I’m sure that many of us doing family history have found out many unexpected things and unanswered questions out through our research. Many of us are quite taken back when we do find something unexpected and wonder why we were never told certain things and why these family secrets were always kept quite, for sometimes more than a lifetime. We have to realise one thing that society was very different during the times of our great grand parents and beyond.
Life was indeed a lot harder and religion played a big part of peoples life’s along with the brake up of classes that society as a whole was broken down into. Through James’s research and given letters of a member of his family, his great uncle was told by his own mother that he should not be going out with a nurse, as she was above his station in life. Class separation was something that people felt very strongly about.
Women were seen as second class and were expected to marry and bring up the children. Men were expected to bring in the income and support the family. Unlike today, family issues were never discussed out in the open and anything that was seen as disgraceful or sinful, families did their best to sweep them under the rug.
Catherine Cookson the author was born in 1906 in Tyneside; she was the illegitimate daughter of a domestic servant called Kate. Catherine was brought up always believing that Kate was her elder sister and who she knew as her parents were in fact her gran parents. This had a terminal impact on Catherine throughout the rest of her life. Through her books she expresses many of her own experiences through her characters growing up in a society of hardness and what was expected of someone from the working class and poverty stricken areas. Through family history research we are now discovering how many things were hush hush and finding many skeletons in the closet.
In the records you will find examples of :
- Illegitimate Children
- Changed Names
- Secret Adoptions
- Missing Persons
- Unmarried Parents
- Unmarried grandparents
- Convicted Thieves
- Convicted Murderers
- Bigamy
- Links to Royalty
- Other Convictions of Crimes
- Lived in the Workhouse
Even in the 1960’s unmarried mothers and teenage pregnant girls were sent to places called unmarried mothers homes to have their babies. Society shamed any young mother out of wedlock and to be honest It’s only been in the last forty – fifty years that as a society we have opened up to. Today its not even thought about if your living with someone and have children and are not married. However If an unmarried mother with children was around in the days of our ancestors there would have been a good chance that she may be found living in the workhouse or forced to give her children up for adoption if she couldn’t afford to survive on her own.
