Sue and I were living in Birmingham when we met. Our families, as far as we were concerned, had been Birmingham families. In our living memory Sue’s family came through the Jewellery Trade in Hockley and had been farmers on land that is now the housing estate of Kingstanding. Meanwhile my parents were products of the Wagon Works in Saltley, and of the Birmingham Brass trade.
But when my father died (too young) in 1985 I wanted to know more. I should of course have started earlier, while he and more people were still alive. Cold facts can sometimes be ascertained later, but family stories, memories and legends (the flesh on the bones) will die with the generations unless they are recorded. And when photographs can no longer be identified, when family bibles or other historical possessions are lost or are no longer available or they get scattered around the World, there is less to go on. Even happenings within living memory can become vague. And as with many families it seemed almost traditional not to talk about the past, particularly when this past might include a family rift or a World War or two. Now I have many questions I can think of that I would have liked to have asked and can no longer do so.
So since the mid-1980s I have picked my way back along my family tree, roaming backwards through time when life, work, family and the availability of information allowed. I have traced and met with living relatives and initially at least spent hours and days in reference libraries, particularly in Birmingham. I read reference books and registers, wills and directories, registers and census returns, obtaining certificates where they were available. I learned how to use the Mormon IGI Registers, paging through micro-fiche and microfilms. My record-keeping has developed along with the rise of computers and their improvements in memory capability. Once an address for someone more than 100 years ago had been established then the Census Returns came into play but at the time they were not yet digitised and ‘on-line’ access did not exist, so family memories had to be relied upon to get me there.
Cameras only started to become available to the masses from around 1888 so while perhaps some photographs might be available from that date, many relatives who had old pictures had often left them un-identified and unnamed. The oldest I have found is a treasured Daguerreotype – a picture etched onto glass – of one of Sue’s 3xGt Grandmothers, a lady born in 1805 but taken around 1880 when she was about 75, but that apart, identified photographs of the early years have proved to be remarkably elusive.
And then came the problem of what to do with all of the information that I had gathered and how to structure it. I realised that by definition the information that I was finding was becoming available as I worked backwards in time, but to put it into a story would require a change of direction. To be logical, easier to read and to be understood by others, it needed to come forwards in time, working from distant ancestors to those more recent. And for this I needed to define a beginning for my story. I have been fortunate to have some branches where I can claim to have traced the families back to the 1600s, but there are also a small number of others where I am having difficulty getting back beyond 1800. So where should I begin?
Wordsworth’s Dawn
During the 1700s England was beginning to enter the Industrial Revolution, a time when changes would occur in society which were going to involve our families in fundamental decisions, changing their lives forever. To some extent, ‘change’ was already occurring. For 100-150 years before this, a philosophical revolution now termed the ‘Enlightenment’ had been picking up pace probably mainly unbeknownst to many ordinary people. Under the Enlightenment the study of science and associated scientific thought was beginning to challenge thousands of years of unsubstantiated belief and faith. Already by 1700 small scale mechanisation and industrialisation was beginning to occur albeit that feudalism, and poverty continued to abound across much of the largely agricultural countryside.
Initial flickerings of this awakening from previous religious orthodoxy can be perceived elsewhere in Europe maybe beginning with Copernicus in Poland (1473-1543). It was he who put forward the idea that it was the sun that was at the centre of the universe and not the Earth, and then he attempted to prove it using a combined approach of mathematics, physics and cosmology. Later in Italy Galileo (1564-1642) studied speed, velocity, gravity and free-fall, working with the principles of relativity, motion and inertia. He used the recent Dutch invention of the telescope to study celestial objects, identifying the moons of Venus and the rings of Saturn. But his support for the theories of Copernicus was deemed by the Pope to be heretical and in contradiction of holy scripture, and it was the Catholic Church that put him under house arrest for the last 10 years of his life.
By this time England was a Protestant country – since the reign of Henry VIII the Pope had no longer reigned supreme here. As early as 1600 Queen Elizabeth the First had given a Royal Charter to form the East India Company to participate in the East Indian spice trade, previously the monopoly of Holland, Spain and Portugal. Following on from the travels of exploration undertaken by the likes of Raleigh and Drake England began to discover and then colonise, and in-so-doing developed world-wide trade. Eventually the British Empire under Victoria covered one-third of the World, the largest Empire ever known. And change began to happen. Tobacco first came into the country in 1614. Samuel Pepys claims the first Coffee shop in the Country was opened in Oxford in 1650. Meanwhile the East India Company was establishing settlements in the West Indies and in India and across the World. Despite a brief hiatus in the years of the Civil War in the 1640s through to the restoration of the Monarchy in 1664, England was still regularly at war with France, Spain, Portugal and Holland, and we were winning. In America the English took over New Amsterdam and renamed it New York, while the East India Company continued to expand taking over Bombay and founding Calcutta.
It was Isaac Newton (1643-1727) who continued to progress scientific thought in England. His book “Principia” published in 1687 established the basis of classical mechanics. He made significant contributions to optics and to infinitesimal calculus. He formulated the laws of motion and of universal gravitation, theories that were not superseded for another 200 years until Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. He devised the laws of planetary motion, accounted for tides and for the trajectories of comets. He formulated a sophisticated theory of colour and he built the first practical reflecting telescope. Newton is recognised today as one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of all time and is considered generally to be one of the most influential scientists ever known. His thinking is recognised as being a key factor in the commencement of the Enlightenment, particularly in England. The Royal Society was founded by Charles II in 1662 and this provided a natural gathering place for groups of Physicians and “Natural Philosophers” who studied ‘science’. Later this term was further defined into chemists, biologists and physicians and more. Isaac Newton was President of the Royal Society for the last 24 years of his life.
The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 brought William and Anne to the throne. The following year saw the passing of the Bill of Rights, that finally established a parliamentary democracy and removed the absolute power of the British monarch for ever. Across the Country came a level of peace and religious tolerance previously unknown, and when the Act of Union in 1707 under Queen Anne finally joined Scotland to England and Wales to form Great Britain, this brought a time of calm and peace across the land. This enabled increasing rational thought and discussion to take place and science to develop in the now increasing number of coffee shops. Nowhere at this time did this happen more so than in Birmingham. In the 1700s the country woke up and started running, and Birmingham was at the forefront.
Ripples of the changes to come can be seen in Celia Feinnes’ diaries as she rode around England in 1697/8. In Simon Winchester’s book ‘The Map that Changed the World’, the story of William Smith the founder of modern Geology, he describes England in the 1700s as ‘awakening from slumber’. The second chapter of that book – A Land Awakening from Sleep – remains a firm favourite of mine of any book I have ever read, and I regularly read it again if ever I feel down.
From the 1700s there arose a new curiosity and understanding of mathematics, astronomy, physics, biology, chemistry, anatomy and medicine, at levels of thought and analysis unknown since the Ancient Greeks. This Age of Reason involved research rather than acceptance, evidence over belief. It was a time where intellectual, political and philosophical thought was brought to bear on society, when new ideas and meanings of liberty, progress, tolerance, constitutional government and the separation of church and state were expounded. Whilst Kings and Princes remained at war across Europe and when France descended into 100 years of religious persecution, it was in England that the Royal Academy was founded in 1768 under the patronage of George III. Under the chair of Joseph Banks, the Royal Society funded James Cook to undertake his first great voyage (1768-1771) to Australia, to New Zealand and Tahiti. On his return Joseph Banks was instrumental in establishing Kew Gardens in London. He became President of the Royal Academy for over 41 years.
These were the days of Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Voltaire, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Turner and Constable. In Russia, Austria and Prussia religious and political tolerance were put into practice in Government. Benjamin Franklin came to England and took these ideas to America where Jefferson enshrined them into the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Further these principles of the Enlightenment became the inspiration behind the French Revolution that began in 1789 and can be recognised even in the Russian Revolution that came 130 years later although neither France nor Russia delivered such a society to their populace who were often brutally put down. Whilst England fell short of a full revolution across its class-based society, progress was made resulting The Great Reform Bill of the 1830s that removed Rotten Boroughs and extended suffrage, albeit only initially for men.
These were exciting times, or as Wordsworth put it “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”.
And “Wordworth’s Dawn” is the beginning that I have chosen for my family history, a time chosen in the middle of a period in which the pace of fundamental change in the lives of ordinary people was beginning whether they knew it or not. By 1770 George III had been on the throne for ten years, Pitt the Elder was Prime Minister and Capability Brown was redesigning the gardens of England’s stately homes. In the previous ten years the Duke of Bridgewater had built his first canals at Worsley near Manchester, Matthew Boulton had completed his Soho Manufactory between Birmingham and Smethwick, Josiah Wedgwood had opened his Etruria pottery works in Stoke and James Hargreaves had invented his Spinning Jenny. This latter invention was quickly followed by the invention of the first Threshing Machine by Andrew Meikle in 1786. Both these inventions and more, that were created to make the workplace and the harvest more efficient, threatened the livelihood of many labourers in the countryside where the majority of the population still lived and worked. Increasingly they had to choose between staying, workless and starving in the countryside, or moving their families to the newly evolving cities in search of paid work.
The Forgotten People
We cannot know how many days, weeks or years of decision- making took place, or the specifics of what made our ancestors start out on the paths that eventually led them to Birmingham. But these pages are my family-based tribute to some of those whom Helen Dunsmore called ‘the forgotten people of history’, a description that applied to the vast majority of the population of England in 1770. These families are generally not mentioned in history books. They were generally too poor and insignificant to be able to leave things behind to remember them by. Such people had hardly any family heirlooms or documents to leave behind, and finding them today can be as hard as if they had never lived. Few left even a gravestone to mark their existence, and any record being made in church registers is often inconsistent.
These were times when education for the general populace was in its early days and few could read or write unless they were lucky, wealthy or in the clergy. Official registration of births of the marriages and deaths of the hoi-polloi only started in 1837 yet many of the signatures on these records and certificates bear anything more than a cross. Despite laws aiming to raise requirement for education for children up to the minimum working age of 12 by 1901 in Britain, enforcement was weak and young children worked long, dangerous hours in industries like textiles and coal mining. With parental consent marriage in England was still possible at 12 for girls and 14 for boys.
In the bibliography is a book – Liberty’s Dawn by Emma Griffin – that traces the hearts and minds of such people through available written records. Then there is a chapter near the end of Alice Loxton’s book “Eleanor” entitled “The Forgotten Women” reminding us that education for women was often thought unnecessary, that history, at least until recently, has been generally written by men and is inherently unfair to the majority of the female sex. There are many men that are remembered throughout history, but unless they were noble where are the women without whom these family trees could not have existed, who on marriage found their lives, intellects and dreams to be bounded by husbands, children and the dangers of childbirth? In addition on marriage women generally changed their surname as the start of the process of becoming invisible to historical record.
So if a family history can be said to ‘start’ anywhere then I have tried to establish the whereabouts of our ancestral families in or around Wordsworth’s Dawn, in the years around 1770, and then to trace the route they took to Birmingham where they all came together some 200 years later. In itself, at say an average of thirty years per generation, this should result in six generations covering both the male and female lines – sixty-four different surnames for each of Sue’s tree and my own over a period of 250 years. Enough to be going on with I think.
Yet despite such a short time period, of our 128 possible direct ancestors of whom there should be 64 women and 64 men, because records can be scant and hard to find there still remain five 4x great grandmothers for whom we have not yet found either their given names nor their original surnames, another nine for whom I only have their first name (4x Mary, 2x Sarah, 1x Hannah, Margaret and Elizabeth)and one 3x great grandmother (Ann) whose lineage remains a mystery. In contrast there are only two great(x4) grandfathers who are completely unknown to me and two others for whom I am forced to surmise that their surname was the same as that of their child. Maybe as research continues, they will yet reveal themselves.
In some compensation I have deliberately started these stories with the distaff side of each family line to ensure that those whom we have identified are given the full benefit of your interest before we move on to the male side of each line as your attention begins to wane or as the information begins to become more known.
All of these people existed. All 128 of them. And like their ancestors before them, they lived and breathed, they worked and played, they sang and laughed, they cried and mourned, they loved, suffered and despaired. And they died.
Their stories risk being lost forever.
A Dedication
At my school, in my youth, it was my Economics teacher, Martin Green, who introduced me to the delights of Economic History and the Industrial Revolution. He referred to such non-noble ancestors as “the real, meaningful people” and this is my chance to remember and record some details of those that relate to Sue and I. Hopefully both they, and he, would have approved. In the pages that follow I have tried to set out some of what I have managed to find in relation to the families of our ancestors who lived through these times and who made their way to Birmingham.
I hope that you find some interest therein.
I shall leave the last word to Samuel Sidney, who wrote a Travel Guide “Rides on Railway” in 1851 with his thoughts on Birmingham and the Black Country.
“In this Black Country, including West Bromwich, Dudley, Darlaston, Bilston, Wolverhampton and several minor villages, a perpetual twilight reigns during the day, and during the night fires on all sides light up the dark landscape with a fiery glow. The pleasant green of pastures is almost unknown, the streams, in which no fishes swim, are black and unwholesome; the natural dead flat is often broken by high hills of cinders and spoil from the mines; the few trees are stunted and blasted; no birds are to be seen, except a few smoky sparrows; and for miles on miles a black waste spreads around, where furnaces continually smoke, steam engines thud and hiss, and long chains clank, while blind gin horses walk their doleful round. From time to time you pass a cluster of deserted roofless cottages of dingiest brick, half swallowed up in sinking pits or inclining to every point of the compass, while the timbers point up like the ribs of a half decayed corpse. The majority of the natives of this Tartarian region are in full keeping with the scenery – savages, without the grace of savages, coarsely clad in filthy garments, with no change on weekends or Sundays, they converse in a language belarded with fearful and disgusting oaths, which can scarcely be recognised as the same as that of civilized England”.
This work was amongst the first to explicitly distinguish the Black Country as an area distinct from Birmingham noting that “On certain rare holidays these people wash their faces, clothe themselves in decent garments, and, since the opening of the South Staffordshire Railway, take advantage of cheap excursion trains, go down to Birmingham to amuse themselves and make purchases”.
But Came They All to Birmingham 