2024 Week 24:Hard Times #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

 I have to go back a long way on my family lines to find anyone who was other than working class. My tree is full of miners, labourers and weavers. All people who did not have much money and, in cases where the breadwinner - the male - was unable to work or even died, family circumstances could be dire. Evidence for this scale of poverty can be found on death certificates, census records and Poor Law  Application Records. 

I don't have to go back far to find evidence of hardship. In March of 1889, when my grandmother, Christina Walker, was only 20 years old, her husband, a miner, was hospitalised with a fever. At this time the couple had a baby who was only five months old. My grandmother therefore had to put in an application for Poor Relief to the local parish. Poor relief came in the form of a weekly or one off payment or families could be helped with goods like coal or even payment for a doctor. Parochial boards had been introduced in 1845  and each board kept a roll of the poor. These can be sources of great information as they contain details such as name, age, country and place of birth, marital status, details of spouse and children as well as the reason for the application.

Excerpts from North Lanarkshire, Scotland, Poor Law Applications and Register 1849-1917

As far as I am aware, this was the only time my grandmother applied for relief. She got five shillings (25 pence).  I have come across families where applications were being made on a weekly basis due to the breadwinner being 'wholly or partly disabled' or to a woman recently widowed. Below is the application of my 2 x great grandmother Marion Somerville/Adams, aged 73 and recently widowed. She had made three previous applications and this time was granted two shillings (10 pence). Again notice the wealth of information taken from an applicant - even a 73 year old - the record names her parents, her children - and the fact two of them are also 'paupers' - and the date her husband died.

Excerpts from North Lanarkshire, Scotland, Poor Law Applications and Register 1849-1917

The Parochial Boards were allowed to raise taxes for the care of the poor and were responsible for a number of things, including the regulation of  'Parochial Lodgings' or 'Poorhouses'. The above mentioned Marion Somerville/Adams, whom I found living with her children in the 1861 census,  spent her last days /weeks/months/years in the Poorhouse in Motherwell, where she died in 1886.

Around the same time, in the 1871 Census I found my 3 x great grandfather Matthew Keir, (1791-1873), having lost his wife, living in the Poorhouse in Lesmahagow,  along with eight other inmates. The description 'Pauper - once a Cotton Weaver' is quite sad, I think.

It is unlikely that, at his age, he ever came back out and he died there, two years later on the 8th of October 1873.

These are only a few examples of the hard times that befell a few of my ancestors. I know that there are without a doubt others too, all of whom found it hard to make ends meet with the events that life threw at them and some of whom whose struggles are undocumented.