I’ve recently begun to teach family history beginner courses
and it is flattering if disconcerting to have my students hanging on my every
word. I do a homily on “Trust Nothing
Check Everything” and one on “Corpse Brides and Bridegrooms” but am about to
add another one called “Engage Brain” as it is all too easy when researching on
the Internet to coast along with your brain in neutral and to accept facts
without questioning them.
Bigamy was not that common
What is worse is when writers in family history magazines
seem to do this too. I’ll not embarrass
them by naming the magazine but there it was in a text box recently:
“If an ancestor appears on the census in two houses, it
might indicate bigamy”
Well it might but if I was a bookie I’d be happy to give you
very good odds if you’d care to bet on it.
There is a much simpler more obvious explanation – they are
two different people.
Okay if it is a very uncommon name the odds are rather
greater on the bigamy side than for a common name but consider this. Did your family come from the area in which
they are shown on the census? Did they
all work in one industry? Is it likely
that the Christian names are carried through from generation to generation?
My grandfather was called William and so was one of his sons
and three of his grandchildren. (His
great grandchildren being born in an age which called itself modern mostly have
less traditional names.) An uncle and a
cousin have William as their middle name.
My Fretwells were miners in Eastwood and I had real problems
in the beginning because there are two William Fretwells born in the same year
there who (probably) both married an Elizabeth.
(I didn’t send for both certificates as I was pointed in the right direction
by a more experienced researcher at the time.) Two John Thomas Fretwells, also born a few
months apart in the same place, caused a headache for both of us until we
sorted out that they were cousins not the same person in a bigamous
relationship or double counting in the census.
Not that we ever entertained the thought of bigamy at the time.
Cattle rustling is not the same as poaching the odd rabbit
Something else which caught my eye in the same issue was an
article on crime in the countryside which blithely stated that
“In 1802 Edward Painter was hanged at Reading for the theft
of two heifers from a local fair, presumably in order to feed his family of 10
children”
Now I don’t think the two stolen cows ended up in the family
stewpot as the writer seems to imply. Cows are big animals and my Great Grandad who was a butcher
in the mid to late 19th century was reckoned to be out of the ordinary in
being able to kill and butcher a cow by himself.
Those cows would have been stolen to sell on
to an unscrupulous butcher and would probably have been upwards of 196kg
deadweight. That translates to 432 pounds at 10d a pound (which is the 1801 beef price given in the
online version of “A history of Epidemics
in Britain” by Charles Creighton (1891) on archive.org ) so that each cow could
have been worth about £18 and he stole two of them. Not exactly petty theft as is being implied is
it?
Make yourself a better researcher
Engage brain, use your common sense and life experience and think about what you are reading.
Ask yourself -
Does it make sense?
Is it likely? Human
nature hasn’t changed much.
Put it in context - what was the culture of the time? It is useless to apply today’s sensibilities
to a different probably much more brutal era.
Put yourself in the situation and think about the mechanics
of the thing – how would it have happened?
What would YOU have done? Think
about how you would go about stealing a cow from a market for instance. Would you have needed an accomplice to handle
two cows? Would it have been an
opportunity grabbed or a theft to order?
