What made you fall into a black hole when finding out about your ancestors ?

[WinterBerry40]

Mine was on my mother's side in the mid 1800s a family with unusual names led to me deep diving into finding out as much as I can about them .

Names :
Thomas , Joshua ( my gg x times gf ) Ambrose , Emmanuel , Hercules ,Charity , Penella , Lendon , Joan .

I discovered they were travellers and had led lives ( and thanks to their names ) which were easily traceable with lots of info available .
They were quite well known in their area and even have things wrote about them in historical incidents .
My mum would have never known she came from traveller stock and I'm quite proud to have that in my family history .
Hello out there if these names are linked to your family also !

A great x (many times) grandfather was a “colonial trader” (ie almost certainly involved in the slave trade 😢)

It's quite amazing when you find out things like that ( the good and the bad ) my gg + gf had a son that was transported to Australia for 14 years of hard labour and was then murdered whilst working for someone , life couldn't have been all bad for him though because I have Australian distant cousins inspite of him having a wife and children in the UK !

I realised that so many versions of family history passed down are very anodyne - diving into the history of my mum's family I learned that her great grandfather was a drunken thug who'd been in prison, her grandfather had been a badly neglected, brutalised child who was placed in a reform school, as was his sister, who ended up in the workhouse and had a baby who died. I knew none of this before Ancestry and the BNA existed! In a way I'm glad my mother never found any of this out, because she would have been very disillusioned by it. People born into poverty had awful lives before services existed to support them.

I researched DH’s family as well as my own, and found his DM, born during WW1, grew up in an orphanage, with its own school, run by the Board of Guardians. They ran workhouses and gave poor relief before welfare benefits as we know them were introduced,

She had always said she went to boarding school.

Perhaps she thought it was . Back then you didn't question adults .

My great great great grandfather was the son of a slave and slave owner in America. He was described as "mullato" in his papers on ancestry.

I think she knew. However, it was possibly a reasonable option, they were cottage style homes, with their own school, she was sporty and learned to swim at a time when a lot of children were in abject poverty. She was articulate, intelligent, and worked as a nurse, becoming a sister later in life.

One of my ancestors was in the Confederate Army during the US Civil War. 👎

After my great grandfather’s wife died, he became involved with a widow and she got pregnant. They weren’t married and already had lots of mouths to feed between both his children and her children, so they sent the baby off to live with an aunt. The baby never became part of their family unit, even after my great grandfather and the widow did eventually marry and went on to have further children together in wedlock.

I was somewhat taken aback to discover that one of my long-ago ancestor's siblings was murdered. There are a couple of newspaper reports, and I need to do some more research on that one. I don't yet know whether they ever found the culprit or not.

My great grandmother was the illegitimate daughter of an Earl. A teeny tiny bit of blue blood must run in my veins. 🤣🤣🤣🤣

The astounding levels of poverty and the fact that my ancestors in work houses built the wealth of the nation and shared no part in it. Over 93% of the 'ancestors' on my family tree died before they were 5.

My very prim and proper great grandmother was 5 months pregnant when she married and had been sent from London to a girls reformatory school in Liverpool when she was 12. She was lovely and died when I was 16. She'd be horrified that I know these things about her.
Another great grandmother caused me hours of searching because she'd changed her name slightly so that she could marry again. Both her and her first husband had bigamous second marriages.

The biggest surprise for me was finding out one of my ancestors had been burned for witchcraft. We don't really know anything about her life prior, just how she died. It's awful and so sad.

Christ the night @SorrySalamander , when and where was that?

I was looking at a family in the 1911 Irish census the other day @heartofsunshine, and got a bit of a jolt when in the 'children born to marriage' the figure given was '12' and the 'number still living' was '2'. That was absolutely horrendous, even a century ago.

I come from a pretty ordinary lineage but I think the one thing that comes across is how resilient the women were in my tree. Whether through divorce, widowhood or their DHs ill health, they kept their familys together. I tell my own DC to always make sure you're earning your own money as you never know what can happen in life.

Paternal grandmothers DF was killed in WW1 leaving a widow and 7 DC, 2 of whom died from malnutrition/TB. No wonder the widow (g grandma) remarried asap. Sadly husband #2 was a drunk and beat his dw and stepkids. The DC all left home as soon as they were able to and greatgran finally left him. None attended his funeral.

Maternal grandma's DF was terribly affected by WW1 (probably had ptsd). Had lifelong health issues due to being gassed and could only work sporadically, so gran and her siblings went out to work earlier than 14yo. All had a strong work ethic - Dgran worked well into her 80s! DM recalled he was a loving grandfather who loved to sing, tell stories, took them foraging, taught them how to ride. A better grandfather than a father maybe.

I’m not sure if this counts as a “black hole”, but sometimes when I’m tracing family members, I happen to stumble across other records that pique my interest and I then get distracted and follow up those interesting snippets to see what happened. Even though they are totally unrelated to my own family tree.

A couple of examples. In one case I was tracing my 4x great grandmother born in 1818. She and her younger sister Mary Ann were in and out of prison together a couple of times when they were younger.

I come from a long and distinguished line of … ne’er do wells and petty thieves (on both sides of my family). Although, interestingly, it was always the women who were on the wrong side of the law. Men overwhelmingly commit much more crime than women. However, in my family, it turns out to be the other way round and it was always the women who were getting convicted.

Whether this means that the men in my family were a lot more law abiding or just better at not getting caught? I don’t know.

My family mostly lived in Gloucestershire (apart from those who left to go and become tobacco farmers in Maryland in the 1600s – and some later went on to become slave owners. But that’s a whole other story).

My ancestor eventually married and settled down, but her younger sister didn’t. She had a couple more convictions and then, in 1846 when she was 21, there was an incident of alleged murder that made quite a few newspapers in different parts of the country.

It turns out that Mary Ann and another young girl, also called Mary Ann, were two young women of, shall we say, negotiable affections.**

On the evening of 21st Jan 1846 they had agreed to spend the night with some Italian and Russian sailors on board their ship in Gloucester docks for the sum of 5 shillings (each, I think?). However, Mary Ann changed her mind at the last moment but the other Mary didn’t – and that was the last time she was seen alive.

The sailors were later arrested, and Mary Ann gave evidence, but there wasn’t enough evidence to convict them of murder.

All of that came from newspaper articles from the time. Newspaper articles can be really fascinating insights into life then. They highlight things that can be very difficult to trace otherwise.
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Anyway, that wasn’t actually the black hole. What did distract me from my, clearly upstanding and law abiding, family was an entry in the prison register in 1842 just above that of Mary Ann (she had been convicted of stealing three silver teaspoons). This led on to a very sad story indeed.

Most of the other entries on the page were the usual things like robbery, receiving stolen goods, assault, sheep stealing etc (the ringleader of the sheep stealing gang got sentenced to ten years).

But then I noticed a particular word in the list of offences; “Sodomy”. Sodomy? Really? And then I thought, yes, sodomy was a crime that was not repealed until 1967.

Then I saw that the person below was also charged with sodomy (actually with aiding & abetting sodomy).

I wondered, are these two connected? Then I noticed their ages. One was a man of 35 and the other was a boy of 16.

Then I noticed the sentence – “Death”. But at the end it said “transmuted to transportation for life”.

Being gay was a death sentence for men back then.

This prompted to me have a look at some more outcomes on the adjoining pages. In comparison, other offences, a murderer was transported for life and someone who aided him was transported for ten years. A death sentence for sodomy and ten years for helping to murder somebody.

The young boy was named Henry Jenkins and the older man was William Smith. I wondered what became of them.

Well, it turns out that, after being convicted on on 6th August 1842, Henry spent some time on two prison hulks. He was then transported on the Asiatic leaving on 25th May 1843 and arriving in Van Diemen’s Land (nowadays Tasmania) on 22 Sept 1843.

Unfortunately, things didn’t go well for Henry when he got to Australia; he drowned just over a year later at the age of 18. The last entry reads “Drowned at Impression Bay Probation Station whilst bathing on the 10th December 1844”.

The records describe him as being only 5’1” tall. A 16 year old boy 5ft 1 tall and a 35 year old man?? Hmm??

All in all, a very sad story.
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** I mentioned about Mary Ann in 1846 being a young woman of negotiable affection. When it came to the 1851 Census, what I found was a little unusual.

Mary Ann was one of four women lodgers, all young women between the ages of 18 and, allegedly, 22 (although Mary Ann was by then 25) each was described as a “laboring woman” – I’ve never seen that term used elsewhere, (has anyone else?), perhaps it was used in the same sense that “working girl” might be used today? There was also a widowed older woman who was the head of the household who was also described as a “laboring woman”. Given Mary’s past, I really do wonder if this was a brothel in reality?

My 2x great grandfather joined the British army in Ireland and was sent to South Africa at the age of fourteen. That just seems inconceivable to me. What must his parents have felt? He never returned to live in Ireland so it's possible that he never saw them again after he left as a child. That thought really upsets me.
And one of my 3x great grandmothers married a 35 year old widower when she was 16, and judging from the date of birth of her first child, probably pregnant. She had multiple children of her own as well as probably looking after his from his first marriage, some of whom weren't that much younger than her. What a miserable prospect and it's hard to believe the poor girl had any real choice in the matter.
So no high profile scandals or anything, but lots of very ordinary working class misery in my family history.

Another black hole that I ended up getting distracted by was when I was tracing a couple of DNA matches and while I was doing that I got distracted by the stories of two brothers born around 1880; one became a soldier and the other a sailor.

The younger brother, Robert was born in 1881, he was aged 3 when his father died and 13 when his mother died. He joined the navy literally on this 18th birthday and, by the time of the 1901 census, he was shown as an Able Seaman stationed at Devonport.

He then joined HMS Grafton and spent three years travelling around the Pacific. HMS Grafton visited various ports during this time but since this was before the Panama Canal opened they had to sail around the southern tip of South America to get there.

At one point, the ship was in San Francisco and escorted President Roosevelt from there to Seattle. The edited letters of one of the midshipmen who were on the Grafton at that time have been published and they give an indication of what life was like.

The midshipman saw Roosevelt give a speech and wrote later that he was “...rather disappointed that he didn’t have his black escort with him. He always travels with them which stirs up a good deal of comment among the Southern people.”

They even had one midshipman who deserted in San Francisco (I wonder what the story behind that was – did he meet a girl, did he want to experience life in the USA?).

While in Chile, the ship obtained a young bear as a mascot:

“Our bear is in a very flourishing state now. It is allowed to walk about the ship. Once it found its way down to an officer’s cabin on the Main deck. It eat his soap, gnawed his boots and finally went to sleep in his bunk. And today, an officer asleep in his cabin, woke up to find him eating his cigarettes by the hundred.”

Robert was a young man from a small village in Gloucestershire who got to see a very different part of the world and, presumably, had a reasonably good time (his records show his conduct as “V.G.” [very good]) sailing up and down the west coast of the Americas for three years.

However, on the way back home in 1905 Robert caught pneumonia and died. His records say “D.D. [discharged dead] 17 Jan 05 in hospital at St Vincent, Cape Verdes from pneumonia”.

It is surprising the number of young people who died of pneumonia in the early 1900s.

Nobody’ll care about him now or even remember his name (a young Englishman buried abroad in a foreign cemetery).

Of course, there are many young men (mostly) who died in wars, but they are generally remembered, at least to some extent – if only a name on a memorial. But a random naval seaman who died and was buried on a small island in the middle of the Atlantic in 1905? Who is ever going to remember him?
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Then there is Robert’s older brother, Charles, born in 1879. Like Robert, he signed up to the army as soon as he was 18.

He joined the Somerset Light Infantry but, just three months later, he had clearly had enough and then swapped to the Dragoons (a cavalry regiment). He went on to serve in South Africa in the Boer War. After that he joined the Mounted Military Police and he was then stationed in Mombasa, British East Africa (nowadays Kenya).

During World War One he was awarded the Military Medal in 1916 and left the army in 1919. He married a woman named Gertrude in 1915 and he never had any children – or so I thought. But it turns out that he had an illegitimate child, Kathleen, born in 1907.

By the time of the 1921 census, Kathleen was living with her mother and new step-father. Her father is recorded as being dead.

Only, he wasn’t dead. Perhaps Kathleen was told that her father had died (like it was stated in the 1921 census) even though, in fact, he had later married another woman in 1915. Maybe she went through her life thinking her father was dead when he was actually living in Croydon with his new wife?

A lot of this is about serendipity. There is no way that anybody looking for the biological father of Kathleen would think of looking in the service records of a random soldier in Aldershot barracks.

But, doing it the other way round, I was reading this record of a guy who was awarded a Military Medal found out that he also had an illegitimate daughter that he was ordered to pay maintenance for. My DH said that we should add all of this to the tree so that other people can find it and don’t have to repeat the work.

The more I think about it the more I agree with my DH’s stance. If some descendant of Kathleen’s comes along in the future then they can find out who her biological father was.

@AInightingale yes, I knew my maternal GGM and she had 13 siblings, but only 4 made it past 4 and 2 to adulthood. My paternal GM was one of 9, sole survivor all 4 food 6 of her(!) and my GD was one of 17, 2 survived and his mother died in child birth with him but he was lucky the other survivor had just had her first child (died) and could feed him.

People have no idea how the poor suffered in the UK and seem to refuse to link this with ancestors today. My GGM worked in a cotton mill from the age of 9, at 11 she was badly injured and the foreman took such pity on her he hired her as a child nurse for his own kids. Otherwise she would have no doubt been killed in that factory, as so many sibling were.

Westminster now sits on its throne and pours scorn on those that funded the wealth country, both abroad and in the UK.

"Over 93% of the 'ancestors' on my family tree died before they were 5."

That's interesting. Would you mind explaining a little bit more about that?

They suffered outrageously @heartofsunshine & you do get angry on their behalf. Also for the women enduring childbirth after childbirth which was mortally dangerous until the mid 20th century. Just so men could have sexual pleasure - they were resigned to it, it is mindboggling. I've come across mothers of forty- nine and fifty researching my FT; nowadays a mother that age would be regarded as very high risk and very closely monitored I'm sure. Then it was just a case of give birth in your own bed, no matter what. My great aunt delivered her own little brother when she was 21.

I’m on my 40s and I found out my grandfather was born when Lincoln was still President

What are you all using to find out this information? I'm fascinated reading all of your family histories!

Same here OP I thought I was 100% Irish Scots but I have traveller roots on one side and am Jewish on the other!