Where did everybody sleep?

If the Clibborns of 17th-century Moate, Ireland, had from 4 to 10 regular servants, in addition to 7 to 9 children (counting an orphaned nephew and niece) — where did everybody sleep?

Although John Clibborn's house was called the Castle, it was a tower house that didn't have as many rooms as we might imagine. Let me describe the layout for you — the rooms and arrangement are real; who slept in which room is fiction in progress.

Main Floor

The main or ground floor has a dining room (where the Moate Quakers probably worshiped), a sitting room, and a kitchen. A small room off the kitchen is called the servants' quarters; the cook likely slept there. Although there might not have been the great differences in hierarchy among servants that we see in shows like Downton Abbey (set 200 years later), I don’t know if the cook would have shared the closet-sized space with the kitchen wench. The girl probably slept on the kitchen floor in front of the fire. The bottom of the two-story round tower (hidden by a tree on the left in this picture) served as a dairy or pantry, similar to a root cellar.

The First Floor

The first floor (second floor to Americans) has four bedrooms: one above the dining room to the west (the window on the right), one off the stairway, one at the end of the hall (window on the far left), and a round room at the top of the tower that can only be accessed through the other bedroom. (I wanted very badly for the heroine of the second book to live in the tower room, so I wrote the story that way.)

17th-century bedroom exhibit - National Museum of Ireland

My novel sets John Clibborn and his wife in the west room. I imagine their bedroom as something like this 17th-century exhibit at the National Museum of Ireland, with the addition of curtains on the bed and a rug or two. (Do I see stacks of rushes on the floor? I think not!)

For the first book, the bedroom at the end of the hall is the nursery and the tower room is for the older girls. In the second book, all the girls live in these two rooms.

The Clibborns had such a reputation for hospitality that I made the room off the stairs a guest room. In the real life, however, guests may have bunked in rooms with the family.

Guests aren't the only ones who slept with family. In poorer households, according to MacLysaght, family and guests slept together on the floor. In wealthier households, according to Pepys' Diary, the chamber maid slept in the bedroom with her master and mistress. That gives new meaning to one of Pepys' diary entries (I can’t find the exact quote): The wench up early. Dallied in bed with the wife a while. That concept of no privacy is so alien to our culture! At least they had curtains on the bed.

The Top Floor

The second floor (or third) has the same pattern, except without the tower. So that's three bedrooms on the top floor. While it was common for siblings to share rooms, the older children must have been separated by sex. So I imagine the boys on the top floor, with their youthful energy to take them up and down that extra flight of stairs. Perhaps the steward had to share a bedroom with the footmen, unless the junior servants slept on the floor in the boys' rooms.

Settle bed

Servants' beds (or children's) could be pulled out from under the main bed. Another hideaway sleeping spot was the settle bed, which served as sofa-bench during the day and folded out into a mattress-holding frame at night. For this novel, I put a settle bed in the Englishes' cottage instead of the Castle.

So the house servants were scattered throughout the house, not in some separate wing. I presume field hands slept in their own cottages each night. But what about the permanent outdoor servants?

Remember the bawn, the walled courtyard on the east side of the Castle?  I forgot about the house-sized room at the far end from the kitchen door. It’s substantial (the current owner of the Castle uses it as her shop. Vague memory tells me the inside of the bawn is like a stable, but the large room could house several servants, including the gardener and the stable hands.

17th-Century Servants

As I write about my family of 17th-century Irish Quakers, supporting characters keep popping into scenes — I have to imagine and keep track of how many servants John Clibborn would have had. The only direct reference I’ve found comes from a list of Sufferings: In 1687 he took his son “and servants” on horseback to confront tithemongers who were stealing crops. Clibborn instructed them not to strike back if anyone hit them, so I can infer these servants were men. They must have been in or near the house, available to leave in a hurry.

A couple of years ago I watched the miniseries Berkeley Square and learned that a footman does a lot more than ride on the back of Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage. He serves at table, carries all kinds of things from food to packages, runs errands and delivers letters. Last year I watched Downton Abbey, the addictive show that highlights the life and hierarchy of servants in a wealthy English home.

Susan Ardelie wrote these great posts about domestic servants in the 18th century, one about women and one about men. A lower-income family would hire an all-purpose maid who (I shiver to think of it) empties the chamber pots in the mornings and cooks the food afterwards.

Finding detailed information about life in 17th-century Ireland has been more difficult. MacLysaght’s index is less than comprehensive. Quennell’s index also ignores servants. I skimmed through and found only one image of a country milkmaid. I checked other social history books, but they describe indentured servants and slaves, not domestic employees.

I finally found answers in the Diary of Samuel Pepys. This abridged version starts in 1660, the perfect time frame for my novel. There would be similarities between the practices of the English in England and the English settlers in Ireland. The differences are that Pepys was an upper middle-class city boy who kept a small household and no stables or farm. John Clibborn was also well off — at least, before the Jacobite-Williamite war — and needed enough people to maintain his large country household with lands.

The Scullery Maid by Giuseppe Maria Crespi

In regard to his own household, Pepys mentions “the wench,” who is probably the same as the “chamber mayde,” “my boy,” the “cook-mayde,” an upper maid, and a short-term companion for his wife. The companion could dance and sing. She didn’t stay employed long, however, because after they hired her Samuel Pepys started staying home more often and his wife took notice.

Pepys’ household of servants, usually three, gave him a lively time. One time he lowered their wages and they cursed him. He had constant trouble with his boy, whom he whipped at least once. After struggling with his conscience about firing the boy, Pepys finally found out he was a thief. Pepys hired his own sister as an extra maid, on condition that she act like a servant and not a family member. They couldn’t stand each other and within a few months, Pepys sent her back home to their father.

Pepys mentions other servants among his wealthy acquaintance: a sword bearer, the king’s footmen, the duke's pages in opulent livery, a drayman, a coachman, “his man,” “the boy,” “her wench,” “the girl of the house,” the Master of the Horse, “his girl” who was cleaning, countrymaids milking, a guide (in the city), a porter, labourers, and the queen’s “maydes of honour.”

Since Clibborn was a Quaker, he would not have had fancy livery for his servants. Pepys’ wife got her hands dirty, working with the maid to do the laundry and sometimes cooking. I can see Dinah English Clibborn, who grew up a farmer’s daughter, doing the same. So maybe the Clibborns had one or two chamber maids (no housekeeper needed to manage a large staff), the cook and a kitchen wench.

As for the men, there might have been a steward to manage all the servants, although I can also picture someone like Clibborn being hands-on and managing many things himself. As landlord and farmer, he needed someone to manage the household, either a steward, or his wife Dinah. MacLysaght lists several sources that show the Irish people living at a slower pace of life — in other words, perceived as lazy by the busy, industrious English. I can't decide between the diplomacy of an Irish steward over Irish servants, or an efficient English steward with the friction of a house full of Irish servants who didn’t live up to his pace of life.

Would Clibborn have managed the stable hands and field hands himself, or was there an overseer for the outdoor staff? Clibborn himself (whom I’ve fictionally given a great affection for horses) would be his own Master of the Horse.

Let's add them up: in the house, a steward, one footman and a boy (to run errands and work) or two footmen, an upper chamber maid and “a girl” or all-purpose maid, and a cook. Oh, and a nursemaid. Outside, one or two stable hands including a driver, a gardener, a gardener’s helper or general handyman, and a bevy of seasonal field hands.

Next time: Where did they all sleep?

Writing family history — Children lost and found

Last week brought me two "Aha!" moments in connection to my work-in-progress.

I've been banging my head against this historical novel — about my ancestors, the English family — for several years. The draft moves forward, slowly. I knew something was wrong with it, but not what.

I just devoured two of Elizabeth Peters' novels from her Amelia Peabody series. Every book teaches me something, even though Edwardian Egypt wouldn't seem to have anything to do with Irish Quakers. I enjoyed the story immensely, but this time I noticed all the subplots ("Writers read"). Not only are the Emersons trying to find a murderer, but the professional rivals are also messing up a new tomb, the grown children have an ongoing romance subplot, the daughter is conflicted about women's rights... there's a lot going on! Switching back and forth between these other little story elements adds tension to the main (murder) plot.

My story, at least in the middle, is ... one plot. *yawn* Since it's based on real people, most of the facts I know are about marriages and births, which require me to skip a year or two between certain scenes. (Spoiler Alert!) I made a conscious decision not to focus on certain supporting characters, like my direct ancestor John, because I know he dies young. I didn't want to build up his storyline or make him another POV character and then disappoint my readers.

I've got to fill the gaps. Between main events (conflicts and happy times) for my MCs John Clibborn and Dinah English, I need to throw a bunch of little stuff in. Have their children get into trouble, add another visit from the tithemonger, create drama with the servants (English vs. Irish, maybe), or even add some favourite horses or dogs to the storyline. I need to flesh out the supporting characters.

I started looking at Clibborn's older children for potential storylines: Jane, Sarah and George (William died as an infant). Was somebody courting Jane, Dinah's new stepdaughter? No; I looked her up and she was maybe 10 years old when they married (no recorded birth date). However, she probably played games with her future husband and his siblings.

Looking up the children led to my next revelation. Jane's sister Sarah — didn't exist.

I must have confused things from secondary sources. Liam Cox's history of Moate contains a family tree that shows Sarah between two other children. Looking at it again, there's a little double line there; Sarah was George's wife!
I knew George married Sarah Fuller, but first names were so common, I easily accepted another Sarah. On top of that, two of John Clibborn's sons by his second marriage married Sarahs. That makes three Sarah Clibborns of that generation, and none of them were his daughters!

Unfortunately, none of Clibborn's children by his first wife are in the primary Quaker records — except a small note about George's death, which explains that he was "sprinkled" and therefore his birth not recorded. That makes no sense to me, since his father and all the first generation of Quakers were baptized as children. I couldn't find Sarah in marriage or death records. When I pulled up photos of a large family tree, owned by a Clibborn descendant who still lives in Moate, Ireland, Sarah wasn't there, either.

That's OK. I didn't like her character anyway; I forgot to include her in the last few scenes I wrote.

I had thought I should put research aside and plow through my writing. 'Looks like I need to get back to research again. I never finished going through all the information I brought back from my last trip to Ireland — beaucoudles of it.

Wait, did you notice? There's another daughter on the family tree, Mary. Who is Mary? I happened upon this previous post and there, at the end, was a mysterious Mary. Aha!

Mary is not in Cox's book. I dug around this weekend, and found that George mentioned a sister, Mary Sawyer (from typed extracts), in his will. I had taken that with a grain of salt when I first saw it, because people commonly called their in-laws "sister." The Clibborn family tree above looks to me like she married William Langer; since I don't have an image of George's will and some writers don't read 17th-century writing accurately, I'll leave her married name with a question mark.

With many descendants in at least three countries, several genealogy books have been written about or at least mention the English and Clibborn families. I'm lucky (or blessed) to keep discovering more information. In 2009 I discovered another sibling, Thomas English, whom everybody else had presumed died as a child. This week I lost a child, Sarah. And now it looks like I've gained another one — Mary Clibborn!

Setting the Stage with Irish history — And what's with all the stripping?

As I research and write my novel, I just don't get some of my villains, who are based on real people in Irish history. I sort of get the resentment between Catholics and Protestants, which at that time was inseparable from "natives" (some of the Irish Catholics were actually earlier English settlers who had assimilated) versus an invading foreign government. I understand, a little, the greed and lawlessness that drove Rapparees to steal from my characters (Rapparees was a loose term applied equally to Irish army irregulars and any highway bandits).

But I don't understand the downright cruelty of some of my villains. The tithemonger, for example, who flew into a rage and beat up John Clibborn's son Joshua, nearly killing him. In the story recorded in the Book of Sufferings, written by the pacifist Irish Quakers in the 17th century, the man's rage seems to come out of nowhere. For me, as a writer, he needs backstory.

Athlone Castle

Another thing that puzzles me, is what's with all the stripping that went on during the Jacobite-Williamite war of the 1680s-90s? The governor of Athlone got in a tizzy one day, had all the Protestants stripped and drove them out of town.

I wondered if it was in retaliation for some similar act the English had done. The English army certainly abused the Irish inhabitants, and people still remembered high Irish fatalities in the Cromwellian invasion and war of 1641. I found these balanced summaries about those conflicts, but nothing about mass stripping.

A History of Modern Ireland: The coming of the Penal Laws
garethrussellcidevant.blogspot.com5/11/12
A History of Modern Ireland: The coming of the Penal Laws. A Note. The history of Ireland is a complex and controversial subject. The relationship between the past and prejudice is symbiotic. The fury, passion and venom that ...

Cromwell at Drogheda: Two Sceptical Threads | Skeptic Ireland
skepticireland.com3/21/12
Cromwell at Drogheda: Two Sceptical Threads. Posted on March 21, 2012 by HandsofBlue. Cromwell as viewed by Ireland. Oliver Cromwell, like so many figures in Irish history, is very difficult to get an objective opinion on. The man is seen as ...

About 1690, Rapparees or bandits stole leather goods and stripped William Edmundson's "ancient" wife naked. She caught a fatal case of pneumonia on the long walk home.
 
Ironically, the only example I've found of the English army stripping any Irish involved Edmundson himself (a Quaker minister) trying to stop the practice. Earlier in the conflict, he saved two Irish men from hanging and fussed at the English soldiers for stripping them. He forced the soldiers who had taken their clothes to return them, saying "Besides it might be a precedent to the Irish to strip the English." (WE's journal)

The conflicts in Ireland go way back, each side retaliating for something the other side did like an Appalachian family feud. But does anybody know of earlier precedents for taking the population's clothes?

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Learning about Ireland in the 17th century

As I work on my novel about the English family, my ongoing brick wall hasn't been so much about genealogy, but in learning about Ireland. I want to include those little historic details that give the reader a sense of time and place. I've found plenty of references about war and battles and even the persecutions of Quakers, but there seems to be a dearth of information about Irish daily life in the 17th century.

I tried using English social history, especially since my real-life characters were English settlers. I started with Marjorie and C.H.B. Quennell's A History of Everyday Things in England. It's a great resource and I used it to picture what Dinah English and John Clibborn would wear. Other topics, however, are jumbled about rather randomly and I'm never quite sure which would have carried over to the neighboring country.

Quakers journals of the time dealt more with spiritual things than physical. English diaries, like that of the famous Samuel Pepys, reflect an extravagant Restoration England that would have been rejected by Quakers, who strove for lives of simplicity.

I recently had a breakthrough — last month I found Irish Life in the Seventeenth Century, by Edward MacLysaght, through intralibrary loan. Pictures are few, but details abound! For example, the English settlers wore "breeches" (snug at the knee in Quennell's drawings) and the Irish wore "trousers," which were looser garments of similar length. One of the appendices (part of which is in Gaelic, but Dr. MacLysaght condescends to summarize a little for us) tells that poorer Irish men often didn't wear a shirt, just a waistcoat with bare arms under their cloaks. Exactly the little tidbits I've been looking for!

Fascinating as it is, Irish Life is not a quick read, and I had to send the plain blue hardback to its home library. I found a 1979 paperback online, with people in 17th-century costume on the front (remember the lack of pictures?), so I ordered it.

My copy arrived yesterday (yay!), sans appendices, notes and bibliography (boo!). Apparently the author, 91 at the time, (and perhaps his publisher) thought fit to cut 150 pages from "this popular edition." Ouch. Looks like I'll have to save up to buy an older copy.

I've been blessed recently with an outcrop of websites and blog posts to help with 17th- and 18th-century research. I plan to gather some of these resources into a subpage on this website. Meanwhile, here are my top finds for May:

1. A map and clothing from 1610 Ireland, at Irish Historical Textiles (contains the picture on the cover of my newly acquired paperback).

2. The Books of Survey and Distribution list names and show how land changed hands from Catholic to Protestant owners in Cromwellian and Restoration (mid-17th century) Ireland.

3. Popular books in the 18th century — a handy list by Roseanna M. White at Colonial Quills.

4. Did 18th-century women tie their apron strings in the front or the back?

5. What basic skills would an 18th-century outdoorsman or traveling colonist need to know? Keith Burgess tells us at A Woodrunner's Diary.

6. The author of Vintage Visions wears 18th-century finery.

And in a different century:

7. Last month 425 years ago, three ships carrying men, women and children departed English waters to start a new life in Carolina. They would become known as the Lost Colony.

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Genealogy check-in — Dinah English

I've been so busy with the book store (opening in a few weeks!) that I haven't spent much time with genealogy or writing. A few weeks ago I wrote two good pages of Joshua's story. (If you're new to this blog, I'm writing a historical novel about my Quaker ancestors in Ireland, to be as factual as possible, like Roots. Joshua is the final generation, the one who emigrates to America, and I've had a hard time imagining his story, which has a lot of genealogical holes in it.)

I tried two other mornings to write, and didn't get down a word. Maybe I need to get back in the habit of writing more often, but that's hard to do when juggling several part-time jobs, physical therapy and church events.

I did have one break-through, not through my own efforts, but from a fellow genealogist. He got my e-mail from a bulletin board (yes, genealogists still use online bulletin boards to find each other) and asked for some information about the English family. He gave me Dinah English's birth year, another piece of the English family puzzle.

Dinah's birth date was strangely missing from all of the Quaker records of Moate, County Westmeath, Ireland. For fictional purposes I had made her the oldest child of Thomas English. I use a lot of educated guesses in my novel; I figured, why would a younger child hide her age? My new informant confirms that she was indeed the oldest child.

I also had a theory in my head that she wouldn't admit to her age not because she was vain, but because she was born "too early"; her parents were only 18 when they got married in England (young by later Quaker standards), and I think it was common among 17th century people to have to get married, if you know what I mean. I didn't include that in the book (yet) because it might not be the case, and I'm not out to dishonor my ancestors, just tell their story. But the theory is possible. Thomas and Ann were married in 1630, and now I know that Dinah was born in 1630.

As a first-generation Quaker and the wife of the village landlord, I think Dinah was embarrassed and hid her birth date to protect her parents' reputation.

Arctic Ireland

You know how you look for a book on Amazon or eBay, knowing that it's probably out of print or hard to find? And sure enough, they don't have any copies, but you can put it on your "wish list." I was looking up something else on Amazon and happened to click on my wish list. To my surprise, several copies of of a book I wanted were now available. No pictures, no "look inside," but one of them was inexpensive and from a highly rated seller, so I ordered it.

Arctic Ireland, The extraordinary story of the Great Frost and Forgotten Famine of 1740-41, by David Dickson, arrived today and I couldn't wait to unwrap it! I wrote earlier this year about that coldest winter, during which my ancestor Joshua English and his family lived in Moate, County Westmeath, Ireland.

I immediately looked in the index for Moate. Sure enough, this book also mentions that 20 houses burned down in that small village during the drought that accompanied the Great Frost. No details, unfortunately. But, although the footnotes are all lumped together by page, I can generally figure out that the source was a Dublin newspaper, which is more than I had before.

Even though there's only that brief mention of Moate, now I have a whole book to read for background information, which will hopefully inspire me to get back to my novel. I took a break from my work-in-progress in August. Now that NaNoWriMo is over (that's a future post), it's time to get back to work.

Benjamin and Ann

(Spoiler Alert! for my novel in progress)

I feel sorry for Benjamin Parvin and Ann English, who had a long and rocky courtship.

In my historical novel-in-progress, the courtship was especially long because of a big argument and an estrangement that went on for several years. I made all of that up, to add conflict and make for an interesting plot. But something happened in real life, and I have no idea what it was.

Quaker engagements had to be long, because the couple went through an approval process that involved their local, "monthly" meeting and the regional, or "province" meeting that only met every three months. No matter what their age, they had to have permission from parents (or relations, if the parents weren't living) and everybody in their meeting (church congregation). Benjamin and Ann were in their late twenties, which was fairly common for 17th-century marriages in that community.

Benjamin, who had grown up as a second-generation Quaker in Ireland, did something wrong in those procedures and the meeting gave him a "paper of Condemnation," which means he was on the verge of being disowned for whatever it was he did. They said he had "proceeded in relation to marriage with Ann English Contrary to the order of truth" — the word "truth" being used at that time for both belief in Christ and for all of the Quaker rules and culture.

No, I don't think they were pregnant. The meeting had no qualms about writing that in their records, and Ann's first child was born in 1698. Since Ann was an orphan and Benjamin's father had died, I suspect they broke some rule about getting permission, or perhaps they set a date or started making plans before they had the meeting's approval.

In the 12th month 1696 (February 1697), Benjamin wrote an apology, which was accepted, and he and Ann started making the required rounds of meetings to get their approval to marry. They presented themselves to the men's meeting, then the women's meeting, that month, then went to the province meeting in 1st month (March), back to the monthly meeting in Moate in 2nd month (April), which sent a certificate to the next province meeting. They finally married in 3rd month (May) 1697.

It took a lot of persistence for a couple to get married back then, but Ann and Benjamin had it.

Tombstone Tuesday - Camden, S.C.

As I finished going through the cemetery files (see previous posts), I did hit paydirt. One of the files contains a spiral-bound notebook where Ted had written down the names in a cemetery (original work), then gone back and annotated where he found full dates or family members' names. Another file had similar work, scribbled onto the backs of re-used paper.

While my goal was to see if we could publish any of Ted's work, I was excited about some of his copied material because it pertains to cemeteries where my Quaker ancestors lived - Bush River and Camden (Fredericksburgh), S.C.

I've never been to Bush River. A descendant in Georgia, with Ted's help, organized a group of people that has done a lot of work to clean up the cemetery. The Haworth family has a couple of photos on their website. I'd like to go there someday, in the next two years.

The Old Quaker Cemetery at Camden, which has grown as it is still in use by the current town, started as a small burying ground used by the Fredericksburgh Monthly Meeting (the old name of Camden, also called Wateree and Pine Tree Hill). Here are some photos I took during a visit in 2007. The brick-covered graves, with no inscription, are purported to be old Quaker graves. Which means that one of them could possibly belong to my ancestor, Joshua English, who immigrated from Ireland in 1753. I don't know. I just know that the 18th-century Quakers didn't believe in marking their names onto headstones.

Literacy and backstory

Yesterday I entered family tree information for the ROBINSON family into my Reunion database. Most of the wonderful things I have found about my extended family in County Westmeath, Ireland have come from either original Quaker records or from writings of the late Liam Cox, and this was no different. I found lots of information on Anthony Robinson's descendants (also Thomas ENGLISH's descendants, since Anthony married his daughter Bridgett) from an Irish Ancestry magazine article, written by Cox, archived in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin.

This morning I was looking over some of old Quaker documents that I copied during my research trip. A few entries weren't about my family, but I copied them because members of my family signed as witnesses and I wanted their signatures. I had noticed before, at a wedding, that Dinah English Clibborn signed with "her mark." But at that particular wedding, the handwriting is all the same (copied into the book by the clerk) and lots of people added their marks, including John Clibborn.

But this morning I saw a list that contained different handwritings (original signatures), and again, Dinah made her mark. And so did John Clibborn, and John's sister and a few other people. Which leads me to think that John Clibborn did not know how to write. That blows my mind (and my mental backstory), because John was wealthy, English, and an only son. But he was also a former soldier. So, even though the first son usually inherited everything (and the second became a soldier or clergy), the lack of education makes me think that John was not wealthy as a child. Perhaps he saved his army wages and then shrewdly sold better lands given to him in the Cromwellian settlement and bought cheaper land in the country - in Moate.

John and Dinah Clibborn's niece, Ann English, and her brother Thomas could write their names. In a previous post, I mentioned that, although I don't know where the orphaned Ann and Thomas lived, my book carries the logical conclusion that John and Dinah took them in. With no regular schoolmasters in the area during those years, I assumed the children were homeschooled. But, if neither John nor Dinah could read or write, who taught Ann and Thomas (and the Clibborn children)?

Here's a synopsis from four events (1670s) with signatures:
John English could write, but his sisters (Dinah, Margaret and Bridgett) could not. John's second wife Eleanor and Bridgett's husband Anthony Robinson could write.
Neither John Clibborn nor his sisters Alice Tuart, Ann Miller and Bathshebah England could write. John's brother-in-law Phillip England could write and Thomas Tuart made his mark in earlier years but apparently learned to write his name later.
There's also a mysterious Mary Clibborn that wrote her own name on several documents. She is not one of John's sisters or daughters and, as I said, he's the only son. Who is she?

Percolating - Joshua's story

As I work on scenes and chapters for the third generation in my story - Joshua English's life - I've been stumped because I don't know anything about Mary Holmes. I know she must be some relation of Richard Holmes, but I don't know how. He's about half a generation older than she, so not a father,  possibly an older brother but more likely a cousin. Her parents aren't mentioned in the wedding procedures, which often means that they're dead. So, not only is she a genealogical brick wall, but I have trouble filling in her character when I don't even know about siblings, background, anything. Everybody else in the novel has at least had a factual family.

As I draw a big blank with Mary, I'm having an inspirational week with Joshua. Little things, tidbits, that I read in the meeting minutes percolate in my head and sometimes boil over into revelations. For example, his marriage inquiry included Dublin, which means that he lived there at some point. Since they didn't have a schoolmaster in Moate, I was thinking he might have been sent to school there. This week, I had one of those head-on-the-pillow eureka moments: Joshua's emmigration request mentioned that he lived in some other area than Toorphelim (next to Moate). My eureka thought was that he didn't live on his father's farm; he lost his land! Which adds to the drive to come to America.

Joshua was a middle child, so inheritance may have gone to an older brother, John or Abraham. I've been wondering (and looking for) what happened to Joshua's brothers. Maybe, after his mother and John were disowned, the whole family moved to Dublin. But who lived on the family farm? Joshua's father left it in trust to the meeting, but if they gave it back to the family when one or more of the children came of age, they could have sold it.

I know that Joshua came back to live near Moate and married Mary Holmes. His little brother, Thomas, was at his wedding. Joshua had a family and survived the Great Frost. He must have been devastated when his daughter was disowned and brought disgrace to her parents. Without the family farm, there was nothing to keep him from wanting to emmigrate and start a new life.

The English family

I've added a new page, with a link at the top of this blog, with basic family tree information for the ENGLISH family. It's "under construction" - I'm not sure if I will add any more in the near future, but I may eventually add names all the way down to me, about 10 generations down from the Thomas English who first moved to Ireland.

One of my pet peeves is the inaccuracies perpetuated by people who don't understand the calendar that Quakers of this era used - fodder for a future post. For now, I'll just say that I've translated the dates into our modern calendar so that people who use this information won't make those mistakes.

Anyone who does 18th-century or earlier genealogy, please, please write down the dates exactly as you find them, using numbers and not words (1st month does not equal January). Thanks.

Reading between the lines in old records

Context is everything.

I'm indexing the men's meeting minutes of Moate Meeting (Quaker) in Ireland. I was working on 1753 tonight when I ran across the entry, that I'd found before, in which my ancestor Joshua English requested a certificate from the meeting to take with him to America. You can imagine how excited I was when I first saw this 1753 record!

4th mon: the 22
Joshua English haveing signified to some of this meeting his Intention of removeing with his family to some part of America and requesting a Certificate from friends of this meeting to friends (there) which, Upon Consideration how he and his family Stand as to Unity with friends it was Concluded that Such a Certificate as friends Could Safely give shoulde be (written) Up for him and brought to this meeting for aprobation which being done Now read approved and Signed John Robinson is appointed to record them in the proper booke and return acct thereof to next meeting.

Tonight, I read it again, knowing now that he and his family had been disowned around 1751, because of his daughter's running out and getting married by a priest. I had assumed that he had written a letter of apology and been taken back into the membership, because he had protested the whole time that he didn't allow the marriage. But the phrases "Upon Consideration how he and his family Stand as to Unity with friends" and "Such a Certificate as friends Could Safely give," added to the fact that he had asked through a friend and not attended the meeting himself, makes me think that he had not been accepted back into the meeting. 'Makes me a little sad for Joshua.

I've been unable to find the certificate they wrote, so far. I have a serious hope that it's in another record book, which is full of letters that are out of order. Unfortunately, they've never been indexed, and I don't have access to the book right now. I doubt I will find the letter before my book about the English family is finished. I do know that the letter was a good one, because it earned Joshua the "bounty" given to immigrants of good character when he arrived in South Carolina.

Indexing the Moate Meeting minutes

What fun, to come home and check the mailbox and find international mail!

During my trip to Ireland, I agreed to index the early records of the Moate Meeting (Quaker), specifically, minutes of the men's meeting in the 17th and 18th centuries (the women's minutes don't exist until later). It's a win-win deal: the Historical Library gets a volunteer indexer, and I get to find more records about my family than I could possibly have read during my trip. I started in 1742 and I'm about a third of the way through the first set.

The package I got this week has more records, through 1792! At first I was excited, then realized that my family (Joshua) left in 1753. I was hoping for the earlier records, or copies from a different book full of un-indexed letters. But, the reward for good work is more work. And, I thought, maybe I will find out what happened to Joshua's brothers. Regardless, I'm honored to have the job.

2010 Goals - How are we doing?

Last year started off so hectic I didn't even write down goals until June. This year, I started thinking about them in January, but tweaked them for a month. And the tweaking continues.

Things I want to do in 2010 (priorities are in blue)
1. Finish novel: write missing scenes, fix timeline and facts, add descriptions and background, and revise and edit.
Thanks to my nanowrimo friends, I work on this at least once a week. I've added lots of the missing scenes, but I feel overwhelmed at all the other things I still need to do before I even let anybody read it.

2. Declutter. Hah! Ahem, well...
3. Get published in a magazine.
I sent out my first query in years, but forgot to follow-up when I didn't get a reply.

4. Make a Storybook for a relative who has a big birthday this fall. That includes scanning Daddy's negatives from the 50s and getting names and information.
I haven't even started on this! But I still have months to go.

5. Make a Storybook of my trip to Ireland.
I labeled the photos and made some notes. The good thing is, I have a June deadline to get one of these books done because I have a prepaid certificate. Deadlines are good for me.

6. Index the 18th-century church records from the meeting in Ireland.
I made good progress on this until the past month, about 160 pages done. This also helps with my novel, which is based on the people in the records.

7. Run in a 5K.
This got dropped for schedule conflicts, but now it's back on - in two weeks!

8. Go on a mission trip.
I got to do this in March. We went to Jean Lafitte, Louisiana to build a house for a family still in a FEMA trailer from Hurricane Katrina.

9. Other items: Blog and network (I've done this, but it's very time consuming). Market and sell my first book (Got a review, but haven't done much). Scrapbook back to 2004 (haven't).

I love alliterative goals (inspired by FlyLady). I tried Monday minutes (indexing church records - this went well until last month)
Tuesday tweets (fell by wayside)
Tuesday taxes (very useful. The rest of year, this means business paperwork)
Wednesday walking (in full force)
Wednesday weed-out (decluttering - forgotten)
Friday finances, Freelance Friday and Saturday sales (business) mostly fell by the wayside.
An early "Nine-o'clock Novel" turned into the Morning Write, 1 to 3 days a week.
Sunday scrapbooking/scanning/see people (made progress on visiting older relatives)

Some of these went well, like Monday Minutes, until my work schedule changed, I went away on a trip and then I had meetings every night for three weeks. Hopefully I can get back to my own goals and routines now.

It's Sunday. I'd better start scanning. How are your goals coming along?

Geneabloggers Winter Games 2010

It was not the best week to join two "olympics" challenges - a week with extra hours and night meetings at my "dayjob." I met some of the challenges last weekend, however. I really wanted to participate in the Write, Write, Write! category, but I decided that just one advance blog post wasn't enough to count. I also tried to put all my surnames in a Wordle picture, but it came up sideways in my blog, so I deleted it.

I did earn one medal, Gold - in Genealogical Acts of Kindness! I sent photos to Trent Briles to add to his Mt. Pleasant cemetery project (I didn't post to Find A Grave because I overlooked that part). I'm still indexing the 18th-century minutes (church records) for the Moate Meeting in Ireland. And I added more genealogy blogs to my "follow" list. The latest one is "Southwest Arkie."

Things I would still like to do in the near future:
- Join the Randolph County Genealogical Society (had hoped to check that off last week!).
- Enter the new information from my research trip to Ireland, with citations, into Reunion.
- Back up my data, after I've entered the new records.
- Create subpages for this blog, listing family trees or at least surnames.
- Read and comment on other genealogy blogs.
- Create a timeline for the English family line (started this a few months ago).

Thanks to Geneabloggers for these great ideas, and a fun Winter Games!

The coldest winter

As I try to fictionalize the story of my real ancestors, just to fill in the gaps, I keep finding that real life is more dramatic than I could ever imagine.

A great frost and famine plagued Ireland in 1740-1741. As if that weren't enough drama, I thought maybe my MC (main character) Joshua might fall through some ice and survive a bout of pneumonia, which would bring him and his wife closer. The first problem with that idea is that there are no loughs (lakes) in Moate, where the English family lived. I could, however, have them go to one of the fairs in Athlone or Mullingar, which have rivers and lakes. But a fair, during the worst of winter? Hmm.

I went back to Jonathan Bardon's A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes (highly recommend it) to read about the great frost. The stories are sobering; about one in five people in Ireland died during the "Year of the Slaughter." (The 19th-century famines were nothing to this, percentage wise.) Even the great ports, like Dublin, were frozen over so that boats couldn't come in. Then I saw, staring back at me on page 249, that the drought brought horrible fires with it, including 20 houses burned "in the village of Moate, Co. Westmeath." What?!!! Moate is not even in the index of this 531-page tome.

Twenty houses gone, in this small village, during two arctic years. How many houses were there? Could Joshua's house have been one of them? I thought that the Quaker records from Moate must mention something, so I checked. Drat! The second book of minutes, which I am indexing, starts in 1743! I looked over my notes from the first minute book, but I was just skimming for the English name during my trip.

I'm not sure where to go with this, yet. I'll have to figure out how many people lived in Moate that year. I do know that in my own 21st-century town of almost 10,000, losing 20 homes would be devastating.

Character conundrum - Elizabeth English

(spoiler alert!) As I try to write these chapters about young Elizabeth English, my mental image of her gets confused. After my research trip to South Carolina, when I knew her as an old maid aunt of colonial Camden, I pictured her as tall, aloof, light brown hair always tucked neatly under her bonnet. The sailors on the Hitchcock would have noticed her high cheekbones and lovely face.

I somehow forgot that vision during my research trip to Ireland. When I found out that a very young (14-15) Elizabeth ran away and married either a Catholic or Church of Ireland member, I pictured her as petite, with long, black, wavy hair and green eyes.

About this point, my friends usually say, Oh, you know everybody got married young back then. Not my family. Elizabeth's parents, grandparents and aunt didn't marry until their mid-20s at least! That may have been the Quaker influence and not necessarily what the general population did. I gather from the records that Quakers believed in choosing one's own mate as opposed to arranged marriages - but that mate had better be a Friend, and everybody and their brother had to approve the match, a very lengthy process.

Back to my conundrum. I can't seem to write these new scenes without my petite, raven-haired beauty. But practically, those features do not run in my family (except the green eyes), and she would have worn a modest bonnet all the time. Will that image fit into the second book, when she lives the hard life of an American pioneer?

A mailbox full of history!

I came home from work to find a package in my mailbox with international markings on it. I had been expecting it - more records from the Quaker library in Dublin, from my research trip there last month. Just glancing at the first few pages is wonderful - nothing about my family in that short glance, but I already noticed that some of the letters are from the Women's Meeting in the 1730s. That's amazing because there are no known written records for the women from before the 1800s, but these had been copied into a book of miscellaneous records.

This will keep me busy for quite a while. Imagine the new discoveries!

Thomas!

I don't work on my novel on Sundays, since writing is my job as well as a passion. I went to the Nanowrimo write-in anyway, for coffee and fun. I took along some dead people to play with — some genealogy notes and blank paper to draw a family tree.

Tonight I was reading through the notes from my research trip to Ireland. You get so many facts running around in your head that sometimes you need to draw pictures or trees, and sometimes you just need to stare at a page or skim through your notes when you aren't doing anything in particular; just time to think. Sometimes those little facts running around my brain start colliding with each other, and that's when I solve mysteries.

For the past few years I've been wondering what happened to Joshua English's two surviving brothers, John and Abraham. He had many siblings that did not live past childhood. One of the little facts I planned to check on this trip was the death date of his baby brother Thomas, because the date was the same as when their father Thomas died.

Tonight, I had one of those wonderful little brain collisions. The incorrect death date (I found out it belongs to the father) collided with some old note I had written somewhere that said, "Who is this?" I did a search on my computer and found the note. There was a Thomas English at Joshua's wedding, long after their father Thomas had died. Joshua's little brother was at the wedding; Joshua's little brother lived!

I have another Thomas English.