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Month: March 2021

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Death in a Teacup. How Leah’s Fortune Became Her Misfortune.

Teacup fortune telling
Photo by  Birgith Roosipuu  on  Scopio

This week, the 52Ancestors theme is ‘Fortune’. My contribution, for something different, is a fictionalised account of the true story of my great grandmother’s death. Don’t be too startled, I don’t intend for this blog to turn into a series of fictionalised accounts, it’s just nice to change things up and try something new once in a while!

You may remember Leah Swinbourne as the mother of the unfortunate Alfred Mario Beckett. Her life continued to be challenging and was cut tragically short at the age of 42. Read on to see why written from her point of view…

Leah as she may have appeared in real life, using the MyHeritage Deep NostalgiaTM feature (from a photo taken in 1913)

Her fortune in the tea leaves

Leah jumped back, startled by what she had seen in the chipped teacup. She was renowned in the family for her fortune telling skills, a legacy of her gypsy grandmother, Mary Ann Hayden. Mary Ann had never lost her gypsy ways and had made sure to pass them down to her daughters and granddaughters.

This morning, Leah had done her customary swirl of the leaves in the last drops of her tea and up-ended her cup to see what lay ahead. Often it was trivial; otherwise-unexpected visitors, children’s bumps and scrapes, rain coming…but today was different. Today she foresaw her own death. The cup dropped from her shaking hands and smashed into pieces on the cold kitchen floor.

“But I’m only 42…”, she whispered to herself, “…whatever will become of the children?”
She didn’t question the patterns in the tealeaves, never for a moment doubted what she saw in her fortune. They were never wrong. Even so, they were very odd. Leah could see a fall, a knock to the head…and then being locked away somewhere? That made no sense. And soon after that, she would be gone from this life. This she knew, and she felt a huge weight of dread settle upon her.

So when would it happen? She knew it would be soon, the dregs of tea were not long-range forecasters. She was a pragmatic woman, Lord knows she’d had to be over the years. Husband number two had been a practical rather than romantic choice. He’d recently died, a late-claimed victim of the Great War. The mustard gassing in the trenches had finally knocked off his kidneys, leaving her alone with eight children to raise.

She had no one left to call on to care for her remaining children. Little Ruby especially was a concern, she was only five years old. Leah’s own family had dispersed with the death of her mother – her brother Alfie had been shipped off to America as a British Home Child and her sister Florence had died tragically young. Leah herself had the poor fortune to have been disowned after trying to run off with her unfortunate choice of first love – Joe, the attempted bigamist.

She couldn’t make firm arrangements anyway, not based on the swirl of a teacup. Her friends good-naturedly accepted that she told fortunes using tea leaves but didn’t especially believe in what they predicted – it was purely a parlour trick to them.

Her misfortune on the tram

So Leah was deep in thought as she headed off to the city with her basket to do her shopping. The tram rumbled to a stop in front of her, teeming with people as usual.
“They really need to run these things more frequently”, she thought yet again. She was squashed up against a musty-smelling old lady and a large man who stank of tobacco and his lunchtime pint, as she precariously held onto the pole just inside the door with her free hand. The tram jolted to a halt suddenly as a dog ran into the road in front of it in hot pursuit of a cat. The large man stumbled heavily into Leah and she felt herself falling….

Groggily, she lifted her head to find herself somewhere else entirely. A cold, gloomy place in one of a row of beds. Was it a hospital? She groaned as a spasm of pain shot through her head where she’d hit the road, unable to break her fall. The face of her eldest daughter Ann appeared above her, with a concerned look on her face.

“Mum, you’re back with us! We’ve been so worried the past couple of days!”

“What’s happened? Where am I?”, Leah mumbled.

“Don’t you remember? You fell off the tram, you’ve got ever such an ‘egg’ on your head!”

And so it transpired as Ann related the tale, that Leah had somehow made her way back home that day, blood streaming down her face, refusing all offers of help. She’d patched herself up, made dinner for the children, put them to bed and had seemed alright, if a little dazed. But later that night she had gone wandering, calling out for her daughter Dorothy who had died of diphtheria as an infant, peering into people’s windows and under bushes trying to find her. So they’d brought her to Hollymoor two days ago, sedated her and she’d been asleep for the past two days.

Hollymoor asylum - misfortune
Hollymoor Asylum, Birmingham

An unfortunate era for head injuries

Hollymoor was not a hospital. It was the local asylum. Because of her sudden erratic behaviour it had been assumed that Leah had had some kind of breakdown. Nowadays we would know it was a concussion, not insanity that drove her actions that night. Nowadays she would have been taken straight to hospital. Instead, she had been ‘put
away’. It was chilly. It was damp. No one except the Director was medically qualified. No one was giving her medical care.

As the lump on her head began to subside over the next few days, Leah began to return to her clear-thinking self. She worried that this was what had been foretold in her fortune– the fall, the head injury, and being locked away. Was she going to be here for the rest of her life? Surely not, couldn’t they see she was herself again and let her go home to her children?

But every time she asked to go home and was rebuffed she couldn’t help breaking down in tears. And every time she got a little more high-pitched and shrill when she asked. This wasn’t helping her case, but she was exhausted. She couldn’t sleep in these awful conditions, with wailing mad women all around her. She couldn’t eat the vile slop they called food. She couldn’t keep dry with the rain leaking in through the roof above her bed.

Two weeks later she was dead. Pneumonia, in an age before antibiotics.

The tea leaves never lied. Her fortune was never wrong.

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The Name’s the Same! And the Names are Different!

This week, the 52ancestors theme is “Name’s the Same”. In a few days, it will be St Patrick’s Day. So I decided to combine the two themes and provide an update on the recently discovered Irish corner of my family tree. My challenge with this branch is now that I’m tackling a massive problem of the same given names AND multiple variations of the same surname concurrently!

For those who have been playing along with my meanderings, my great-great-grandmother Norah Vaughan was eventually found to be an Irish famine refugee from Cork. Since I wrote up the 30-year journey it took to find her Irish origins, I’ve found her baptism which gave her mother’s surname. That led me to her parents’ marriage.

Blarney roots

John Vaughan and Hanora Manley married in Blarney in 1836. Blarney Roman Catholic parish is in the civil parish of Whitechurch about 5 miles NW of Cork city. The Blarney parish registers are some of the earliest Catholic registers available in Ireland. However, there is a significant gap of over an entire generation between 1792 and 1821 for baptisms, after only commencing in 1791. The marriage registers have a gap from 1813 to 1821 after the early flurry of recording from 1778. The details included also varied from parish priest to parish priest over the years.

Manley – the Worst. Surname. Ever (for variations!)

Her surname was given as Maley (as was one of the witnesses), so at first, I was unsure if it was them. So I did a bit of digging. The original Irish name was Ó Máinle. In a Cork accent, the ‘n’ is not strongly pronounced. In fact, the pronunciation can come out sounding like Mauley. Therefore, it’s also occasionally spelt that way.  So, surname variations include all the ways to spell it with an ‘n’ in it. Or without. Or with a ‘u’. Also, occasionally a ‘ur’ or even an ‘or’. With or without the ‘e’. Possibly a double ‘l’. And sometimes an ‘O” on the front for good measure. Most of these variations appear in the Blarney register. They are all at the end of the day, the same name.

There no such thing as one way to spell an Irish surname! Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Blarney appears to be Manley Central for Ireland. It looks at this stage as though there were at least 7 separate but related families by that name in Blarney in the early days of the parish registers. However will I work out which family is which and where my Hanora fits in? Especially given that her baptism was never recorded. Hers is the generation missing from the registers. And their townlands were rarely recorded in the register until after the mid-1850s. Time to FAN club the Dickens out of the entire community!

But the first names are also the same…

The first names are consistent. Sigh. The names are the same, over and over. John, Daniel, Patrick, Timothy or Cornelius for the males. Ellen, Mary, Margaret, Johanna and Honora for the females.

The other ‘name’s the same’ issue that I run up against here is that the pool of other local surnames is also small. I am trying to analyse the witness/sponsor names to gauge patterns that might tie branches of the Manley families together, but it was a community where the same surnames appear over and over too, so conclusions cannot be reached with this approach. Even where there is a pattern it’s potentially a hint only.

Sadly, it was rare to baptise with a middle name. Therefore, there’s been no opportunity to take advantage of the old middle name trick as yet!

The ‘Manley Blarney’ project (because I need yet another project!)

Blarney Castle, site of the Blarney Stone. No wonder I talk a lot. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

The ‘Manley Blarney’ project has begun. I have extracted every single person with every variant of the Manley surname from the Blarney baptism and marriage registers up to the turn of the 20th century (so far). Unhelpfully but not surprisingly there are no burial registers to help me kill off the early ones. Now I am systematically trying to cross-reference against Tithe Applotment Books, Griffiths Valuation, civil registration for later entries (especially marriages to tie them to a father’s name and townland), surviving census fragments/pension applications, gravestone records, will indexes, estate records etc. Irish newspapers have not been helpful so far; I need more time to try all those surname variations out!

I will be working through the Catholic record collection on FMP looking for emigrant families in the US, UK and anywhere else, as I suspect many families left during those famine years. Did any other related families end up in the Chepstow area too (it doesn’t look like it so far)? Passenger lists for further-flung locations will also be trawled. Certainly, the parish registers showed fewer and fewer Manleys as the years went by.

I have created a hypothetical tree with a ‘Connector Manley’ as a pseudo-father to each of the Manley children with unrecorded baptisms and uploaded to each database that generates record hints. This has been helpful in discovering a branch that went to Buffalo and another that went to Detroit so far and occasionally helped me give them their real father’s name. Bit by bit as I explore further the children will find their true families.

I’m going to continue to build down the lines to see if I get any DNA hits too. If this happens it may also help me unravel the families. By using WATO, I may be able to see which lines are genetically the closest to my Hanora.

I think this will be a long-term project. It’s turning into both a mini (i.e. localised to one parish) One-Name study and a bit of a One-Place study as so many other local families of the time are being dragged into it!

There will be a further update. It may be a long time coming…

I realise I am setting high expectations on myself, given that it’s not common to get back into the 18th Century for most Irish families. But I don’t give up easily and am looking forward to the challenge of seeing how much of the Manley family I can untangle! It’s a quagmire of names the same and names different. It’s just another temporary brick wall. Let me at it!

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The More the Merrier! Multiple Births in Your Family Tree

multiple births twin feet
Credit: Michael Fallon at Unsplash

I was a twin. All through my childhood, while most were fantasising that they were adopted or actually princesses, I only ever felt like I had a twin somewhere. That I had been part of a multiple birth. There were no other children in the house of the same age, so why did I feel this way? There has been much written about twins having some kind of connection. I always thought that there was someone else out there that I was connected to in this way. I felt daft though. How could this feeling have any basis in reality?

My mum broke the news when I was eighteen years old. She’d been told she was expecting twins. It was her first pregnancy and the labour was dreadful. I was not only breech, but sideways rather than even just feet first. They never resorted to a caesarean delivery which would have changed the course of our family’s history. Finally, my mother was presented with me. Just me. Three weeks overdue but only just over 7lbs. Yes, I was an overcooked twin.

There was no mention of another baby, and she was too exhausted and overwhelmed to ask the question. Somehow, however, when she eventually told me, it all made sense. With it came the knowledge that not only had I had another brother or sister, but that I had killed them by barring their entrance to the world. My first action as a human being and I feel irrationally guilty to this day.

Two’s company…

Twins run in families and are not uncommon. However, it’s only fraternal (non-identical) twins that do this. Identical twins are an accident of fate. This is why I know my twin could have been either a brother or a sister. Because twins do run in our family. When checking your family tree for multiple births, check on the mother’s side. The gene for this is a maternal one.

I had a great aunt Peggy and a great uncle Ron who were on my mother’s side. Going further back on that line Norah Vaughan also gave birth to twins. They both died, and I only discovered their existence through their names being listed in the family bible. Twins are not hugely uncommon. In natural pregnancies, 1 in 250 or so will be twins, so there are sure to be some lurking in your tree somewhere. There may be mention of surviving babies being twins in their birth or baptism records. However, this was not universal, so if it is not mentioned don’t assume it wasn’t so. If the birth dates match though I think it’s probably safe to make a bold assumption!

multiple births simpson twins
The family bible revealed the births and deaths of the Simpson twins

Another hint, the older the mother was, and the more children she had already had, the greater likelihood that she would have twins. In my family branches, twins were quite frequently the ‘grand finale’ of the mother’s childbearing life!

…three (or more) is a rare crowd!

I have found no evidence of larger multiple births, e.g. triplets or quadruplets in my family though. But this is not unexpected. Firstly, they are rarer. Triplets naturally occur in about 1 in 10 000 pregnancies and quadruplets in around 1 in 700 000. Back in the early days, it was unusual for multiple births to have a successful outcome, either for the babies or the mother. They were often miscarried, or very premature and both the pregnancies and the labours were more complicated, perhaps leading to the deaths of all involved.

multiple births pregnancy

When they were successfully brought to term and delivered, newspapers and magazines of the time often covered these families extensively. So if you know of triplets or even bigger multiple births in your family, be sure to check at least the local papers and perhaps even national ones for that coverage! Some of the websites you might try depending on where the families were from may be the British Newspaper Archive (UK and Ireland), Trove (Australia), Papers Past (New Zealand), or Newspapers.com (USA).

What is the greatest number of babies from a single pregnancy that you know of in your family?