold makes the case that three of the five Ripper victims weren’t prostitutes at all. She also points out that there were no signs of struggle or yelling for help, indicating the victims were probably asleep at the time of the attacks. The commonality, then, was that his victims were poor working class women generally sleeping rough (outdoors) on city streets or alleyways easily accessible to attack.

Sarah conceived her last illegitimate child in October, 1888, shortly after a double Ripper homicide. It’s fair to wonder if the Jack the Ripper headlines made her question her safety. There is no way of knowing what stopped her string of illegitimate births — fear of attack, growing maturity, falling in love, a desire for financial stability — but we know that after her third illegitimate child she began a long-term relationship with a man she would marry in 1891, William Estall.

Though there are many unanswered questions, one thing can be said for certain. Jack the Ripper proved to women of his time that it’s better to lose your heart to a lover than it is to a madman.

And his crimes may,  just may,  have convinced Sarah to take a different path in life.

Sources:

1. Hallie Rubenhold, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), p 290.

2. Judith Flanders, “Prostitution,” British Library: Discovering Literature: Romantics & Victorians, https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/prostitution.

3. George Rosen, “Disease, Debility, and Death,” from The Victorian City: Images and Realities, edited by H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, (London: Routledge Degan and Paul, Ltd., 1973), 657.

4. Revisiting Dickens, “Prostitution in Victorian England — Presentation Page,” https://revisitingdickens.wordpress.com/prostitution-victorian/

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William Estall — Beating Ploughshares Into Swords

The Estall family historians Mark and Kim Baldacchino have recently traced the Estall line a generation back from its first London appearance.1

The Baldacchinos believe William Estall, the tallow chandler of Whitechapel of the early 1700s (and our 6th-great-grandfather), was born in Lavendon, Buckinghamshire, a farming community sixty miles northwest of London, to William and Susanna (nee Valentine) Estall.

The junior William and his sister Mary were baptized in Lavendon in November of 1693, they being two of the five or six children in the family.2

Extract from the Lavendon parish register of 1693

Their father, William the Elder, was a farmer/yeoman in possession of horses, cows, sheep, and bees.3 He would have farmed the community’s common field, which wasn’t enclosed until 1801,4 in the company of his neighbors. The family worshiped, though perhaps only intermittently,5 at St. Michael’s church in Lavendon, a structure dating back to the early 11th century.6 In the 17th and 18th centuries the church was the site of several Estall baptisms, marriages, and funerals.

St. Michael’s Church in Lavendon

William the Elder, besides being a husbandman, also exercised his civic duty, appearing on a polling list — one of 25 men in Lavendon — voting for the Knights of the Shire in 1705.7 Exercising his social duty, he would have also had occasion to lift a pint or two at the thatch-roofed inn and pub, now called The Green Man, on Lavendon’s High Street. The pub still stands for anyone interested in rubbing elbows with Estall spirits of the past.

Lavendon’s historic pub, from an 1899 drawing

In the elder William’s will of 1740 he left most of his estate to his son George,8 likely indicating George was the eldest, hence in line for the lion’s share of the estate under the protocol of primogeniture.

William Estall the Elder’s signature on his will

The younger William received one shilling in his father’s will. Although measly, it wasn’t necessarily miserly on his father’s part, as explained below.

An Apprenticeship in London

William the Younger left the farm and went to London in 1709 at around age sixteen to enter an apprenticeship in the Cutlers’ Company,9 a guild of metal workers making swords, knives, and domestic wares such as cutlery, razors and scissors.10 Apprenticeships were expensive, entailing years of training as well as room and board, often under the master’s roof.11 William’s father would have paid a considerable sum for this and would have felt justifiably relieved of further financial obligation, particularly since his son was then living in distant London.

Woodcut of a sword maker’s shop, 1878. The shop William worked would have pre-dated this by 150 years.

An account of apprenticeship found in The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London 1660-1730, provides an appreciation of the adjustment and hardship William endured in his teen years.

“It must have been a fairly traumatic experience for the young apprentice when, at the age of sixteen or so, he arrived with his box of clothes to start his term. For most young men, it was probably the first time they had been away from home and the first that they had seen of the basically hostile environment of the big city. Working conditions varied, but the hours were long, typically from seven in the morning to nine at night with a break of two hours for dinner at mid-day.”12

Apprenticeships typically lasted seven years, and shortly after William completed his (we assume he did, as marriage wasn’t allowed during apprenticeship13 and William married shortly after a typical term) he wed Hannah Skegg at St. James’s church in Clerkenwell, London, in January of 1717.14 It was a short-lived marriage, though, as Hannah passed away a little over a year later, in March of 1718.15 Given the timing of her death, it’s possible she died of complications from pregnancy or childbirth, considering the maternal mortality rate at the time was 10.5 for every 1,000 births.16

William then went through another transition. He moved from London’s north side to its east, marrying Leah Holt (or Hott, the marriage register writing is unclear) in 1721 while in his late twenties at St. Mary’s Church in Whitechapel.17

Extract from the St. Mary’s, Whitechapel, parish register of 1721

At some point he also changed careers. Considering the time and money invested in his apprenticeship, one may wonder why he would leave the cutlers trade behind. There are a couple of possible reasons.

When teenage sons were apprenticed it was typically the parents’ responsibility to “help them choose the particular career that they were to follow, ideally helping them discern their vocation.”18 As he matured, William may have discovered, however, that this wasn’t his natural vocation.

More likely, though, he left the trade because it was in the midst of relocating from London to Sheffield by the mid eighteenth century, where raw materials and water-power were more favorable for steel work.19

Whatever the reason for the switch, William took up the tallow chandler trade (making and selling candles made from animal fat) while raising a family in east London with his second wife Leah. The rest of his story is presented in the on-line book Footprints: The Immigrants, starting at page 89.

From farm to city

That, then, is the prequel, or back story, of the Estall family of London. Like so many of our ancestors, the family began on the farm and migrated to the city. The move by William Estall in 1709 from rural Lavendon (population around three hundred) to bustling London (population over half a million), and from working behind ploughshares to making swords (or perhaps steel utensils), makes this family, the Estall’s, among the earlier converts to urban life in our family’s history.

1. The Estall Family: A One-Name Study of the Estall Surname and Family Tree, https://estall.one-name.net/up/index.htm, accessed 15 March 2020.
2. The Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, Buckinghamshire County Council, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England. A copy of William Estall’s will, obtained from the Centre, is in possession of this author.
A transcription of the will can be found at The Estall Family: A One-Name Study of the Estall Surname and Family Tree, “Wills: Will of William Estall died 1740,” https://estall.one-name.net/up/wills.htm, accessed 15 March 2020. In his will William Estall the Elder names five children and another son-in-law, bringing the count to three sons and three daughters. Only two of the daughters are identified by their forenames.
3. Ibid.
4. Gilbert Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields (London: Archibald Constable & Co. Ltd., 1907), 271. Available on line at https://archive.org/details/englishpeasantry00slatuoft/page/n11/mode/2up/search/olney, accessed 17 March 2020.
5. Only three of their five or six children were baptized, and the wedding of William and Sarah (Valentine) Estall wasn’t recorded in the Lavendon or surrounding parishes’ registers.
6. British History Online, “Lavendon,” https://www.british-history.ac.uk/rchme/bucks/vol2/pp161-165, accessed 17 March 2020.
7. Ancestry.com, “UK, Poll Books and Electoral Registers, 1538-1893, for William Eastall” [database on-line], image 47 of 237, accessed 4 Mar 2020.
8. The Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, the will of William Estall.
9. FindMyPast.com, London Apprentice Abstracts, 1442-1850, for William Astall. Details of the record transcription are: “Astall, William, son of William, Lavendon, Buckinghamshire, yeoman, to John Elton, 24 Feb 1708/9, Cutlers’ Company.”
10. The Worshipful Company of Cutlers, “History,” https://www.cutlerslondon.co.uk/company/history/, accessed 15 March 2020.
11. Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London 1660-1730, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, pp 86, 94, 95, 101. Available on line at http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8489p27k/, accessed 17 March 2020.
12. Ibid, 102.
13. Ibid, 94.
14. Ancestry.com, “London, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812 for William Estall,” [database on-line], Islington, St James, Clerkenwell, 1711-1726, image 5 of 193, accessed 21 Feb 2020.
15. Ancestry.com, “London, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812 for Ann Extell,” [database on-line], City of London, All Hallows London Wall , 1675-1729, image 202 of 218, accessed 21 Feb 2020.
16. National Center for Biotechnology Information, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, “British maternal mortality in the 19th and early 20th centuries,” November 2006, 99(11): 559–563. Available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1633559/.
17. Ancestry.com, “London, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812 for Leah Hott,” [database on-line], Tower Hamlets, St Mary, Whitechapel, 1711-1733, image 184 of 202, accessed 2 Dec 2018.
18. Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class, 90.
19. The Worshipful Company of Cutlers, “History.”

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Double Dating: Changes to the English Calendar

If double dating evokes images of romance, be forewarned. This isn’t about romance, though the example of “double dating” below is, sort of. Let me explain.

Double dating — not the romantic kind — was sometimes used to show the difference between a civil year and an historical year in England. England used to observe the civil, or legal, year as running from 25 March to 24 March of the next year … this despite the fact that January 1st was celebrated as the New Year festival.

This confusion finally ended in 1752 with the passage of the The Calendar (New Style) Act.

The act:

• Changed the start of the civil (or legal) year from 25 March (Lady Day) to 1 January.

• Adopted the Gregorian calendar, advancing the calendar by 11 days.

Dates in English parish records prior to 1752 may show dual (or double) dating. Since the civil calendar year ran from 25 March to the subsequent 24 March, dates in the registers from January 1st to March 24th would sometimes show two years to reflect the civil year and the historical year.

An extract from the St. James, Clerkenwell, parish register showing double dating of the William Estall and Hannah Skegg marriage

For example, the parish register of St. James, Clerkenwell, London, records the marriage of one of our Estall ancestors, William, to Hannah Skegg on Jan 21st 1716/17. The date fell in the civil year of 1716 and the historical year of 1717.

Since in our current era we observe an annual start date of 1 January, it makes sense to use new-style (historical) years when dating our ancestors’ life events. Some genealogy programs allow for recording a double date, while using the new-style year for calculating ages. I follow this practice when dating our English ancestors.

Bottom line: Dating was complicated in England’s past. Double dating may have allayed some of the confusion … though perhaps not to modern eyes. All of this, obviously, was before the advent of Match.com — which makes dating simple!

Notes:

• British colonies, including the Americas, were also affected by the Calendar Act.

• Scotland, unlike England, had begun its civil year on the 1st of January since 1600.

Sources:

• Wikipedia, “Calendar (New Style) Act 1750,” accessed 1 Mar 2020.

• GENUKI (UK & Ireland Genealogy), Mike Spathaky, “Old Style and New Style Dates and the change to the Gregorian Calendar: A summary for genealogists”

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A Modern-Day Relic

Yes, I’m a relic. But that’s not what I’m writing about. (We may get around to that later, time permitting of course.)

Relics serve the useful purpose of reminding us of people, places, or times past.

The year 2019 was memorable, worthy of a relic. My sister and I explored our family history in London, walking the streets and visiting the sites where our ancestors lived going back to our great-g-g-g-g-g-grandparents. And that’s just on our father’s side; on our mother’s side we visited family neighborhoods inhabited by our great-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-grandparents.

The year was also memorable for seeing the publication of my book Footprints, which explored the history of these English ancestors.

So I couldn’t let the year lapse without marking its significance. I wanted a “relic” that honored our visit to London, our English ancestors, and my book publication. A relic that was English, old fashioned, and had a connection to writing.

The solution: an English fountain pen. And I found one with a brand name that stretches back to the years my grandmother, who was born in London, lived there. A pen with a technology our grandmother would have used in her school which we visited. A pen I can use to make notes for my follow-on book.

The pen is an Onoto, or as its engraved barrel says, “Onoto the Pen”.

The Onoto Magna Classic — uncapped

Since I like to name my fountain pens after figures in my family, I’ve named mine “the Estall.” The pen will commemorate the seven generations of Estalls who inhabited London as tallow chandlers, silk weavers, dock workers, general labourers, and lastly as orphans.

Onoto pens got their start in 1905, a year before our grandmother’s emigration to Canada. The London-based company De La Rue started making fountain pens in 1881, predating her birth, and in 1905 they began making the first self-filling fountain pen guaranteed not to leak, which they dubbed the Onoto, in their factory on Bunhill Row in London, not far from where our great-grandfather was born.

My pen doesn’t go back that far, of course. It was born on 12 December 2019. And though it uses an outdated technology (really, who uses fountain pens these days?) it writes far better than modern-day biros (that’s ball-point pens to us Americans). The model I bought, the Magna Classic, is styled after an Onoto model designed in 1937. It may look dated but that’s kind of the point — it reminds me of olde London. It is, after all, going to be my “relic.”

A history of the company and its pens is available at A Brief History of Onoto Pens, the De La Rue heritage site, or the Onoto web site.

My black and silver Magna Classic has a chasing pattern engraved in its cap and body. My other black pen, a Montblanc 149, is rather plain and stodgy, whereas the chasing on the Onoto gives it some character. In place of Montblanc’s snow-capped top, the Onoto has a carved silver company logo, giving it a unique vibe, if not the prestigious brand recognition of a Montblanc. The pen has flat ends rather than than the rounded ends of the cigar shaped Montblanc, and I’m partial to the flat design which my favorite pen brand Pelikan also uses.

The Onoto and Montblanc both have 18 carat gold nibs. I like the size of the Montblanc’s nib, which is massive, but truth to tell, the writing experience with the Onoto is better. The Montblanc was a pretty terrible writer until the nib was tuned by a professional; the Onoto on the other hand wrote perfectly right out of the box, as smoothly as butter sliding over a hot  English muffin. Perhaps that’s because the nib is wet and writes more like a broad than a medium.

The other cool feature of the Onoto is that its nib is a “duo point,” which puts down a medium (I’d call it medium broad) size line when writing in the nib-side-up position and a fine line when the nib is turned over in the feed-side-up position. It’s like having two pens in one. I use the medium side for journaling and notes, and the fine side for entries in my small date book. Medium for daily crossword puzzles, fine for the smaller squared Sunday puzzles. You get the idea.

“Abbey Road” written using the upright medium nib position above followed by the reverse fine nib orientation below.

The Onoto Magna Classic is considered a luxury pen, similar to the Montblanc, though not quite as expensive as its German cousin. The Onoto has hallmarked sterling silver furniture — clip, rings, and buttons on the cap and barrel — as well as a gold nib. Unlike the Montblanc’s piston ink filling system, the Onoto uses a converter, which reduces its cost, though one can buy an optional plunger filler, bringing it more in line with the Montblanc price tag. I’m perfectly happy with a converter system that will prove to be easier to maintain and/or replace over the years.

The Onoto pen is a good size. It’s the same size as a Pelikan M800, which some pen connoisseurs consider the ideal size for a pen. The Onoto has the advantage of a longer grip section, keeping the threads away from fingers. The Onoto’s moderate size also makes it easier to write with than, say, the Montblanc 149 oversize pen.

Our Estall ancestors were not perfect. Nor is my Estall pen. A minor downside is the threading which attaches the cap to the barrel. Most pens are secured with one (Pelikan) or two (Montblanc) rotations of the cap. The Onoto takes four. That could be an issue for a student who is capping and uncapping her pen while taking frequent class notes. By the time the cap comes off, the history professor may be halfway into the next century. But for me who usually writes in longer sessions, cap rotations are not an issue. As a family historian I might even speculate there’s an advantage to stories written with more turns of the screw.

Another criticism I’ve read of the pen is its light weight. I didn’t think that would bother me, but based on pen reviews I ordered the optional brass weight in the pen barrel, and my Onoto’s barrel is now the same weight — 21 grams — as the Pelikan M800 barrel. Ideal size, ideal weight.

Burl wood presentation box, including the pen’s “birth” certificate in the lid

Although I don’t put much stock in packaging material, I’d be remiss not to mention the eye-catching, highly polished solid burl wood box the pen came in. It’s relic-worthy in itself and something I’m likely to keep on my desk for years to come.

I’ll always have a soft spot for the year 2019. And now I’ll always have my “Estall” pen to remind me of our trip to London, of our ancestors, and of the year that I connected with them in a very tactile way.

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Sarah McLean — A Hidden Link?

Isabella (née McLean) Campbell is our great-great grandmother. She was born in 1801 on the western coast of Argyll, Scotland, at a remote farmstead called Arichonan. The farmstead was famous for an uprising among its farmers when they were evicted as part of the Highland Clearances in 1848. Two of Isabella’s brothers, Allan and Duncan, were indicted for violence during the uprising.

One of Isabella’s nieces, Sarah McLean, was the daughter of Allan. Sarah was born at Arichonan in 1835.

We’re taking a look at Sarah because she may have played a previously undiscovered role in her Aunt Isabella’s emigration to Canada in 1857.

Sarah with Aunt Isabella in the 1841 census. Click to enlarge.

Sarah first appeared on our radar when we found a Sarah McLean living with Isabella Campbell’s family in the 1841 Scotland census. The child, having the same surname as Isabella’s maiden name, sent us off on a search for a relative (or neighbor) who might logically be staying with the Campbell family. The only candidate we found was Allan McLean’s daughter. The match wasn’t perfect because she was listed as 12 years old when she should have been six. But censuses frequently had errors and this didn’t seem to be an insurmountable one.

Further piquing our curiosity was finding unexpected initials on a sampler that Isabella’s daughter Sarah Campbell made in 1854. The sampler had the initials of everyone in Sarah Campbell’s family, with a mysterious “S McL” thrown in. Considering that Sarah McLean was staying with the Campbell family in the 1841 census, it seemed possible that the initials stitched in 1854 represented Sarah McLean. If so, it also seemed likely that Sarah McLean was in close contact, or even staying with, her Aunt Isabella’s family again in 1854.

Sarah Campbell’s sampler from 1854. Note the circled initials. Click to enlarge.

Considering that Sarah McLean’s parents emigrated to Canada some time between 1849 and 1851 when she was a teenager, it seemed unusual that she would stay behind in Scotland with her uncle and aunts … but census records show Sarah may have been a bit … shall we say … untethered from her family.

The 1841 Scottish census was the first one in which Sarah appeared — and appear she did. She showed up twice in Arichonan, at both her parents’ house and at her grandfather’s next door. Perhaps she was staying with her grandfather while the parents were dealing with her newborn (born the day of the census) sister. But as seen above, she also showed up with her Aunt Isabella Campbell’s family in the adjoining parish. One could speculate she’d been staying with her aunt in the days leading up to the newborn’s arrival so they reported Sarah too.

In the next census, of 1851, we see Sarah twice, but this time on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. She shows up as a domestic servant living with her uncle Duncan (a stone breaker) and aunts Mary and Cathy (provision merchants) at Bellanoch, a short distance from Arichonan, in March of 1851. She also shows up with her parents in Ekfrid Township, Ontario, in the census taken in Canada in January of 1852 . As mentioned earlier, her parents emigrated some time between 1849 and 1851. If they immigrated between the two censuses they too should have appeared in both census but they didn’t. So we don’t know when Sarah emigrated. It may be that her parents reported her as part of their family in Canada even though she had stayed behind in Scotland with plans to join them later. She was sixteen at the time.

Sarah (McLean) Wrightman

We know Sarah emigrated to Canada by the time of her marriage to Harvey Wrightman in Ekfrid Township, Ontario, in 1858 when she was 22. She and Harvey, a laborer, had 10 children and settled in Middlemiss —a small community in Ekfrid near a bend in the Thames river — until their deaths in 1914 and 1911 respectively, both in their late 70s.

Further confusing the subject of her emigration date, we find that Sarah reported different years in the 1901 and 1911 Canada censuses.  In the former census Sarah reported her immigration year as 1848 and in the latter she reported it as 1857. The 1848 year is too early because her family was still in Scotland until at least May of 1849 when three of Sarah’s siblings were baptized there.

But it is the reported 1857 immigration year that is really intriguing.

Sarah, and her immigration year, in the 1911 Canada census. Click to enlarge.

If she came to Canada in 1857 she may well have come with her Aunt Isabella’s family who emigrated that same year. This theory would explain how she was still in Scotland in the 1851 census with her uncle and two aunts at Bellanoch; and with her Aunt Isabella at a farmstead called Auchrome in 1854 at the time of the needlework sampler.

(Parenthetically, also living in Bellanoch, at least by 1853, was Isabella’s eldest daughter Effy Campbell who had her first three children there. This small farmstead appears to have been an intersection point for some of  the McLean and Campbell families.)

If Sarah McLean did remain in Scotland when her parents emigrated we could assume she stayed in touch with them in the ensuing years, and may even have been the conduit for communication between her father Allan and her Aunt Isabella. This could also explain how, when Isabella emigrated 3,400 miles from Scotland to Canada in 1857, she came to settle only nine miles away from her brother.

We have no way of knowing, but we suspect Sarah McLean may have served as a link between Allan and Isabella. As such, she may have played a role in Isabella’s emigration destination. For if Sarah hadn’t stayed behind in Scotland, Isabella may have lost touch with her brother Allan and could have emigrated elsewhere in Canada, or perhaps even emigrated to Australia where her son Malcolm had moved a couple of years earlier.

It’s an intriguing theory … one which ascribes a vital role for Sarah in the history of the Campbell family and its descendants.

Sarah’s McLean’s Emigration — a Flight of Fancy?

Sarah McLean’s great-great-granddaughter Marsha Vonica shared this bit of family lore:

Queen Victoria

“It has been said in our family that Sarah’s dad Allan was working as a gamekeeper for Queen Victoria when they left for Canada. The queen supposedly wished Sarah well when she got on the ship with her family and gave a bowl to Sarah to take with her. Sarah’s daughter’s daughter Ruby gave the bowl to one of her daughters.”

Given that Allan was a simple farmer or herder in a remote corner of coastal Scotland who’d had a dust-up with the farm’s owner and with the law, it doesn’t seem likely that Queen Victoria would have ever heard of him, employed him, or went to see him off and present his daughter with a farewell token. But it makes for a good story, and who am I to question it? It enchantingly adds another layer of mystery and mythology to Sarah’s life and to the role she played in the lives of those around her.

This article was developed with the assistance of Marsha Vonica, a descendant of Sarah (née McLean) Wrightman. Marsha provided the photograph of Sarah and we co-researched and debated Sarah’s whereabouts over the years.

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Magical History Tour: Part 7

What I Learned

The point of visiting historical family sites is to connect in a sensory and  an emotional way with your forebears. The trip my sister Beth and I took to London this year fulfilled that goal.

Walking neighborhood streets and visiting homes, schools, and churches does a number of things. First, it de-mythologizes the past. Researching ancestors and their environs from afar often renders people and places exotic, bigger-than-life, their images refracted through our own imaginations or the viewpoints of authors and historians. But walking the streets makes the places real and the people more immediate because we have a first-hand setting to put them in. Although we can never hope to really know the ancestors we’ve never met (and let’s face it, how well do we really know the people we do meet?), walking a mile in their shoes at least makes them approachable.

Second, visiting places and walking neighborhood streets helped us to orient places, distances, and times in our mind. We made spacial connections in our brains that mirrored the geography. We know that two blocks away from the birth home of our grandmother was her baptismal church, within earshot of its bells; how close her school was; how tightly the family’s various homes were clustered. It’s like a web of locations is formed in your mind, orienting and unifying a sense of the whole.

Third, our ancestors and their stories are internalized more vividly when we visit where they lived. It’s the difference between the two-dimensional experience we get from researching documents, maps, and pictures on paper versus the twelve-dimensional experience of visiting a place. If that sounds like an exaggeration, consider the multiple dimensions of height, width, and depth (e.g., how big is the place?); location (where is it, and where in relation to others?); time (historical, as well as transit between places); sensory dimensions of sound, sight, smell, taste, and touch; and the thoughts and emotions imprinted as the memory is formed.

Take for instance the visit my sister and I paid to the Palm Tree Pub in Bethnal Green, a place over which our great-grandmother lived in 1887. I’d seen the pub location on an old map and I’d seen the building on satellite and street views on Google. Those were two-dimensional experiences. On visiting there, however, we now have a strong impression of the place: its location close to the Regent’s Canal (we walked along the canal on the way there); its size; its proximity to other places; its look and feel; the sound of conversations at the tables and bar; the taste of the ale; the Victorian decor. And overlaying these physical impressions were the thoughts shared by the octogenarian barkeep on the history of the neighborhood, as well as the warmth of camaraderie, humor (the owner had a sharp sense of it), wistfulness at being where our great-grandmother called home, and ease at enjoying a pint in a friendly and restful place. Two versus twelve dimensions: you can guess which made the bigger impression, the stronger memory, and brought history more to life.

I feel closer to my grandmother Bessie’s extended family because of this trip. I have a better framework from which to understand their stories. In a sense, the play’s scenery and props have now been added so that the action on stage seems more real.

Along the way I also learned:

• That Bethnal Green is smaller than expected. I had wondered how my great-great grandfather had moved his family so often from its western to eastern sectors, but having been there I realize it wasn’t far at all, just a few minute’s walk. In the words of a local historian, Bethnal Green was an insular world, like a town which some people never left. It was a neighborhood seen from the outside, but it was a universe seen from within.

An 1882 map of Bethnal Green

• Similarly, walking from the parish of Whitechapel to Spitalfields and on to Shoreditch and Bethnal Green — all of which were at one time home to the various generations of the Estall families — was surprisingly easy. I’d previously thought that the family “migrated” over the years from parish to parish, but now I think of it as just moving around the corner. Along the same line, the distance from Bethnal Green to the River Thames, where the East and West India Docks were located, was also a walk-able distance, explaining how our great-grandfather could make a living as a dock worker.

• Our earliest Estall forebears were tallow chandlers, and one of them, John, apprenticed through the Tallow Chandler Company, i.e., the guild. We found John’s entry in the register at the Guildhall Library, but the Tallow Chandler Company’s archivist couldn’t find any other evidence of the family’s association with the guild. She wrote me while I was there, “I’m afraid we have no records on our historical database [other than the apprentice entry] for anyone by the name of Estell or Estall, likely because John and William never became Freemen or Liverymen of the Tallow Chandlers Company, as it was rather expensive to become a member for most tallow chandlers.” This confirmed my suspicion that the early Estall families were not among the poorest in their neighborhood, but neither were they among the most well off.

• Having said that, I also got the sense that the later Estall families lived normal lives of the lower working class rather than the grueling lives of abject poverty portrayed in many accounts of that time and place. The flat where my grandmother was born, for example, was in an attractive brick tenement rather than a dilapidated structure. The pubs over which my great-grandmother lived before her marriage were striking, substantial buildings. The school my grandmother attended is architecturally pleasing and still vibrant. Though most of the other buildings our ancestors inhabited no longer stand, the impression we got from those that do is that these were not places of squalor. The neighborhood may have had many pockets of poverty — this was after all the notoriously poor East End — but our families, though apparently struggling, didn’t necessarily sink into the bottom of them.

• The role of the church in the community, and even in the family, came into focus as we visited the sites of family baptisms, marriages, and burials. Sitting in the same pews, attending a service, and gathering around the same baptismal fonts as did our ancestors gave us a sense of the potential comfort and reassurance of ritual that may have succored our families over the years. Reinforcing that was the way every church we visited still reaches out to the poor of their neighborhoods, offering food and services to the needy. Since our relatives appeared to reach only the lower steps of the economic ladder, the church may have been a place where they felt welcomed and untroubled and even validated.

• Pub culture, past and present, was a real factor of the neighborhoods. This is where neighbors and workmates got together for a pint and socialization. My impression is that our great-grandmother Sarah Hutchings, who lived above two pubs at various times, was no stranger to alcohol (she was once a barmaid after all), and her husband William, a general labourer, probably was not either. Whether they over-imbibed is unknown, but with the plethora of pubs in their time, and even the number of well-attended pubs in the present day, they wouldn’t have likely been teetotalers either. London is a pub culture, which knits people together, and to know its pubs is one way to know a neighborhood.

On a side note, in the 10 days we were in London I figure we enjoyed drinks in at least 20 of them. One of the more memorable stops was the Kings Arms in Bethnal Green. This pub, a bit off the beaten path and quite informal in atmosphere, had by far the greatest number and variety of cask and keg ales on tap, displaying a list of them and their origins on a large wall-mounted board. And what particularly endeared the pub to me was that while we were there a tune came on the radio that perked up my ears: the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour after which this vacation and series of blog posts was named.

Beth and I share a toast to our magical history tour at the Kings Arms in Bethnal Green

I learned a lot about the family on this trip and feel even closer to them. It was quite magical.

♫ Roll up, roll up for the mystery tour! ♫