Your Alice Isn't My Alice...!

Oh dear...having a bit of trouble on Ancestry at the moment with a chap who is insistent his Great Granny was the daughter of my second Great Grandfather...he says my g.g.father was married twice when I know he wasn't and when I asked please send me details of his second marriage he went into a bit of a huff...said he'd employed a researcher and that is what he'd been told.

Then he was very cross because one of my g.g. father's children was described on a census form as having been ' simple-minded'...wanted to know why that expression was used when the girl might have just been slow in her learning...like it was all my fault.

So I said simple minded was much nicer than being called 'an imbecile' which was another category she could have been put under...he came back with 'would I please look for Alice'...she being his Gt Granny, when I only have one Alice in the tree and she was born in 1660...so it wouldn't be her, unless he's positively ancient.

So I'm going to tell him about my Alice who died when she was a little girl in 1663...see what he makes of that.

Much of the wording is offensive in our eyes...you just have to get over it.

The records for Workhouse inmates are awful...so many listed as imbecile or lunatic.. those poor people must have been left by their families I suppose or perhaps the care-givers died and there was no-one to look after them anymore...

But one of the very worst records I unearthed was about the lunatic asylum a second cousin four times removed was confined in...he was actually buried in a graveyard in his home village but there is a communal grave for that particular asylum which holds the staggering figure of 67,000 people...it opened in 1860 and closed at the out- break of the First World War when it was turned into soldiers barracks.

Something which can be disconcerting is finding unusual names...Golden George is one of Himself's people...we both have girls named Happy...I have one called Deliverance...Hephzibah is commonplace...one of my gt gt gt Grandfather's was named Fernando...and he came from Lincolnshire! Another relative was called Righteous...

Makes the names present day 'pop' stars call their children appear perfectly normal...