RLP 143: Writing a Family Narrative: The Thomas Bradley Family

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 143, Writing a Family Narrative. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional.

Nicole (44s):
Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (46s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you doing today?

Nicole (48s):
I’m doing good. How about you?

Diana (50s):
I’m doing great. Just finished up a project yesterday for a client, and it’s always nice to come to the end and feel like you’ve given some good results to the client. So now I’m excited to start a new one.

Nicole (1m 2s):
Yeah. I finished giving feedback to everyone in the Study Group. Finally, it took me a few extra days, but everyone’s work was so great on the timelines and analysis, and it’s really fun. And the steady group to read each other’s work and get ideas for how to do things and just see what people are working on.

Diana (1m 18s):
Yeah, I agree. I’ve been really impressed with this group of people in the Study Group. We’ve got such a variety of projects, too. It’s interesting to see the different localities and types of projects they’re working on some of the different brick walls and mysteries. So it’s always fun to see other people’s research. So for announcements today, if you’re interested in joining one of our study groups, make sure that you join our study group email list so you can get advanced notice of our early bird registration. And our next study group will be our fall DNA study group. If you’re interested in being a mentor for that, we have an application on FamilyLocket, and mentors are people that have been through the process themselves, either gone through the e-course or previous study group or work through the book and really feel confident in giving more feedback and helping others with the process.

Diana (2m 11s):
And if you are interested in joining one of our study groups, make sure you join our newsletter where we periodically have coupons for sales for that. Great.

Nicole (2m 22s):
So today for the podcast, we are talking about a recent writing project that I did as part of my ProGen study group that I’m doing, which I’m almost done with. This is the very end. So it’s been the last 14 months and it’s been really great, but the assignment was to write a family narrative. This is similar to the kinship determination project that you will do if you do certification. So it was kind of a practice for that. And instead of writing three generations like you do in the kinship determination project, this assignment for just had you write about one generation of a family and focus on one couple and their children.

Nicole (3m 6s):
And so we were supposed to keep it within 10 pages and include a genealogical summary with vital information about the couple and have a properly formatted child’s list. That’s numbered, you know, in either of the two most widely accepted formats, the NGS Quarterly format or any HGS register style. And they’re very similar, but the NGS Quarterly style has a couple different things like giving each person a number, even if they’re not carried forward. We were also supposed to have a section with biographical information on the lives of the couple who we were talking about and then a proof summary, our argument detailing the connection between the parents and at least one of their children.

Nicole (3m 52s):
And we were supposed to set that apart with the title proof summary or proof argument, so that it was really clear that this was the section we were writing out the kinship determination, or the proof of the parent child relationship. So that was the assignment and it seemed a little bit daunting to put all of that within 10 pages, especially with all the citations and footnotes that would be required, but I ended up being able to do it and I even added a few pictures, so that was fun.

Diana (4m 20s):
Good job. I think a page limit really does make you tighten up your writing. When we have unlimited space, we can tend to go on and on, you know, be kind of wordy. But if you have a page limit, you’ve got to make sure that every word counts. So that’s good. And it’s especially nice as a reviewer to have a page limit. I know when I was mentoring the ProGen study group and I gave feedback on this assignment, I was glad it was just 10 pages per person.

Nicole (4m 45s):
So true. And that’s exactly why there is the page limit because we are supposed to give feedback to each other and really give detailed feedback and then review the rubrics that BCG puts out that are used to grade the kinship determination projects so that we can really get practice with the rubrics and the project. The goal, at least for me, was to really practice this part of the portfolio and make sure that I’m following the guidelines in the rubrics. So I do really appreciate that part of the assignment. So I just gave feedback to one of my peers last night, and I read through the rubrics and as I was reading her project, I commented on some of the rubrics that she did a good job with or that she could improve on.

Nicole (5m 31s):
And doing that helped me to think about what I need to do when I write my kinship determination for my portfolio.

Diana (5m 38s):
You know, that just got me thinking those rubrics are available on the BCG website, the Board for Certification of Genealogists and whether any of us are working towards certification or not, you know, it might be a really good idea to pull up those rubrics and just test your own writing against it. I’m just thinking the client research report I just completed. Of course, it’s a little different for a client report than a family narrative it’s, it’s handled differently, but still those rubrics are so valuable things like good source citations and making sure that you are documenting each genealogical fact, you know, I can’t remember what they are cause I haven’t liked that on for awhile, but I’m just thinking that sometimes we need to have something to judge our own work against.

Diana (6m 23s):
And that’s a great resource.

Nicole (6m 24s):
Yeah, it is. They just updated them to this year 2021. So you can download those on their website and we’ll put a link in the show notes, but there are different sections within the rubrics for each portfolio items. There’s a section for research reports and then there’s a section for your case study. And then there’s another section for the kinship determination. So you can use those rubrics to judge any kind of your writing that you want to. I like that. Yeah. So when I was writing my family narrative, I didn’t really start by writing the introduction. First.

Nicole (7m 4s):
I just started with writing the life sketch of Thomas Bradley, who is my fourth great-grandfather. And I wanted to write about him and his daughter, who is my third great-grandmother, Sarah Jane Miller. Thomas Bradley, never married, but he had children with at least two women that we know of. And so it was kind of tricky trying to figure out how to organize the family narrative. I ended up focusing on the life sketch of Thomas Bradley and then I had another section in the life sketch about Thomas Bradley’s children and that’s where I talked about the women who he had children with, and their children.

Nicole (7m 47s):
So it was just kind of an interesting family. They’re not really a true family, as you would think of it, that live together.

Diana (7m 55s):
Well, this problem comes in with all of our writing, how to organize it. We have so many different little pieces we want to put in, and that is the challenge. So I think that was really wise that you decided to do his whole life and then come back to the children.

Nicole (8m 9s):
Yeah. Cause he never lived with most of his children. He had one child who lived with him during one census and then that guy moved away, but his son stayed with him. And so one of Thomas Bradley’s grandsons ended up living with him towards the end of his life. And that was the one who inherited from Thomas Bradley in his will. So that was interesting. So I had a lot of information I wanted to include about Thomas’s daughter, Sarah Jane. So I put that kind of toward the end of the section of his children. Then after that, I put in the proof of Sarah Jane to her parents, that was my proof summary. And then the very end I had my genealogical summary with the child list showing his two partners and their children with the numbering using the NGS Quarterly style.

Nicole (8m 59s):
So that’s kind of how I formatted it. And as I was finishing up, I went back and wrote the introduction, writing the introduction when I had already written the rest of it was a lot easier because I knew what I was introducing. And so I ended up focusing on one of the, just really interesting and fascinating parts of this family that has always made me feel so curious about their lives. And it’s the fact that they were all born as illegitimate children. Thomas Bradley was illegitimate and Sarah Jane was illegitimate and her two sisters, Mary and Elizabeth and their mother Ann Miller was also born out of wedlock.

Nicole (9m 40s):
Thomas’ other son, Robert Maidens, and then even Thomas’ mother was illegitimate. So there was just kind of a microcosm here. If you look at this family, it seems to point to kind of a trend that shows that at this time period in England, from about the 1790s to the 1840s, if you were poor and you were an illegitimate child, it seems to me that you maybe were more likely to have illegitimate children yourself.

Diana (10m 10s):
I think that pattern can fall into families really easily. The poverty is what you mentioned, and that seemed to be a huge part of this family. And it wasn’t just them. You think about this time in England, you had the class system was just right there, you’re wealthy landowners. And then you had maybe some tenant farmers and then you had those who were in poverty and just, wasn’t a lot of opportunity for them to move out of whatever position in life they were put into. I don’t think it was till more of the industrial age where they could move into the cities and go to work in the mills and try to get more work that, that things began to change.

Diana (10m 53s):
I could be wrong, but just kind of thinking about this early 1800s in England, what it might’ve been like for our ancestors, if they were stuck in that poor cycle.

Nicole (11m 2s):
Yeah, I think a lot of it was a cycle and also just what they knew, what happened was some of these women would get married later, maybe were like young and had a baby out of wedlock and then five years later they would get married and then have some more children. So I did see that with some of them.

Diana (11m 23s):
Interesting.

Nicole (11m 24s):
So I really wanted to add a little bit of historical context, right at the beginning to my introduction paragraph about this illegitimacy trend that I noticed in the Thomas Bradley family. So I went to JSTOR and I looked up articles about illegitimacy in England. And I found an article by Peter Laslett and Karla Oosterveen from the journal called Population Studies. And what they did is they studied illegitimacy figures from the parish registers in England from 1561 to 1960. The title of their article is Long-term Trends in Bastardy in England, a Study of Illegitimacy Figures in the Parish Registers and in the Reports of the Registrar General 1561 to 1960, they have gone through a parish registers and try to compile some figures to help us understand what percentage of births were out of wedlock.

Nicole (12m 16s):
And so the figure that I used in the introduction paragraph was from 1845 to 1901, 5.3% of births in England were illegitimate children. So that was my opening sentence. And then I talk about how it wasn’t ever common in England for children to be born out of wedlock, but it seemed common for some poor families kind of leading into the fact that I was going to talk about a family where this is happening. And then I introduced how Thomas Bradley of Swineshead, Lincolnshire was the bastard son of an illegitimate woman. And though he never married, Thomas fathered at least four of his own illegitimate children with two women who were also of illegitimate birth. My final sentence of introduction was, this microcosm of Lincolnshire illegitimacy points to a trend that poverty and illegitimacy and parents, bred more of the same for children in the early 19th century.

Diana (13m 7s):
I really like that you pulled out that theme of illegitimacy. And I think we can learn a lesson from this in our writing for someone trying to write a family story or a family history. I think that’s really wise to look for a theme and it may not be something quite as stark as this, that there might be something else for the family where they just really hardworking or do they come up against some kind of a trial. They were always trying to overcome a different kind of a challenge. I think those kinds of things can bring a lot of life and interest to our family stories. So I like that too. You figured that out kind of how to frame this writing.

Nicole (13m 42s):
It made, writing the introduction easier to have something like that, but it’s really not required. Like you don’t need to have a special theme. You can just talk about whatever you are going to discuss. And for the KDP in the past, there’s been a lot of discussion of you need to have a great theme and it needs to be like really special. And, and that’s kind of been debunked that you don’t have to have a theme. It’s really just about proving the generational link. So that’s the most important part. I think it is fun if you have a theme to include that, it I’ve seen some really great articles, I guess family narratives, you know, that were published in the NGSQ or that one, the family history writing contest, the NGS does that do have some themes like that, but I don’t think it’s required.

Diana (14m 25s):
I agree, but those are my favorites. I may actually have some something just to kind of focus on. Well, let’s learn a little bit more about what you wrote. So after you did your introduction, then you went ahead and did a live sketch of Thomas Bradley. And what kind of records were you able to find on him? This is early 1800s in England so I’m guessing you relied maybe on some church records because this was before Civil registration.

Nicole (14m 52s):
You’re right. I did rely on parish registers. So Thomas was baptized on November 4th, 1813, in Pinchbeck, which was a parish in Lincolnshire, England. And I actually included a screenshot of his baptism because it was just kind of a neat image showing how children who were born out of wedlock were recorded in the parish registers. It shows Thomas, bastard son of Mary Bradley, and she was a servant. So it doesn’t list any father’s name, which is very common. That’s really how one of the ways you can tell that the child was illegitimate is that no father is listed and they have the same surname as the mother.

Nicole (15m 37s):
So then after the baptism record, I kind of talked more about his mother, Mary. She had another son born out of wedlock in 1821 named Pierce Sumpter Bradley. Now Pierce Sumpter Bradley is very interesting. On his record it gives you this name of Sumpter. And a lot of the time when an illegitimate child is given what looks like a middle name, it’s often the surname of their father, even though the father’s name is usually not listed in the baptism record, you can sometimes infer that that middle name that they were given was their father’s surname.

Nicole (16m 18s):
So Pierce Sumpter Bradley actually was the son of Thomas Sumpter, which I found out from a bastardy record that was created back in 1825. Not all of these bastardy orders, you know, that were created by the parishes and the quarter sessions and things survived to the present day. So this was the only one in my whole family narrative that I could find, but it was really fascinating to read kind of what happened. Basically the mother and the child were dependent on the parish for their upkeep if they had no father, not always, but a lot of the time.

Nicole (16m 59s):
And so if they were, the parish would try to find the father and then get him to pay for the child’s upkeep. And so that was what the order was saying is that Thomas Sumpter needed to pay for the upkeep of Mary Bradley’s son.

Diana (17m 11s):
What is the term for these records? Just parish records?

Nicole (17m 15s):
They’re part of the poor law records.

Diana (17m 18s):
There you go. Poor law.

Nicole (17m 20s):
Yeah. The Lincolnshire archives have the originals of these. And so I’m still waiting to get the original bastardy order that will have more information. And I’m not sure because of COVID how long it will take. So that was kind of disappointing that I had to put in a derivative record. So we’ll see. But it was just an abstract that I had that listed Mary Bradley and the order was against Thomas Sumter, it had the date listed when the child was born, supposedly, but it didn’t name the child. So hopefully the original record will have a little more detail. But it did make me wonder, could this Thomas Sumpter be the father of Mary Bradley’s first son also because they both have the same first name?

Nicole (18m 2s):
Maybe he was named after him, who knows, but I do know Thomas Bradley and Pierce Sumpter Bradley were brothers throughout their life. They kept in touch and they, you know, mentioned each other in documents later in their life. And Thomas Bradley’s will, he mentioned his brother. So anyway, that was kind of where I went with. The next section, you know, after Thomas was born, then his brother was born and then later Mary, their mother, she got married to someone else in 1829. She married William Tales and he had never been married before. At that time it appears that Mary and her two sons began living with William Tales in Swineshead, which is where Thomas Bradley would end up meeting Ann Miller and fathering some more children.

Nicole (18m 47s):
Then I found a bunch of articles in the British newspaper archive that mentioned Thomas Bradley. So I kind of went into that section next and really talked about what we can learn about Thomas Bradley from the newspapers. And we can learn a lot. It was pretty fascinating that the first thing that happened was in 1837, Thomas Bradley was in a fight with his stepfather William Tales while they were at the Green Dragon Inn in Swineshead, and William Tales died.

Diana (19m 16s):
Oh my goodness. Which led to a series of events that were not very happy for Thomas Bradley.

Nicole (19m 23s):
Right. So I found William’s burial record and there was an investigation held by the coroner on the body of William Tales. And they decided to charge Thomas Bradley with manslaughter. And in the newspaper article, they mentioned that Thomas was a blind Fiddler, which I had found from other census records as well, that he was blind from smallpox and that he was a musician. So that was kind of an interesting part of his life as well.

Diana (19m 54s):
Just makes you wonder what, how did that happen? How did he end up killing William Tales when he was blind?

Nicole (19m 59s):
Good question. And that’s probably why he was acquitted.

Diana (20m 3s):
I’m just thinking, did he smash a bottle, you know, of alcohol on his head or what happened and also in your report, it talks about his size and he was only five feet and two and three quarter inches tall. So he is not very big.

Nicole (20m 18s):
Yes, that was very fascinating. That came from his prison intake record. So I was really excited about that. That came to me as a hint on Ancestry. So I hadn’t even realized that was a record set I could search, although I should have thought of it. You know, the fact that he got admitted to prison, I knew that from the newspaper article, but it did say that he was 24 years old, five feet, two and three quarters inches tall with a sallow complexion, dark brown hair and blind in both eyes and occupation. So after the coroner’s inquest came back and said that they were going to charge him with manslaughter, he was admitted right then to the Lincoln Castle prison.

Nicole (20m 58s):
And Lincoln Castle was built long time ago and the 11th century by William the Conqueror. But it started being used as a prison in about 1787. And in that prison, they kind of had the idea that the best thing to do for the prisoners was to isolate them. And so I researched all about this Lincoln Castle prison and found some articles that talked about how the prisoners were isolated, even when they were in the prison chapel, they were enclosed so that they could only see the preacher and not the other inmates.

Diana (21m 26s):
Well, that sounds horrible. And you just think this poor guy, but you know what, he was blind anyway, but then, you know, if you’re blind, you put up, you’re using the rest of your senses to be part of the world. And so, oh, that must have been even worse for him. I think.

Nicole (21m 44s):
Well, he was in prison for five months. Then his court trial began in March of 1838 and the grand jury found No True Bill, meaning no probable cause to decide that a crime had been committed. So he was acquitted and released from prison. And you know, when I was looking at the prison records from the Lincoln jail there almost everyone else was executed. Oh my goodness. So he was like one of the ones who was acquitted, which was pretty startling to realize.

Diana (22m 17s):
So they didn’t keep them there very long. It’s like they just did away with them. If they were found guilty of murder, they were just executed. Is that what happened?

Nicole (22m 27s):
Yeah. And this was like a list of felons that were admitted to Lincolnshire prison that I was looking at. So these were like the most serious crimes, the list that I was looking at. So the next newspaper article that I found was that Thomas’ mother Mary Tales had applied for aid from a friendly society that she was part of, which was like a benevolent society that provided like pensions or insurance for its members. And they had denied her payment. So she sued them and the petty sessions in Boston, Lincolnshire, England, and the magistrates decided in her favor and asked the society to pay her the amount that they owed her.

Nicole (23m 9s):
And it didn’t say, but I assumed it was either for funeral expenses or for her husband’s life insurance.

Diana (23m 14s):
Well, for a poor family, they certainly got into the records a lot.

Nicole (23m 18s):
Right. You know, I don’t know how poor they were, they were poor, but at the same time they did I think have something. And that’s what I found out in some of these newspaper articles that they had a property. And I think Mary inherited it from her father, even though she was illegitimate. I found out that her father had a surname Powderell because in her marriage record, she was listed as Mary Powderell Bradley. And then she also received an inheritance from a Joseph Powderell and that was a cottage in Swineshead. So I think maybe later in life wasn’t as poor as she was at the beginning,

Diana (23m 59s):
She got her inheritance, or she had a little property insurance thing.

Nicole (24m 5s):
Yeah. And in the census records, it mentions Mary Tales and Pierce and Thomas all living together for the 1841 and 1851 and 1861 census in this cottage in Drayton, which is a neighborhood in Swineshead, and I was able to look it up and look at some of the cottages and Google street view. And it’s amazing how this neighborhood and this little village Swineshead is it still looks like all the houses were built in the 1800s.

Diana (24m 29s):
I bet. I have done that too. I had a client project where I was able to find every house the family lived in, in the 1800s. Google Earth, where you actually see the street view and can get a screenshot of the house. So that is kind of a fun part of researching in England, Isn’t it

Nicole (24m 48s):
It Is, it was fun. The next section of my life sketch at Thomas Bradley is about his drinking and his debts because he got into the newspaper several times for court cases regarding drinking and debts. And it was just amazing. I could always tell if the article was about my Thomas Bradley, because usually it mentioned that he was from Swineshead or it was pretty obvious because he was drinking with somebody in Swineshead, accusing them of stealing his money or something

Diana (25m 10s):
True identifier that he had a problem with drinking. Yeah.

Nicole (25m 22s):
Yeah. I wondered if it was a drinking problem or if it was just like whenever he went drinking bad things happened,

Diana (25m 26s):
It could be both.

Nicole (25m 29s):
But one time, this was an interesting one, an owner of an alehouse, brought him to court claiming that Thomas owed him two pounds and 16 shillings for ale and tobacco. But the magistrates noted that Thomas was completely blind and that Oliver had been keeping the bill on a chalkboard, which he copied into a book from time to time. And so I think the fact that Thomas was blind and that the bill was kept on a chalkboard it seemed unfair to them. I don’t know, but Thomas denied owing anything to him and called in a witness to prove that he was not in the ale house that day. And so he didn’t have to pay,

Diana (26m 7s):
Oh, that’s funny that William Oliver are trying to take advantage of a blind man

Nicole (26m 12s):
Who knows. I wondered if that was, you know, what really went down, but another time he and a friend were charged with being drunk and riotous and they had to pay 17 shillings. There were just a few other times where him and a friend were drinking and bad things happen. So I put all that in there. And then I ended up the life sketch of Thomas by talking about his house that he lived in that had been inherited from his mother who got it from her father, the Powderell family. And I talked about his will, which was really fun. I’m so happy that I received the will. I got it the day after my ProGen assignment was turned in. And so I quickly updated it with the information from the will and turned it in again, no one had reviewed it yet.

Nicole (26m 54s):
So I figured I could, but the will mentioned that he was giving furniture to his servant, Rebecca, and that the rest of his personal property went to his grandson while he didn’t name him as his grandson. But I knew from census records that he was his grandson wasn’t of age yet. So he left his cottage to his executors to sell and then help his grandson get set up in an apprenticeship for any occupation of his choosing. And then when he reaches age 21, he’s allowed to have the rest of his inheritance. And so that was neat. And then the part that really blew me away, and I still have no idea who this person is, is that if this grandson, Tom was to die before he reached age 21, then all of the rest of Thomas Bradley’s estate was supposed to go to Mary Ann Ripon, the wife of the blacksmith, Benjamin Ripon in Boston.

Nicole (27m 48s):
Boston was like the city nearby Swineshead . And I have no idea who this Mary Ann Ripon is. I have researched her and her husband and her maiden name is Jackson. I can find no connection to Thomas Bradley at all, or any of his family members. She’s seven years younger than him. So it’s not as daughter. I wonder if it’s a sister somehow or I have no idea. I’m just so curious who she is. Was that his first girlfriend? I don’t know.

Diana (28m 15s):
Maybe it’s another illegitimate person.

Nicole (28m 18s):
She, I found her in the parish registered as she was not born an illegitimate child. So

Diana (28m 25s):
Maybe she had a different father than is mentioned in the parish.

Nicole (28m 29s):
Yeah, I know. I’m so curious. I, I wonder how I can never find that out, but it sure was interesting that he was going to leave everything to her. I was really hoping that his will, would mention one of his daughters by Ann Miller, but it didn’t seem too well.

Diana (28m 44s):
I have heard in classes on England research that I can’t remember the exact percentage, but maybe 25% of people were mentioned in a will. I don’t know. And I can’t actually quote that, but I just remember it was a higher percentage than I thought it would be. And this is a good example because this was not a rich person, but they did have some property and named a lot of people in the will. Yeah.

Nicole (29m 10s):
It really did, it named his servant, his grandson, his son, and this Mary Ann Ripon who I have no idea who she is, and two executors. So there were a lot of people there

Diana (29m 20s):
And I bet all those people were not indexed or is this will even index. How did you find them?

Nicole (29m 24s):
So England, after a certain year, they have a national probate registry before that. I can’t remember the exact year, but it’s sometime in the mid 1800s before that year, all of the court records were kept by the local government. And then after that, they were kept by the national. So there’s a national probate calendar in England. And Thomas Bradley died in 1872. So he is listed on that national probate calendar. And it’s just an abstract. It said, you know, his affects were less than 100 pounds. He lived in Swineshead, the date of probate, the date of death and his executors. And that’s all it said in the abstract. So then using that, you can order the will from some like government page on the UK’s website, it was pretty new.

Nicole (30m 10s):
I think it would still in beta, but you can just order the wills and then they deliver the PDF within about a week or two. It was really fast. So it was great.

Diana (30m 19s):
But the only name in that calendar was Thomas Bradley.

Nicole (30m 22s):
And it had the executors names as well?

Diana (30m 24s):
Okay. So it had, it had a little bit, but there were still people mentioned in there that are not, yeah,

Nicole (30m 30s):
You have to get the original, the original has the entire will. And the abstract just gives you like the basic information to get the original.

Diana (30m 37s):
So that’s so similar to what we have in the United States where we index the name of the deceased, but then you have to actually read the, will get the original, to find all the people. Okay. Really interesting.

Nicole (30m 50s):
I love when an original arrives. It’s so exciting. I almost had to just read the will without transcribing it, but I decided to transcribe it as I read it because it’s, I’m going to go to the effort of reading the handwriting. I might as well write it down.

Diana (31m 5s):
You know what? I have done that before too. I started reading a document like that and I thought, what am I doing? Stop go back and start transcribing because that’s exactly right. You’re going to have to just muddle through it again when you transcribe it. So why not do it at the beginning.

Nicole (31m 19s):
But it is exciting to see what’s in there. So Thomas Bradley’s children is the next section. And this is where I talk about the two women that he had children with and the children. So in the Lincolnshire Chronicle, a newspaper, I found that he was committed to prison for three months of hard labor for a non-payment of a two pound six shilling order of bastardy made an 1835. It didn’t say who the mother and the child were, but it could have been two people. There was either Robert Maidens baptized as the illegitimate son of Elizabeth in 1833 or Elizabeth Miller, who was born to Anne Miller in 1834. I had found evidence that these were children of Thomas Bradley.

Nicole (32m 2s):
Both of these mothers, Elizabeth Maidens and Ann Miller were super poor and had really hard, awful lives. And both of them were likely to live in the Boston workhouse, which I ended up researching quite a bit. So Robert Maidens, his mother died when he was pretty young. She died in 1841. And that year seven-year-old Robert, her son was an inmate of the Boston workhouse. And I’m guessing he was probably sent there after his mother died, but by 1851, he was living with Thomas Bradley in Drayton without his mother, but with his putative father and grandmother Mary Tales. So because he was in the workhouse, I wonder if Thomas decided to bring his son to live with him.

Nicole (32m 46s):
So Robert Maidens in 1856, married Latitia Thorpe, and the father was listed as Thomas Bradley. So that was a great evidence that I wish I could have found for his daughters as well, but it didn’t work out.

Diana (32m 59s):
Yeah. And you already had him in the will as well. You know that relationship of father, son,

Nicole (33m 4s):
It didn’t actually state relationships in the, will, it just said that they were the people who inheritance. Okay. Yeah. So that was, it was a good thing. I had this other info, but Latitia died. And that’s why Thomas Bradley’s grandson, Tom Robert Maidens ended up living with him. Then there’s Ann Miller’s daughters. So this is our side of the family. So Thomas Bradley must’ve met Ann Miller in Swineshead when they both lived there and Miller was born in 1805 and in nearby parish called Gosberton, the illegitimate daughter of Mary Miller from Anne’s LDS baptism record. She joined the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints in 1851.

Nicole (33m 44s):
And from that baptism record, it lists her father as Edward Engli. So we’ve been able to find out who that is. One thing I found that hadn’t been found before was that Mary Miller had married a man named William Reed, who was a widower just the next year, right after Anne was born in 1806. And this happened in Boston. And so I think that’s probably why I hadn’t found it because Boston was kind of a big city, but then the reason I found it is because William Reed died and then Mary was widowed and she got remarried to John Northern. And I knew that John Northern was Mary’s husband because of later census records.

Nicole (34m 25s):
And so I was kind of looking for this marriage between Mary Miller and John Northern couldn’t find it and then found Mary Reed had married John Northern. So that’s how I found her first marriage. So she married two widowers, which was interesting.

Diana (34m 37s):
That’s so interesting. And there’s a really good little lesson there that when you find a possible marriage, but a different surname for a woman, go look for that other marriage. We get so stuck on thinking that they should have had a certain surname. And just don’t even think about the fact that they could have just had a previous spouse. So good job,

Nicole (34m 55s):
Right. It was really fun to find that. So then Anne was about 12. When her mother married this John Northern and they probably moved over to Wigtoft. That was where John had lived. And that’s where Anne’s younger sisters were born, Elizabeth Northern and Sarah Jane Northern. And then John Northern died in 1828, was buried there in Wigtoft and that’s what I think Mary Northern and her daughters, including Anne moved to Swineshead. And so once they were in Swineshead, Ann Miller was there were Thomas lived and they met each other. They didn’t get married, but in 1834 and gave birth to Elizabeth Miller in Swineshead.

Nicole (35m 36s):
And there was no record for her until several years later, when she was about 12, she was baptized in Swineshead and it actually listed her birth as being June, 1834. So I have to wonder why did she get baptized so much later? And this daughter, Elizabeth went to go work as a servant. And I wondered if she had a better chance of obtaining work as a servant, if she had been baptized into the church of England. Very probably. So the evidence that I have that she was the daughter of Thomas Bradley is Elizabeth marriage record, which she ended up moving with the family that she was a nurse made for and ended up two counties over in Derbyshire.

Nicole (36m 20s):
And she got married to Benjamin Gregory. And on the marriage record, it states that her father was Thomas Miller, a stone Mason. You know, there’s no one named Thomas Miller in Swineshead. No stone mason, no one at all named Thomas Miller. There were no Millers at all, besides Dan Miller and her three daughters and her uncle John Miller. And so I think Elizabeth didn’t want to reveal her status as an illegitimate child. You know, she was in a county where no one knew her. She didn’t have to reveal. So why would she, I think she just gave her father’s surname is Miller instead of Bradley.

Diana (36m 53s):
Yeah. That would make sense, you know, just starting over and there’s a stigma, I’m sure that went with illegitimacy. So why not just pass on that if you can.

Nicole (37m 2s):
Well, and the reason why we think that Thomas Bradley was having children with Anna is because of Sarah James. So Sarah Jane was the third daughter. So after Elizabeth was born, there was another daughter named Mary who was born. And then Sarah Jane was born in 1841. And then later when Anne got baptized into the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, it lists both parents on that record. So Sarah Jane got baptized five years later. And so both of her parents were listed on this baptism record. And so her parents were listed as Anne Miller and Thomas Bradley, and Thomas Bradley of Swineshead was the only man named Thomas Bradley who lived in Swineshead, who it was likely that Anne Miller could have met and had children with.

Nicole (37m 49s):
And, you know, I looked to see if there were other Thomas Bradleys and the surrounding parishes, and there weren’t, there were some other men named Thomas Bradley in the county of Lincolnshire. But Lincolnshire ishuge. And it’s not super likely that and was traveling around. She was poor. She was living in the Boston workhouse. And so I concluded that this Thomas Bradley of Swineshead where she lived was the father of all three of her daughters. And that could be an accurate, I think you, for sure. It was probably the father of Sarah. We really don’t know if he was the father of Elizabeth and Mary, but we do have Elizabeth marriage record that says her father was named Thomas. Although it did say Thomas Miller. So that’s all we really have.

Nicole (38m 29s):
And I’ve looked at DNA and there’s no DNA matches coming from this Bradley family. So I need to do some targeted testing to find out if he was the biological father or not. The thing is, is that there just weren’t that many descendants of Thomas Bradley, a lot of his mother’s children and his brother’s children didn’t have a lot of children. His grandson didn’t have any children. So

Diana (38m 50s):
Yeah, you don’t have a lot of candidates.

Nicole (38m 52s):
I think his brother Pierce had a lot of children. So what I want to do is trace those forward and find somebody to test.

Diana (38m 58s):
Oh, nice.

Nicole (38m 59s):
So I have found the census records for Anne Miller and her three daughters. You can never find them together. It’s really sad because in 1841 Anne Miller is living with Mary, her second daughter, and Elizabeth, her first daughter is living with her mother, Mary Northern and Mary’s brother John Miller, who was a shoemaker in Swineshead. And then she was pregnant with Sarah Jane during that census and gave birth to her later that year. And then I found a newspaper article that said the Anne Miller was committed to 21 days of hard labor for misbehavior in the workhouse. And I was just shocked. I couldn’t believe I found an ad in the newspaper and that really led me to research more about the workhouses and they just seem terrible.

Nicole (39m 47s):
But they were created when the, the new poor law came into effect in the 1830s. And it was a way for the parishes to save money on their poor relief. And so people could go into the workhouse to get poor relief if they needed help and they couldn’t pay for food and board, but they tried to make the workhouses so unpleasant that the people who were able to get work would be motivated to move out and get other work to avoid living there. And so what they had to do were like backbreaking tasks, like breaking stones or picking Oakham, which was picking fine fibers from old ropes and cables used on a ship. And then they would mix that with grease and turn it into caulking to fill the gaps on the wood and ship planks. So didn’t sound like a really great place to work.

Nicole (40m 28s):
The saddest thing about living at the workhouse is that the parents were separated from their children and only got to see them for a limited amount of time. One article I read said, you could only see your children for about an hour on Sundays.

Diana (40m 39s):
Oh my goodness. They separated men and women also didn’t they? So that the men’s wing the women’s wing and then one for the children probably.

Nicole (40m 48s):
Yes. And I wondered if that’s why she was in trouble at the workhouse. I know she was there with her daughter, Sarah in1851. I’m guessing maybe Mary lived there for a while too. And so that could be why she was misbehaving. If she wanted to see her daughters more than one hour a week.

Diana (41m 6s):
Oh, they were a little too so sad.

Nicole (41m 9s):
It is sad. And they weren’t required to stay there. It did say that they were inmates on the census, but they could leave if they wanted to, if they found work elsewhere and they had somewhere else to live and things. So they went in and out as they needed to. Then I just kind of went into talking about how Anne and Sarah joined the LDS church. They decided to leave England. They went with their religion to gather to Salt Lake City, Utah and Anne left behind her two daughters. So Mary is living with her grandmother and going to school. And Elizabeth was a servant somewhere else. I don’t think either of them wanted to go, but Sarah and Anne were living in the workhouse and I think they wanted to escape.

Nicole (41m 53s):
And so they went ahead and went with the LDS missionaries and a big group of other converts on the ship Samuel Curling, Sarah was 14 years old and got married right before leaving to James Constable Borner, who was a widower. So James, Anne, and Sarah were listed on the ship together. And then they also were part of a handcart company that crossed the Plains from Iowa city to Salt Lake City. They arrived in 1856 in Utah, and then Sarah Jane ended up getting married to William Career and I have their marriage notice in a newspaper. And then I cited a newspaper obituary for when Sarah died in 1902.

Nicole (42m 34s):
And it just talks about how she had all these amazing children and grandchildren and how her husband was the city attorney. And he ended up being the mayor of Spanish Fork. And it’s just such a contrast at the end of this narrative with how Sarah’s life turned out, that at the beginning where we have Thomas Bradley drinking and debts and dying kind of alone with just one grandson in England. So it’s just kind of an interesting contrast. And then I ended with my proof of Sarah Jane Miller to her parents and then the genealogical summary. So it was just a really fun project and I probably could have written 20 pages about that. So maybe I’ll explain.

Diana (43m 14s):
Yeah. That is amazing. All the different things that you found. I wanted to just mention, as you were talking about Sarah Jane and her mother, how they escaped the work house, that our cousin, my first cousin, your first cousin, once removed, did a trip to England a few years back and visited this very work house where our great great-grandmother lived and the woman who was giving them the tour. She actually was brought to tears when my cousin explained Sarah Jane and how she left and came to United States and was able to have this big family. And the woman at the work house had so few ever escape this life of poverty or even got out of the work house.

Diana (43m 54s):
And it just made her so happy to know that someone did. So I thought that was a, such an interesting perspective from someone still there and involved in the history and giving tours and kind of knew intimately all about the history at the work house.

Nicole (44m 10s):
Oh, so neat. I would love to go there sometime. We’ll have to do that. That made me think that I should explain how they even got the money to leave. The LDS church at that time had established the perpetual immigration fund and they asked church members in the United States to contribute money to those who were trying to immigrate to Utah. And so those funds were used to help the new converts in England, be able to afford passage on the ship. And they were supposed to repay that loan back into the perpetual immigration fund. But I’ve found that, and Sara’s debt, the perpetual immigration fund was forgiven in the 1880s during a celebration of the church at some point.

Nicole (44m 53s):
So they didn’t end up having to pay it back. So it was just a gift, you know, that they had from the church members who contributed.

Diana (45m 1s):
That’s a great part of the story. And I think the other fun thing about that story is that Sarah Jane was in one of the very first-hand cart companies. Maybe she was the second one, the first she wasn’t.

Nicole (45m 13s):
Yeah, she was in the Edmund Ellsworth company, which left nice and early in the season. And they did well. They hadn’t had any problems. They had to pull their belongings in a handcart. They didn’t bring, you know, oxen to pull them. But the fourth and the fifth, I believe handcart companies left too late and they had problems getting stuck in the winter storms in Wyoming. And a lot of them died.

Diana (45m 35s):
So sad. Yeah. Those were the Martin and Willy handcart companies. And we visited that area at the Sweetwater where they were rescued. And we had a family reunion, I remember a few years ago and did our little hand cart pull there. So kind of a fun connection to this ancestor. What a change of her life coming from a work house in England, crossing the Plains and coming to the wilderness of Utah. Great story.

Nicole (45m 58s):
Okay. All right. Well, thanks everyone for listening today. We hope that you have a chance to write a family narrative as well. It’s so fun and really bring together the historical economic and geographic elements and context of their lives into a story that is fun to read. All right. We’ll talk to you guys next week.

Diana (46m 16s):
All right. Bye bye.

Nicole (46m 19s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our Research Like a Pro online course or join our next Study Group. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com to share your progress and ask questions. Join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our e-course or Study Group. If you like what you heard and would like to support this podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.