The Bluestocking Women’s Pub - The Return of Salad and the Lion

[MyrtleLion]

It’s been a while since I last saw everyone!

Welcome to everyone, regulars, lurkers, newly ventured in.

A place for women to discuss whatever takes their fancy, where the bar staff are attentive gerbils, Rosy the Red Panda is available for cuddles and all sweet things have no calories and all alcohol leaves the drinker slightly merry and hangover-free.

Previous thread is here:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5326705-the-bluestocking-womens-pub-where-brains-can-exist-in-a-single-state

Not the first deletion. I was deleted a thread or two back for referring to some biological men using a phrase they don’t like, even though it is clear, accurate, and a useful way to describe those men without confusion. My friend, Tim, agrees with me. Apparently it’s against MN guidelines written in 2018.

Also I asked to be deleted on this thread because a picture contained identifying information.

I have done loads of genealogy, both sides.

My father had some honesty issues, but after he died I was put right by multiple cousins-at-various-removes who I slowly tracked down. They filled in a lot of gaps, esp related to events during WWII, of which my father had only told me parts. Nightmare fuel.

DNA confirmed what the cousins told me. I also found I had some French blood, which was not 100% a surprise given that a surname up DM's side had French roots, though her family have always regarded themselves as 110% English.

But I am about 90% peasant, 10% lower-lower-lower middle-class. NOT descended from Edith Stourton.

I found unusual surnames to be a mixed blessing. Great if the spelling was established, and terrible it wasn't. I had to keep plugging alternatives into FreeBMD and the census data, only to eventually find that some people transcribe very, um, imaginatively.

@Shedmistress I sympathise with the log-stacking. I have stacked a lot of logs in my time.

@Swashbuckled , still thinking of you.

@Swashbuckled I am thinking of you and your family 😔

Co Pilot has got the measure of me I think, it conjured that from surprisingly little info in the prompt I gave it.

Anyway I've found a family photo from the early 1960s

It turned out I didn't have to go back very far to get into the weeds of informal adoption, child abandonment, bigamy, you name it. Sometimes genealogy is like EastEnders.

Unusual surnames I've been dealing with are mostly Huguenot French, though that's far enough back that my DNA test showed zero French. My more usual surname experience is: "Aha, Maxwell, I bet they're from Lisburn... yes, I was right about that... oh god, half the population of Lisburn were Maxwells."

But in terms of class breakdown, yes, mostly tenant farmers; lots of industrial workers (both sexes - in the census I found my great grandmother as a 16 year old mill worker); quite a few economically marginal types; the odd tradesman; and, randomly enough, a whole bunch of Church of Ireland clergy, many of whom seem to have been very eccentric.

It's the eccentrics and rogues that make it worthwhile for me. I just love to find an old court record where someone is sentenced to transportation to Australia for stealing a cow. Can't have been much fun for the accused though...

On the subject of genealogy. Her is my story of an ordinary Irish woman who kept her baby in 1945

I signed up and picked up quite a bit of information. I met a second cousin on ancestry from dad’s side she asked if i would do DNA test which i did.

Thing was my Irish nan on my mums side was a single parent and kept my mum, her baby. We had no idea who my mums father was.

We were told he died in the war. The DNA test brought up a whole bunch of American cousins.

A few of whom had bothered to do their trees.

it took me two years and a lot of messaging said cousins, some of whom did DNA tests for me to figure out who my grandad was.

He was a GI in the UK down south, my nan had come from Eire (Port Arlington) to work in munitions. And they met somewhere near Portsmouth.

He was returned to the USA before he could possibly have known my nan was pregnant.

What i can never know now is how my Nan kept herself away from the nuns and their baby units. Who cared for her? Did she manage to conceal her pregnancy?

When she had my mum she moved to the midlands and worked as a residential housekeeper. And then with a vicar and his wife where my mum was mostly brought up. Who got her that job?

Was there a network protecting these Irish mums?

My mum is an angry and bitter old woman and i can not get her to realise that my nan must have fought hard to keep her.

there is so much more but i fear boring you all

@Boiledbeetle i love your piss take btw

I have always said that every family has drama in it.

Aside from my grandfather keeping a family hidden from his last family, it turns out that my grandmother had my uncle very quickly after her wedding to my grandfather. But it’s very likely that my uncle’s father was my grandfather’s father.

That pattern of women giving birth barely a few weeks after being wed goes back at least three generations.

That is a fascinating story, Banned! I'm so sorry to read at the end of it that your mother is unhappy with what happened.

Unmarried mothers only ended up in the mother and baby homes if their families didn't accept or support them, and there were some families who did. The homes - like the Magdalen Laundries - were places of last resort for many women, when nobody else in society, including their families, wanted them.

A 'domestic placement' along with her baby was one of the least worst options.

I know that the nuns in some of the Laundries had a network of 'good catholic families' in the USA, Canada and Australia where they placed girls, or got them jobs as laundresses.

Did you know that Portarlingon where your gran was from was known as 'The Paris of the Midlands' because so many Huguenots settled there in the 17th and 18th century?
It still has an annual French-themed festival I think.

You wouldn't bore us at all, it would be fascinating to find a quiet corner of the Bluestocking and listen to your family stories

.

Oo yes please tomorrow.

Not the t shirt or the mug or the bag, but look what arrived in the post today.

I knew the pins/badges were out of stock when I ordered them, and had almost forgotten making the order, so I was pleasantly surprised.

Saying goodnight, dear Stockingers.

Love to Swash if she stops by 💙.

Is that the same grandfather, Myrtle?

So, if yes, someone becomes pregnant by an already-married man and then marries (or is married off to) his son?
If no, it’s a small village?

Badge twins

Damn! You'll have to click on the image

Yes, the same grandfather. Likely my grandmother was married off to my grandfather while pregnant by my great grandfather.

In my home town about 30 years ago, a friend of my brother's was going out with a young woman. It turned out that she was having an affair with his dad. She had been encouraged to go out with his son so the dad could see her more often.

And babies are still being passed off as if their teenage mother is their big sister.

@MyrtleLion wrote:
And babies are still being passed off as if their teenage mother is their big sister.

Many, many years ago I taught in a convent school run by actual RC nuns. There was very little information in the students’ files, so most would say nothing, but I still remember that one girl’s said the person she thought was her older sister was in fact her mother. This stays in my mind because I could, and can, see no reason at all why her teachers needed to know this.

Yes, the same grandfather. Likely my grandmother was married off to my grandfather while pregnant by my great grandfather.
In my home town about 30 years ago, a friend of my brother's was going out with a young woman. It turned out that she was having an affair with his dad. She had been encouraged to go out with his son so the dad could see her more often.

So, some might think, these particular men who disrespected their wives have little respect for their sons as well. The wives and sons are just supporting players in their lives.

Something about property. The older man acquires a younger woman. She belongs to him. She may not realise it because she's a young woman. Or she may just accept it as being how things are, how they've always been.

In my family, there are three generations of women marrying men very much older than themselves, and men who had a much higher and more powerful status in society than they did. This resulted in awful power struggles that were always lost by the women. Each of those women in each of those generations were not able to bring up their own children, they were either put in an orphanage or brought up by strangers, leaving the mother to her fate, which is very difficult to follow through the usual research routes, because of their low status and lack of identifying documents and records. But what I do know is that those women worked hard and fought hard both for themselves and for their children, and the men behaved appallingly with complete impunity.

So yes Myrtle, there are dramas in every family. I find it very interesting to turn the spotlight on the women.

... and even as I write this I am so painfully aware of Swash. Sending you love dear Swashy. Thinking of you, and your daughter, and your son.

A late Goodnight to my fellow Stockingers, most of you will be fast asleep.

And, love to Swash, holding you dear in our hearts.

Badge Twins with the esteemed Boily! I shall treasure that honour.

The Shedmistress is finding the new Bluestocking calmer, less frantic and more sobering and thoughtful than earlier incarnations she had read from afar, and is enjoying the fireside chats about history and intrigue and finds this is an ideal home from home for sharing stories and connections. And thinking of Swash every day.

Update: fresh pancake batter is made, just flick the hotplate on when you want one and don't forget that calories don't matter here but doing the washing up after does!

Where did you get that cat badge? I NEED one!

I regularly toy with buying myself a doormat saying, 'L'enfer, c'est les autres'.

One of my forebears went 40-odd miles, in early Victorian England, to marry her late sister's widower - within 'the forbidden degrees of matrimony', and with the connivance of her family. Her father was a bit of an operator, and it's impossible to decide if he was just a scheming bastard or trying to do his best for everyone.

Wills are cool, if anyone was posh enough to leave one, and you can manage to decipher them. They can help establish relationships in the absence of church registers.

I’m just popping in to let you know I’m still here. I’m in the morning part of my new routine. My daughter is still sleeping in my bed and I have come to sit up in my son’s bed with a coffee.

It is very comforting to see life going on in the BS and also to feel your love and mentions, and see Swashy’s ship in so many of the pictures.

I cannot talk about what I am going through yet; it is unbearable. But I am so grateful for the love and thoughts from you all.

Thank you.

Dear Swashy, you're held in love here. Even when we seem to be faffing around with irrelevant nonsense, we know one of our own has 'trouble', and we are sorry for it.

I think it is hugely destabilising as a child to find out that your sister is your mother and that your parents/grandparents lied to you about something so fundamental. What else have they lied about? I wonder if you, as a teacher, were an adult she could rely on for certainty. I wonder what else was going on in that family.
A family close to me arranged for the husband to impregnate his stepdaughter, with whom he had lived as a father figure since she was 11. Just so the wife could finally have a son. The ages involved mean it was illegal in Scotland but not in England. I wonder what that now 8 year old child will think when they finally see their birth certificate.