Speaker 1: Pushkin. Sometimes retrieving forgotten lives from the recesses of history
Speaker 1: feels like magic, a kind of alchemy, like raising the dead.
Speaker 1: Something that Hallie and I often get asked making podcasts,
Speaker 1: or in Hallie's case, writing books about social history, is
Speaker 1: how do you find all of this information out? Where
Speaker 1: do you look? How do you know where to start?
Speaker 1: After spending nearly thirty years training and working as a historian,
Speaker 1: some of what happens in the course of researching a
Speaker 1: subject has for me started to feel instinctive. But there's
Speaker 1: a method to all of this, a logical way of
Speaker 1: putting the pieces together and of using sources to revive
Speaker 1: lost stories. Researchers and historians are fundamentally detectives. What we
Speaker 1: do in the archives and libraries can be absolutely rilling,
Speaker 1: holmsy and feats of discovery, chasing clues from one collection
Speaker 1: to the next, sometimes across the country, sometimes across the world.
Speaker 1: I've often said to people who love reading crime fiction
Speaker 1: and murder mysteries that they would equally loved being a historian, or,
Speaker 1: as in the case of Kate Healy, a genealogist reconstructing
Speaker 1: the lives of the women in this podcast series has
Speaker 1: been an enormous task, and Kate's helps us with the work.
Speaker 1: She's got over thirty years of experience in the field
Speaker 1: of genealogy, and she assisted us by building out the
Speaker 1: family trees of the victims of the Black Out Ripper,
Speaker 1: as well as of Rachel Dobkin, Doris Staples, Kathleen Patmore,
Speaker 1: and Marjorie Stephens, the wife of Gordon Cummins. Her expertise
Speaker 1: has enriched our understanding of where these women came from
Speaker 1: and of who they were. Today, Kate's joining us for
Speaker 1: a special bonus episode of Bad Women to tell us
Speaker 1: all about her work as a professional genealogist. Kate, Welcome
Speaker 1: to the show. Hello, So, Kate, I wonder if you
Speaker 1: can start by telling us what does the genealogists do
Speaker 1: in a nutshell? Well, the term genealogy is actually referring
Speaker 1: to the study of lines of descent carried out for
Speaker 1: wealthy families to establish inheritance of land or titles. But
Speaker 1: what we do is more family history, and over the
Speaker 1: time the two terms have become interchangeable. Some people use
Speaker 1: the analogy of a tree. The branches of a tree
Speaker 1: are the family members, and then you'll add the foliage
Speaker 1: for the information about the family, what they did, their relations.
Speaker 1: So essentially, you're gathering lots of raw data about when
Speaker 1: and where people lived through their birth records, through their
Speaker 1: marriage records, through their death certificates. And that's material that
Speaker 1: we use on bad women. But hallet, do you want
Speaker 1: to talk a little bit about how genealogy and wider
Speaker 1: historical context interact. Yeah, what Kate is doing is going
Speaker 1: and almost putting pins in a map of places where
Speaker 1: we knew people were all incidents in their lives and
Speaker 1: dates when we knew things happened that turn up on
Speaker 1: the records, and then you can fill in the blanks
Speaker 1: around that. And that's I think where history and genealogy
Speaker 1: intersect and helped create a much bigger picture. So, for example,
Speaker 1: Kate was fantastic and helping us put together Evelyn Oatley
Speaker 1: story and for me personally, I found that one of
Speaker 1: the most emotive stories from season two because we were
Speaker 1: able to come up with so much information about it,
Speaker 1: not only her, but her mother, Rasina, and Rasina's experiences
Speaker 1: coming from Germany and living in the UK and what
Speaker 1: it was like during the First World War and how
Speaker 1: she lived with a German community at a time when
Speaker 1: Germans were persecuted. There was this upsurgeon germanophobia and the
Speaker 1: butcher shop she was living above as attacked. So we
Speaker 1: have a very intimate understanding of where Evelyn came from
Speaker 1: and her mother's experiences. So what a genials just brings
Speaker 1: to it, it's fundamentally important. It's the first step in
Speaker 1: reconstructing a life. What we're saying is that that data
Speaker 1: we get through genealogy about where people are born, where
Speaker 1: they live, who they marry, where they work, together with
Speaker 1: wider context, those are essentially complimentary building blocks when it
Speaker 1: comes to creating a historical narrative. And it strikes me
Speaker 1: that what we don't see in those official records can
Speaker 1: also be important and can also work alongside wider historical
Speaker 1: context to tell us about a person. I think the
Speaker 1: example of Evelyn Otle is a really poignant one. As
Speaker 1: you say, Hallie, we know from the police reports and
Speaker 1: the witness statements after she dies that she has this
Speaker 1: very full, very animated life in London. She's got lots
Speaker 1: of friends, there are clubs and bars she likes to
Speaker 1: go to, she works there, she's got a client base.
Speaker 1: At one point she's allegedly engaged to another man. If
Speaker 1: you look at the official records of her life, none
Speaker 1: of that appears. If you just looked at the nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty nine register, you would think that she was a
Speaker 1: housewife living on a poultry farm in a bungalow near Blackpool.
Speaker 1: So this is an example of how we need sources
Speaker 1: beyond what those records can tell us. In this case,
Speaker 1: it comes in the form of witness testimony from her husband, Harold,
Speaker 1: and from friends, acquaintances, clients. But the fact that none
Speaker 1: of that appears on the official record, and the fact
Speaker 1: that also that life in Soho is embedded in a
Speaker 1: particular type of counterculture, contributes to the sense that she's
Speaker 1: keeping secrets, that she's hiding things, that she's living a
Speaker 1: double life. And so when you put all of that together,
Speaker 1: what we do know what is officially recorded with what
Speaker 1: is flying under the radar, her story almost becomes more
Speaker 1: than the some of its parts. Yeah, absolutely are very
Speaker 1: fortunate in Evelyn's case in that we did have a
Speaker 1: lot of disparate sources to draw from. And this is
Speaker 1: why people who were involved in crimes are such brilliant
Speaker 1: material for historians, because there's press coverage, and then there's
Speaker 1: a whole other layer of records, court records and various
Speaker 1: criminal records and things like that. That means that you
Speaker 1: can really dig into these people's lives, the witness examinations,
Speaker 1: and you can get intimate details of what somebody was
Speaker 1: doing precisely, almost like every hour of a particular day.
Speaker 1: And so with Evelyn we had some of that, We
Speaker 1: had newspaper reports, and that really means that we can
Speaker 1: piece together that life. But in many cases, you get
Speaker 1: glimpses into lives and then that's it. It's like this
Speaker 1: window opens and then it shuts again, and you have
Speaker 1: a partial bit of a life, and it makes you
Speaker 1: wonder and it makes you think, and it makes you
Speaker 1: desperately want to know more. Why did that person immigrate,
Speaker 1: Why did that person marry that person? Why did that
Speaker 1: person walk out on that person? And sometimes you don't
Speaker 1: have the answers, and that can be as scintillating as
Speaker 1: actually even finding them. And as you mentioned earlier, Pari,
Speaker 1: part of the appeal of historical research is for both
Speaker 1: of us. I think that element of detective work of
Speaker 1: getting those glimpses and then seeing what you can work
Speaker 1: out about what went on in their life in between
Speaker 1: following the clues. Kate, what's the appeal for you of
Speaker 1: genealogical research and how did you get into genealogy. Well,
Speaker 1: I first got into it when I was a child
Speaker 1: and my mum's family came from Scotland, although she was
Speaker 1: raised in England, and my mum inherited my great granddad's
Speaker 1: World War One medals, and that led me to want
Speaker 1: to learn more about him and more about the Scottish
Speaker 1: side of the family, and so I then embarked on
Speaker 1: a quest to try and find out about that side
Speaker 1: of the family. A lot of genealogical research can be
Speaker 1: done online now, But you were going to physical archives,
Speaker 1: weren't you. Now a lot of it is online and
Speaker 1: it's amazingly useful. You can do a lot of it
Speaker 1: from your living room. But yes, but then it was
Speaker 1: visiting local or national archives to dig out records and
Speaker 1: to view original certificates and censuses to find the information.
Speaker 1: And what was that like for you? Going and reading
Speaker 1: around in libraries and archives. It is fascinating, but it
Speaker 1: can also be quite daunting and intimidating. A lot of
Speaker 1: the archives have now moved to more modern family history
Speaker 1: centers as the hobby has become a lot more popular.
Speaker 1: But many years ago they were big, dusty archives and
Speaker 1: you can imagine someone behind the desk saying, yes, what
Speaker 1: do you want and you feel quite intimidated by all
Speaker 1: these big old documents around you. But now it is
Speaker 1: so much more welcoming and there's often people to help you.
Speaker 1: And what did you find out about your family in Scotland?
Speaker 1: One brunch was quite surprising. My great great grandfather he
Speaker 1: was a fisherman in a little village and I discovered
Speaker 1: that he drowned at sea. There was a hurricane and
Speaker 1: the boat overturned and that left my great great grandmother
Speaker 1: a widow with a five year old, and my great
Speaker 1: grandmother who was one and it just makes you feel
Speaker 1: so sad and want to find out how they survived.
Speaker 1: And because it was such a small village, everybody was
Speaker 1: related to each other and intermarriage, and so it would
Speaker 1: have impacted the whole community. And in fact, ten years after,
Speaker 1: another huge hurricane killed a lot more. It gives a
Speaker 1: huge sense of perspective. It certainly does. The cottages that
Speaker 1: my great grandparents lived in, the little Fisherman's cottages and
Speaker 1: now actually holiday lets. So we went and visited and
Speaker 1: stayed in there. And now, of course they're nice and
Speaker 1: centrally heated, but you can imagine the coal fire and
Speaker 1: in a home from a fishing trip, all wet and
Speaker 1: dripping and all living in practically one room. It does
Speaker 1: bring it home and easily we have it now. So
Speaker 1: what was their quite small home that they worked really
Speaker 1: hard to have and we're probably quite proud of, has
Speaker 1: now become a leisure space basically, which shows us how
Speaker 1: much society has changed that. You know, I went with
Speaker 1: my children. They're playing on the rocks that were the
Speaker 1: danger to the fisherman that fish there doing a piece
Speaker 1: of historical research, it's really like solving a puzzle that
Speaker 1: sort of gradually reveals itself, or you're moving the pieces,
Speaker 1: you're trying solutions out, and the more clues you gather,
Speaker 1: the more suggesting themselves to you. In a sense. Just
Speaker 1: thinking of an example again from Evelyn Oatley's story, you
Speaker 1: identified in the census Kate that Walter Judd was absent
Speaker 1: in nineteen eleven, Walter Judd being Evelyn Oatley's father. No,
Speaker 1: we couldn't find him at all. These on the census
Speaker 1: but did manage to find him on an electoral register
Speaker 1: the year before, so we assume he's in the area,
Speaker 1: but it could be that he was sleeping rough that night,
Speaker 1: or he was maybe in prison. What happens quite often
Speaker 1: is he has been mistranscribed and just can't be found
Speaker 1: because his name's been put down wrong. I think what
Speaker 1: was curious at the same time was that whilst Walter
Speaker 1: Judd was absent and couldn't be found, his wife, Rosina
Speaker 1: and their two young children, Herman aged roughly five, and Evelyn,
Speaker 1: aged roughly three, were all living apart. So Rosina was
Speaker 1: working for a German butcher and herman Evelyn were boarding out,
Speaker 1: which means they were being fostered. Yeah, that's true. I
Speaker 1: managed to find Evelyn first living with another family boarding
Speaker 1: out as you say, and then I discovered her brother
Speaker 1: was with her as well. But then of course that
Speaker 1: raises the question where's her mother, And it did take
Speaker 1: me a bit of digging to find her mother. She
Speaker 1: was again mistranscribed as Rye jud but with the knowledge
Speaker 1: now that she was from Germany, we could be quite
Speaker 1: content that we got the correct person. But yeah, it
Speaker 1: was quite surprising to find her away from her children,
Speaker 1: obviously trying to make ends meet working for another family
Speaker 1: and having to put her children out to fostering. I
Speaker 1: got a bit hooked on this mystery, actually wondering what
Speaker 1: circumstances could have given rise to this. How have we
Speaker 1: ended up with this absent father, this mother living a
Speaker 1: few streets away from her children working, and then these
Speaker 1: children living with another family. And as you say, there
Speaker 1: was no sign of Walter anywhere on the official records
Speaker 1: at that point. In compliment to your work, Kate, I
Speaker 1: started digging around in the newspaper archives looking for Walter
Speaker 1: and found that before he had his children, he'd been
Speaker 1: involved in strikes. So the taxiles industry is very big
Speaker 1: in the local area. There were strikes over pay and
Speaker 1: working conditions, and in the late nineteen hundreds, Walter was
Speaker 1: named in an article as participating, and he actually got
Speaker 1: a conviction for doing some damage to someone's property. You know,
Speaker 1: that doesn't tell us where he is in nineteen eleven.
Speaker 1: But then we start to build out a bit of
Speaker 1: a profile of Walter, he starts to seem like a
Speaker 1: bit of a rabbel rouser. Could he be a bit
Speaker 1: of a troublemaker? You wonder what impact that conviction could
Speaker 1: have had on him, his work prospects, his employment, things
Speaker 1: like that. Then off the back of that article, I
Speaker 1: found a second article which said he'd actually threatened a
Speaker 1: local landlady. He threatened to cut her throat, and he
Speaker 1: used other abusive language towards her. He'd been drinking, And
Speaker 1: here in this article we learned that he's got eight
Speaker 1: previous convictions, and that starts to cast what seemed like
Speaker 1: just rebellious behavior in a slightly different light. Now he's
Speaker 1: not just a rabbel rouser. There seems to be something
Speaker 1: a bit darker to him. There's violence. Is he violent
Speaker 1: towards his family? And so Kate, you and I discussed that,
Speaker 1: and we wondered if maybe he could be in prison
Speaker 1: at the time of the nineteen eleven census and looked
Speaker 1: at the records, couldn't find him. But then a third
Speaker 1: article from nineteen ten starts to illuminate the picture even more.
Speaker 1: Rosina Weber, his wife, Evelyn's mother, has summoned Walter to
Speaker 1: court for a separation order. He's again absent, but we
Speaker 1: learned there that he's incredibly difficult to live with. He's
Speaker 1: stolen a truck and sold it. He's routinely out of work,
Speaker 1: and Rosina is so desperate that she lays out this
Speaker 1: plan that we then see materialize in nineteen eleven. Her
Speaker 1: plan is that she will get a job and her
Speaker 1: children will go into foster care because she cannot live
Speaker 1: with her husband anymore. He's not holding up his end
Speaker 1: of the bargain. He's not being the breadwinner he's supposed
Speaker 1: to be. And so, no, we still don't know where
Speaker 1: he is in nineteen eleven. But by building a profile
Speaker 1: of him and by following those clues, we've been able
Speaker 1: to elucidate a bit more of the picture of what's
Speaker 1: going on with this family. With this type of research,
Speaker 1: you begin with what feels like these infinite narrative branches.
Speaker 1: Is Walter abroad, who knows what's happened. But you know,
Speaker 1: the more research you do, the more those branches start
Speaker 1: to Now, I just wonder what both of your experiences
Speaker 1: are of this, Hally, Can you talk about that at all?
Speaker 1: Oh gosh, you know, when you start out on one
Speaker 1: of these journeys, you never know what you're going to
Speaker 1: find and what you're describing. I have gone through countless
Speaker 1: times and I'm sure Kate has even more, for example,
Speaker 1: trying to eliminate somebody from the record, or referring back
Speaker 1: to season one, when I was researching Annie Chapman's family
Speaker 1: and George Smith. Can you think of a name more
Speaker 1: common than George Smith? Trying to find a George Smith
Speaker 1: in the record. So in season one we were looking
Speaker 1: at the lives of the victims of Jack the Ripper,
Speaker 1: and of course Annie Chapman was Jack Rippers second victims,
Speaker 1: had a very full life before she became second victim,
Speaker 1: and George Smith was her father, so she began life
Speaker 1: as Annie Smith. Yes, also a very common name, that's right, absolutely,
Speaker 1: and in fact looking for George Smith was difficult. But
Speaker 1: what did help was that he was in the army,
Speaker 1: so we could find army records. But you had to
Speaker 1: look through everything and then narrow it down and narrow
Speaker 1: it down. The thing is, then once you've got purchase
Speaker 1: on a bit of information which you know is pretty
Speaker 1: much water tight, then that can open other doors for you.
Speaker 1: We know. According to an article that appeared written allegedly
Speaker 1: by Annie Chapman's sister after her death, she gave a
Speaker 1: number of details about their childhood and One of the
Speaker 1: details she gave was, our father committed suicide by cutting
Speaker 1: his throat. God, that's really that's awful. That's got to
Speaker 1: appear in the record somewhere. And of course we couldn't find,
Speaker 1: well whatever reason, a death certificate or any death registration
Speaker 1: for George Smith. But eventually what I did find was
Speaker 1: a small news item which opened up a whole story
Speaker 1: surrounding his death, which was truly shocking and sad. That
Speaker 1: he was working as a gentleman's valet in Wales. He
Speaker 1: was traveling with this man he was working for in
Speaker 1: a particular regiment, and he cut his throat one morning
Speaker 1: and it was in the newspaper. It was a little
Speaker 1: tiny article in the newspaper. Oh my god, that's just extraordinary.
Speaker 1: And that was obviously the right George. That was George Smith.
Speaker 1: So these little bits come together. Newspapers are very useful
Speaker 1: that sometimes they're unreliable, but they are incredibly useful for
Speaker 1: the historian. You're listening to a bonus episode of Bad Women,
Speaker 1: all about genealogy. They'll be back after this short break. Okay,
Speaker 1: what about you? If you need to find a needle
Speaker 1: in a haystack, how do you embark on that type
Speaker 1: of research project, where do you begin looking for a person.
Speaker 1: Going back to Walter Judd, it was only later that
Speaker 1: we've managed to discover his character. When I started to
Speaker 1: research him, one of the first things I came across
Speaker 1: was his pension records that stated that he had been
Speaker 1: injured in World War One. It actually suffered a gunshot
Speaker 1: wound to the arm. You start then to think, oh,
Speaker 1: poor Walter. When he couldn't be found in some of
Speaker 1: the records, you think maybe he's suffering, So you're feeling
Speaker 1: sorry for the man, and coming from a military background myself,
Speaker 1: knowing people who have suffered in post traumatic stress and
Speaker 1: gone through hard times. It was only later that you
Speaker 1: then discover a bit more about his character and you think, oh, yes,
Speaker 1: well he was troubled before the war and court martialed
Speaker 1: as well. So it just shows that you really do
Speaker 1: have to use lots of different sources to build out
Speaker 1: a picture of the person and a family and not
Speaker 1: just rely on one sort. The census, though, can be
Speaker 1: an absolute treasure trave of, can't. It's the official survey
Speaker 1: of a population, and in Britain and the US it's
Speaker 1: taken every ten years. It's a good starting point, isn't it.
Speaker 1: So what can the census reveal? Kate? Yes, well, I
Speaker 1: love SENSUSS because they are great. I love them too, Kate,
Speaker 1: that's something we share. They are amazing, aren't Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: they are. They are a snapshot of one night every
Speaker 1: ten years. But the amount of information you can get
Speaker 1: just from that, it is amazing. Who's in the family,
Speaker 1: what children they have, and then when you move on
Speaker 1: ten years, if children are missing, what's happened to those children?
Speaker 1: Have they died or if one of the spouses has died,
Speaker 1: we can go to look for their death record, and
Speaker 1: then quite often, certainly it's happened in my family that
Speaker 1: I've discovered a complete new branch of a family because
Speaker 1: there's a border staying with them with a name that
Speaker 1: I've not come across before. But if you dig into them,
Speaker 1: they might actually be a cousin or an uncle, and
Speaker 1: that can lead you in a completely different branch of
Speaker 1: the tree. Hally, what about you, Why do you love
Speaker 1: the census? Oh? My gosh, I love the census so
Speaker 1: much because I think at first glance, to the untrained eye,
Speaker 1: the census is just what is this? This is somebody's name,
Speaker 1: and what is this telling me? But as a historian,
Speaker 1: it tells you so much that you can just unpack
Speaker 1: and unpack and unpack, and then with every bit that
Speaker 1: you take out of the census, you can build onto
Speaker 1: that to their ask for everybody who lives at a
Speaker 1: particular address or in a particular building, who the head
Speaker 1: of the family is, all of the names, where they're from,
Speaker 1: what their occupations are, how old they are, if they're married,
Speaker 1: if they're single, if they're widowed, and sometimes other bits
Speaker 1: of information creep in as well. It depends who the enumerators.
Speaker 1: And sometimes and I've come across a census and is
Speaker 1: the Jackson family? And somebody had written in scrawled into
Speaker 1: the margin, miss Jackson did not sleep at home last night,
Speaker 1: And you think, oh my goodness, what was that about?
Speaker 1: Something happened there. But the amazing thing about the census
Speaker 1: is it's not just the family you're looking at, but
Speaker 1: it's also who lives around these people. So what type
Speaker 1: of house are they living in, Who are the people
Speaker 1: who live next door to them, who live upstairs from them,
Speaker 1: what do they do? Gives you a sense of a
Speaker 1: social class. And then again one of the fascinating things
Speaker 1: about the census is that you can actually overlay this
Speaker 1: information onto a map, both contemporary maps and also modern maps.
Speaker 1: So to be able to see the type of neighborhood
Speaker 1: that somebody lived in and the type of neighbors they
Speaker 1: had and what the surroundings were like is really important
Speaker 1: in understanding what their lives would have been like, what
Speaker 1: were the local shops like, how crime ridden was it?
Speaker 1: And so again you're getting this layering effect and all
Speaker 1: of this. So the census is the starting point. You
Speaker 1: just grow it and grow it. You get this tremendous picture.
Speaker 1: And sometimes people can inadvertently reveal things about themselves, can't
Speaker 1: they in the way they choose to make entries in
Speaker 1: the census. I'm thinking of the gain Another example pertaining
Speaker 1: to Annie Chapman from season one, when her husband describes
Speaker 1: himself on the census as a coachman and she describes
Speaker 1: him as a stud groom, which is a slightly righer
Speaker 1: ranking class. Or talk a little bit about that. You know,
Speaker 1: if you're looking with a historian's eye, you're looking for nuance,
Speaker 1: and that is a perfect example of that. So John,
Speaker 1: her husband, who were at Saint Leonard's Hill, where he
Speaker 1: worked at that time when the census was being taken.
Speaker 1: He told the enumerator that his title was a coachman.
Speaker 1: And Annie Chapman was at that point staying with her
Speaker 1: mother in London when the enumerator came round and said
Speaker 1: that her husband was a stud groom, and a stud
Speaker 1: groom held a very esteemed position within a gentleman's house
Speaker 1: in the countryside because he managed the racing stock, and
Speaker 1: he would have had a relatively intimate relationship with the
Speaker 1: master of the house, which would have put him in
Speaker 1: a position above many other servants. This disparity is very
Speaker 1: interesting because it shows aspiration, and it shows how Annie
Speaker 1: saw her life and saw her husband and how he
Speaker 1: saw the realities of his life, and it makes you
Speaker 1: wonder what was really going on there. There was a
Speaker 1: lot of middle class aspiration, that's for sure, but it's
Speaker 1: very intriguing. So even on a document like the census
Speaker 1: that appears to be quite black and white, there are
Speaker 1: things we can read between the lines. There's a lot
Speaker 1: we can read between the lines, and that's one of
Speaker 1: the joys of it. And in fact, every time you
Speaker 1: look at a source, it answers questions, but it asks
Speaker 1: further questions. This is what I mean by a sort
Speaker 1: of Holmsy and Chase. It's uncovering clues and you're finding
Speaker 1: stuff that you didn't know about, and then you have
Speaker 1: to answer those questions, which leads you somewhere else. And
Speaker 1: you actually, again, thinking of season one, you made some
Speaker 1: really quite surprising discoveries. Didn't you that if we just
Speaker 1: heeded the census might not have been apparent? Yeah? Absolutely,
Speaker 1: And this again came from that same letter about Annie's
Speaker 1: childhood and her background. One of the things that her
Speaker 1: sister said was effectively that she went into a rehab
Speaker 1: center because she was an alcoholic. I thought, God, that's
Speaker 1: really amazing. This was in mid eighteen eighties, and I
Speaker 1: started researching, Well, we're worth these places? How many were there?
Speaker 1: And I created a list and narrowed it down. Can
Speaker 1: see to about a handful I think maybe three that
Speaker 1: she could have been at. And then I traced the
Speaker 1: records for a spell Thorne sanitorium to a convent of
Speaker 1: Protestant nuns just outside of Oxford, and I'll just get
Speaker 1: in touch and let's see what that turns up. And remarkably,
Speaker 1: one of the sisters got back to me and she said,
Speaker 1: we do have these uncataloged log books from the time.
Speaker 1: Do you want to come and have a look at them?
Speaker 1: And I thought, oh God, yeah, of course. And I
Speaker 1: remember that day going out. It was a beautiful summer's day,
Speaker 1: driving out into the countryside with swaying poppies and big butterflies,
Speaker 1: and going to this rather secluded romantic convent and being
Speaker 1: taken to this library, and the sister brought this archived
Speaker 1: box out and put these ledgers down, and I just knew.
Speaker 1: I knew I was going to find her in it.
Speaker 1: I knew it. And I opened up these books and
Speaker 1: I'm going through it, and there it was. It was
Speaker 1: Missus Chapman was brought into by her two sisters, and
Speaker 1: the date was right, and then Missus Chapman's taken home
Speaker 1: to Windsor and various of the little entries, and it
Speaker 1: was just so gratifying to be able to see that
Speaker 1: nobody had seen that, nobody knew it was there. It's
Speaker 1: not cataloged, and sometimes everything aligns like that. For me,
Speaker 1: when I learned Auntie Chapman's story, that detail about being
Speaker 1: in a sanatorium made it even more tragic because when
Speaker 1: you look at the word of context about those sanatoria
Speaker 1: and the approach to quote unquote treatment there, you start
Speaker 1: to understand just how little society at the time understood
Speaker 1: about addiction. Alcoholism and drunkenness in particular were seen as shameful.
Speaker 1: They were an example of moral failing. But at these
Speaker 1: sanatoria women were expected to do feminine activities, to get
Speaker 1: fresh air, to exercise, to embroider. The idea is that
Speaker 1: you can be cured from your alcoholism by being reminded
Speaker 1: of your feminine duties. There's no dealing with the root cause,
Speaker 1: and us shows that Annie never really had a chance,
Speaker 1: and so that one detail you found about the fact
Speaker 1: that this was where she ended up, when you couple
Speaker 1: it with what we can learn about these institutions, just
Speaker 1: makes our story so much more poignant. I think, Kate,
Speaker 1: were there any really surprising moments for you, any twists
Speaker 1: and turns like this In your research of the women
Speaker 1: in our series. You often hope that her family is
Speaker 1: going to be quite straightforward, that they're going to live
Speaker 1: with their parents and go through life and marry and
Speaker 1: go on. But in the case of Catherine Mulcahey, when
Speaker 1: I discovered that she was orphaned at the age of eleven,
Speaker 1: questions of who then looked after her, And what I
Speaker 1: found surprising was that the grandmother was receiving payment as
Speaker 1: guardian for the children. But the grandmother was named as
Speaker 1: a Phoebe Jones, and this was a complete a new name.
Speaker 1: So then I had to look into who Phoebe Jones was,
Speaker 1: and then that led to finding more out about Catherine's
Speaker 1: father and discovering that he was actually born out of
Speaker 1: wedlock and his mother was Phoebe Jones, and that's quite
Speaker 1: unusual for a child to be raised by the father's parents.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite subjects as a historian is the
Speaker 1: stories people tell about themselves versus what the records say
Speaker 1: about how people really lived. And one of the interesting
Speaker 1: things that Kate's picked up on about Kavin McCarthy's life
Speaker 1: is that she came from a family with a kind
Speaker 1: of very mixed background. There was a lot of illegitimacy,
Speaker 1: and illegitimacy is hidden, but it often comes out in
Speaker 1: the records. Birth records are fascinating for that uncover these
Speaker 1: family secrets. You think that somebody, somebody's cousin and they're
Speaker 1: actually their brother. It's happened in my own family, where
Speaker 1: I think my great grandmother had so many children that
Speaker 1: she gave one of her sons to her sister to
Speaker 1: raise and he never knew that he actually belonged to
Speaker 1: somebody else. And that happens so frequently, and it really
Speaker 1: comes out in these records. We tend to think they'd
Speaker 1: be Victorians, when Eduardians are all very straight laced and
Speaker 1: well had illegitimate children left right and center, people had
Speaker 1: mixed families and deaths and remarriage, people working much closer
Speaker 1: to death and tragedy than we can even imagine in
Speaker 1: the modern world. And that becomes very apparent in these records,
Speaker 1: and you stumble across these family secrets and it's a revelation,
Speaker 1: but also I think you need to tread very carefully
Speaker 1: because it is somebody's history. And of course, as an
Speaker 1: example of illegitimacy in our story in season two of
Speaker 1: Bad Women, isn't there in the form of Doris Joanne,
Speaker 1: who is raised by her aunt and her mother and
Speaker 1: who never knows her father, although she does invent one
Speaker 1: on her marriage certificate. Kate, do you ever find that
Speaker 1: you come across family secrets in your work, Yes, certainly,
Speaker 1: illegitimacy is the main one you do come across. And
Speaker 1: a lot of people will think, don't know any cases
Speaker 1: of illegitimacy in my family, but you can guarantee there's
Speaker 1: always one lurking around somewhere. Every client is different and
Speaker 1: how they might react to that news. The older generation
Speaker 1: might be a bit more touchy and upset about it,
Speaker 1: because along with all of that is you know something
Speaker 1: that isn't picked up in the records, but is part
Speaker 1: of life experience, certainly in the past today as well,
Speaker 1: is shame, absolutely crippling shame that people experienced around these things.
Speaker 1: It comes out both in season one and season two
Speaker 1: of The Women's Lives. We looked at absolutely and because
Speaker 1: there's so much secrecy surrounding this issue of illegitimacy, it
Speaker 1: won't be spoken about, so there are silences in the records.
Speaker 1: In Doris's case, we looked too a proxy to try
Speaker 1: and understand what she might have experienced. One who has
Speaker 1: spoken about being called a quote unquote bastard is the
Speaker 1: prolific British writer Katherine Cookson, who came from a similar
Speaker 1: area to Doris and who's written about her experiences and
Speaker 1: the stigma that she bore. So we were lucky to
Speaker 1: find that, but often these things do remain covered up.
Speaker 1: You're listening to a bonus episode of Bad Women all
Speaker 1: about genealogy. Will be back shortly. I'd love to talk
Speaker 1: a bit more about the women from season one and
Speaker 1: season two. Were there any kind of particular sources or
Speaker 1: moments in your research, Kate that helps you really connect
Speaker 1: with these women and made you feel that you understood
Speaker 1: them a bit more. Yes. In the case of Kathleen Patmore,
Speaker 1: I was lucky enough to read the police report and
Speaker 1: it really gives you an insight into her life and
Speaker 1: her personality. So Kathleen Patmore was of course a victim
Speaker 1: that we looked at in our final episode, whose husband
Speaker 1: murdered her when he returned home from war. Yes, we're
Speaker 1: not usually privy to police reports, but once you delve
Speaker 1: into it, parts of it quite harrowing. Knowing what happened
Speaker 1: to Kathleen and the reputation that was attributed to her.
Speaker 1: Reading those witness statements, it made me quite angry what
Speaker 1: they were saying about her, and she wasn't there to
Speaker 1: defend herself. The fact that she was pregnant whilst her
Speaker 1: husband was away in the army shows that she was unfaithful,
Speaker 1: but the way that they went on about her and
Speaker 1: her behavior with the soldiers, and then to top it off,
Speaker 1: the police inspector practically opened the report by saying, it
Speaker 1: is clear that this woman is immoral and brought it
Speaker 1: on herself, and it really did make me angry. On
Speaker 1: Kathleen's behalf, I felt the same, and I think you know,
Speaker 1: we've worked with a police documents on this series and
Speaker 1: prosecution files, and they're complex to work with because, on
Speaker 1: the one hand, you can hear the voices of the
Speaker 1: people who were in the lives of the person that
Speaker 1: you are studying and trying to understand. Sometimes you can
Speaker 1: hear them reporting their speech and it can feel as
Speaker 1: though your subject is reaching across space and time to you.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, they are filtered through a
Speaker 1: very powerful institution in the form of the police. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they're doubly filtered because if it's a witness reporting speech,
Speaker 1: you have their voice layered on top of the original speech,
Speaker 1: and then their voice has been elicited by the questions
Speaker 1: of the police officer who actually is invisible. We don't
Speaker 1: see those questions. But the story that the witness is
Speaker 1: telling has been extracted very carefully by someone who knows
Speaker 1: exactly what they're doing, and who isn't necessarily as you've
Speaker 1: just illuminated, Kate impartial. They may well bring their own
Speaker 1: prejudices to the matter. Allie, I wonder if you can
Speaker 1: tell us a bit about any experiences you've had with
Speaker 1: the voices of the women that you're studying. One of
Speaker 1: the things that I set out to do as a
Speaker 1: historian is to try to restore voices to the voice list,
Speaker 1: so the people who've been written out of history. Through
Speaker 1: the various techniques that we've described, there are ways in
Speaker 1: which if you cannot resurrect a person and hear their
Speaker 1: voice directly, you can create an outline of that person,
Speaker 1: so you have an idea of what their preferences are,
Speaker 1: what sort of experiences they had, and Matt gives us
Speaker 1: something towards understanding who those individuals were. Often women's voices,
Speaker 1: especially poor women, or they dispossessed. Their voices just are
Speaker 1: absent from a record because men are speaking for them,
Speaker 1: authorities are speaking for them. As you said, with the
Speaker 1: police for example, with the victims of Jack the Ripper,
Speaker 1: they're very few occasions where we have somebody's actual words
Speaker 1: that they spoke recorded, and one of them was Polly Nichols.
Speaker 1: And interestingly, towards the very end of Polly's life, you
Speaker 1: can trace all of the various places she went to
Speaker 1: because she was in and out of workhouses and casual
Speaker 1: wards and they tend to keep quite good records. I
Speaker 1: was looking through something which were called settlement examinations. So
Speaker 1: when you went into a workhouse, they tried to determine
Speaker 1: whether you actually belonged in that parish or not, because
Speaker 1: you're accepting charity, and if you don't live in that area,
Speaker 1: they don't want you there, so they'll send you on
Speaker 1: to where you're from. So what they do is they
Speaker 1: question you of trying to figure out where you're actually
Speaker 1: from and where you can be shunted onto. Nichols turns
Speaker 1: up at the Hulburn Union. They want to find out
Speaker 1: where she belongs. Her answers are written verbatim. They're written,
Speaker 1: as I used to live in the Peabody buildings on
Speaker 1: Stamford Street and Lambeth. What was it like for your
Speaker 1: reading that it was Wow, it just jumped off the
Speaker 1: page because here she is speaking for herself in the
Speaker 1: midst of this very regimented, very bureaucratic structure. Here was
Speaker 1: the voice of a workhouse inmate, you've both touched on
Speaker 1: how in the course of your work you might learn
Speaker 1: about family secrets before the actual families themselves might know them.
Speaker 1: It seems as though there's a huge amount of ethical
Speaker 1: responsibility that goes along with what you both do. I
Speaker 1: wondered if you could talk about that a bit, Daddy,
Speaker 1: do you want to start. Yeah, Like, for example, in
Speaker 1: the work I'm doing now, which was about the murder
Speaker 1: of Bill Elmore by doctor Crippin in nineteen ten, I
Speaker 1: have been trying to find the descendants of his first wife,
Speaker 1: who died in very mysterious circumstances in Salt Lake City,
Speaker 1: and her family was originally from Ireland. I was actually
Speaker 1: working with a genealogist to try to find out where
Speaker 1: these relatives ended up, and she located this branch of
Speaker 1: the family in the United States, and I thought, oh,
Speaker 1: that's interesting, how did that happen? And then I started
Speaker 1: looking into this daughter of the brother of Crippen's first
Speaker 1: wife and found out when she came over to the
Speaker 1: United States, and I was surprised how much I could
Speaker 1: find out about her, the name of the ship she
Speaker 1: was on, where she settled, who she married. And I
Speaker 1: suddenly felt really embarrassed because I then had to talk
Speaker 1: to this woman's daughter on the phone and she was
Speaker 1: telling me about her mother, and I was saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, yeah, I know. Oh God, I shouldn't say
Speaker 1: that because it feels so intrusive, and you realize the
Speaker 1: sort of power that you have, and the power that
Speaker 1: these records have, and how delicately you should be handling
Speaker 1: this material and this information because it is somebody's life
Speaker 1: that people alive care about today. Kate, how do you
Speaker 1: feel when you end up in the position of learning
Speaker 1: people's secrets and how do you regard the ethical responsibilities
Speaker 1: in the role of genealogists. Well, yes, you do have
Speaker 1: to be careful and make people aware that they might
Speaker 1: find things that they were not expecting and that might
Speaker 1: be upsetting, particularly if you're dealing with more recent families.
Speaker 1: And I actually tried to die away from any adoptions
Speaker 1: or living relatives because I think that really does need
Speaker 1: a specialist. I do say to people, I only deal
Speaker 1: with dead people. I've recently traced a family and they've
Speaker 1: got some minor criminals in the family. That personnel I
Speaker 1: found fascinating and really quite amusing. I'm going to have
Speaker 1: to be careful with how I present the information. And then,
Speaker 1: of course you also get the situation that people are
Speaker 1: convinced that they are related to somebody. They've been told
Speaker 1: this family story, particular one that being from the Midlands,
Speaker 1: I get people who think they're related to Shakespeare. I
Speaker 1: had to tell somebody that the family that you thought
Speaker 1: you were related to, you're actually not related to anyway,
Speaker 1: because of illegitimacy. They'd done this whole big family tree
Speaker 1: and it turned out that they weren't actually part of
Speaker 1: that family. Of course, it was quite disappointing, but not
Speaker 1: too upsetting, hopefully. What advice would you give to aspiring genealogists, Kate, Well,
Speaker 1: the first thing we always say if you want to
Speaker 1: look into your family history is to speak to your
Speaker 1: living relatives before it's too late. Find out as much
Speaker 1: as you can about their history, about their parents, their grandparents,
Speaker 1: and dig out any family records you've got, certificates, birth certificates, anything,
Speaker 1: and particularly when you are talking to. Your family is
Speaker 1: not just about the dates and places, it's family stories
Speaker 1: of your parents growing up. I speak from experience that
Speaker 1: my mother died recently, but luckily we did share the
Speaker 1: love of family history together, so I did make a
Speaker 1: point of trying to ask her questions about her family.
Speaker 1: And those stories are invaluable because I'll never learn them
Speaker 1: once they've gone. But if you want to pursue it,
Speaker 1: there's certainly lots of help out there. There's lots of
Speaker 1: good books, online courses. Then you've got the ancestry and
Speaker 1: pharmo passed websites and other subscription websites that are fantastic,
Speaker 1: and you have to use due diligence and check your
Speaker 1: sources and cite your sources. We're talking about the birth certificates,
Speaker 1: the marriagetificates, the censuses. If you do a bit of
Speaker 1: digging down into some of these trees, you can find
Speaker 1: some glaring errors. You'll have a man who's died and
Speaker 1: then father children a few years later. And I think
Speaker 1: that's possibly why historians may give genealogy a bad rep
Speaker 1: and think that we're almost hobbyists doing it online. But
Speaker 1: as long as you are going to do diligence to
Speaker 1: make sure you're sources are correct, then I think the
Speaker 1: stories are worth telling. I think you've hit upon something
Speaker 1: really important there, which is that some people do under
Speaker 1: value genealogy. They might think it's not rigorous, they might
Speaker 1: see it as backward looking. Why are these microhistories, the
Speaker 1: types of stories that you uncover through your work, both
Speaker 1: of you so important. Well, first, I wanted to address
Speaker 1: this snobbery around genealogy, which I think is very misplaced,
Speaker 1: and that comes from a larger problem within history, which
Speaker 1: is defining what is history, and this idea that history
Speaker 1: is only the history of the great and the good,
Speaker 1: which is totally antiquated. And you speak to any academic
Speaker 1: in any history department in the world and they will
Speaker 1: say that is not working definition of what history is. Histories,
Speaker 1: all the nooks and crannies and niches, and in that
Speaker 1: the work of the genealogist is absolutely key. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: would agree with that history does often focus on the
Speaker 1: great deeds of men, doesn't it on politicians and leaders,
Speaker 1: not the ordinary people who are actually subjected to the
Speaker 1: follies of those politicians and those leaders whose lives slip
Speaker 1: through the cracks you mentioned earlier, Halle, this idea of
Speaker 1: giving voices back to the voiceless. If we don't try
Speaker 1: to exhume those lives, if we don't try to imagine
Speaker 1: their experiences, recreate them, walk in their footsteps, then we
Speaker 1: let those voices be silent. We conspire in that silence.
Speaker 1: We conspire in the silence. We conspire in the prevailing
Speaker 1: prejudices too. Kate, what do you think about all of that?
Speaker 1: Why is genealogy so important because the ordinary person is
Speaker 1: the history of the country. That they are the people
Speaker 1: that have made the country what it is. I remember
Speaker 1: studying history at school and learning about the Poor Law
Speaker 1: and the Factory Act and things like that, and it
Speaker 1: was all quite dry. But then when you look at
Speaker 1: your own families or other people's families, and you can
Speaker 1: see these laws actually having an impact on people's lives.
Speaker 1: Particularly using where I'm from as an example from Birmingham,
Speaker 1: a lot of families were that working class person working
Speaker 1: in the factories, living in these back to back homes,
Speaker 1: but they're the ones that fuel the growth of the city.
Speaker 1: History doesn't cover these people generally, but it's all of
Speaker 1: our histories and knowing about how our ancestors lived. Certainly,
Speaker 1: for me, I think it puts my life into perspective.
Speaker 1: This is the true value of history, Kate, And what
Speaker 1: genealogy helps us get closer to is that very fundamental
Speaker 1: human experience, individual lives. And I think if history serves
Speaker 1: a purpose, it's to we connect us with those human
Speaker 1: experiences to inform our own experiences to understand all of
Speaker 1: this better. And that's really what we should be focusing on. Kate.
Speaker 1: I wonder if you have any wider reflections on the
Speaker 1: research you've done for us on bad women, or if
Speaker 1: there's anything you'll take away more generally. I think certainly
Speaker 1: I got the feeling that all of the women were
Speaker 1: very strong, independent women. They tried to forge their own
Speaker 1: way in life despite their not backs, usually by men,
Speaker 1: And well, it's been a privilege to get to know
Speaker 1: them personally. Same here me too. But the sad thing
Speaker 1: is knowing that things haven't really changed much, that these
Speaker 1: issues are still going on today. A woman walking home
Speaker 1: from the pub late at night being blamed for being
Speaker 1: attacked because she shouldn't have been there. It's just sad
Speaker 1: that things haven't really moved on. Kate Healy, thank you
Speaker 1: very much for joining us. It's my pleasure. That's it
Speaker 1: from us. But if you're interested in finding out more
Speaker 1: about Kate's work, or even engaging her services, you might
Speaker 1: like to check out her website www. Dot Oakwood Family
Speaker 1: Trees dot co Hey