A while back I embarked on the slightly dim-witted exercise of tracing back as much of my family tree as I could find using on-line resources. I also had my recently inherited archive of material from my mother, with all the usual certificates. A strange exercise which took me right into the heart of Dickensian London; the great majority of my ancestors lived in the tenements and stews in Clerkenwell, Shoreditch and around St Pauls.
What fascinated me was seeing that my great, great grandmother was, in one census, a matchbox maker - this was piece work almost certainly for Bryant & May and unbelievably hard work at that - they had to make about 1,000 boxes a day for pennies; if they didn't meet their target, they lost their job. The big 'advantage' of this was that the materials were collected - pre-dawn - and then worked on throughout the day, the rest of the family helping in one way or another and delivered in the darkness at the end of the day.
Her husband was in the print, as they say. At that time she had three children; she, her husband and they lived in one of these tenements and were one of seven different families all of a similar size living at the same address. They had no running water, toilets were outside and non-flushing, lighting came by candles and heating by coal. I know this tenement, from my research, had a cellar area (which flooded occasionally) and three floors, with about 3 rooms on each floor of various sizes. In square footage this is about half that of my current abode, 34 people lived in these conditions in that space.
It's barely credible, but it happened and it was commonplace. Common in every sense of the word. Disease (not a surprise), infant mortality rates of over 50%, were prevalent. Unless you had talent or money, that's where you ended up. But, and this is the big but, it shows you how bad conditions were in places like Lincolnshire and Norfolk that walking to London was preferable to remaining! The Irish part of my family came from Wexford at around the time of the great potato famine - a bit difficult to determine exactly who was who at this time, because two of my maternal ancestors were brothers, wait for it, both named Albert John - one was named Albie, and the other Bertie*. They married two sisters.... Ellen Mary and Mary Ellen. It doesn't help that I only have the documents for one of these unions, and that my mother couldn't remember which was which when she was alive!
I managed to get back seven generations before coming across a real showstopper - a female ancestor with a surname that doesn't exist - the registrar even put down two surnames for her on the marriage certificate. Which is another window into the past, because both she and her husband signed with a cross.
The reason it's a slightly dim-witted pursuit is that none of my generation in my immediate line has any children or prospect of children, but I still found it fascinating. What triggered the post was a segue from using Google map pictures to try and find a place in London and was minded to have a look at my earliest remembered front doors. These were my two grandfathers' doors in Fleetwood Street, Stoke Newington. We called one 'pink grandad' and the other 'green grandad' after the colours of the doors; thanks to Google I can now report that the green door is now blue, but, 55 years on, the pink door is still pink! Amazing.
*Bertie Knight was for many years the producer at the London Palladium. For some really odd reason which is lost in the midst of time, he and my grandfather fell out, so I never actually met him or my cousin Paul Knight who, until 2003 was a prolific producer of TV dramas. Odd how life goes
