How Family History can Reveal Details of Poor People’s Lives in the Past

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By Dr. Tanya Evans, Guest Writer

Family historians working on their poor white ancestors often style themselves as new social historians, the vanguard of the “history from below” movement, determined to recover the histories of society’s marginalised. In their path-breaking study ‘Australians and the Past’, Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton argue that most Australians’ knowledge of the past does not come through the formal teaching of history, in the classroom or at university, but rather, through an understanding of their family’s past acquired from a range of evidence (oral, material and visual). This knowledge is developed and augmented during visits to museums and by television programs and films about history. This is why family history is so important.

I am an historian of the family, sexuality, gender and poverty in Britain and Australia from the eighteenth century to the present. I have written two books on the history of unmarried motherhood in England and I am currently writing one on poor families in nineteenth-century Australia. Since 2011, I have worked on the bicentenary of The Benevolent Society, Australia’s oldest charity, established in 1813. My focus on the family histories of former clients of The Benevolent Society’s asylum has revealed some of the histories of poor families in nineteenth-century New South Wales as well as some of the motivations of contemporary Australians who practice family history using the charity’s archival records. My efforts have been enriched by recent scholarship by a range of public historians who share my fascination with the growth of genealogy amongst “ordinary” Australians over the past twenty years or so. The project was driven by a desire to bring together the work of family historians, recovering the histories of their poor ancestors, with academic research focused on analysing the history of the organisation and the wider historical context of this nineteenth-century charity.

On 8 May 1813, Edward Smith Hall, along with five other “like-minded gentlemen”, met in Sydney to form the New South Wales Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and Benevolence. On 5 June 1818, this organisation transformed into the Benevolent Society of New South Wales “for the relief of the poor, aged and infirm and for other benevolent purposes” when Lachlan Macquarie became its patron. He funded the construction of the Benevolent Asylum which opened in 1821 (where Central Station in Sydney Australia now stands). It functioned much like a workhouse in the colony. In its early years, the Society focussed much of its efforts on the aged poor of the colony but from the 1830s, a lying-in ward was dedicated to poor pregnant women who presented themselves at the asylum to give birth. Single women, amongst many desperate others, flocked to the charity throughout the nineteenth century.

Most of the family histories gathered from genealogists for this project are of clients of the asylum who gave birth to “illegitimate” children. Family historian Anne Coote discovered that her paternal great-grandmother Sarah White gave birth in the Benevolent Asylum three times between 1877 and 1882. Sarah was born in Kent in 1858 to an agricultural labourer Weeks White and his wife Mary, who died shortly after giving birth to her last child in 1861. The family, including the widower Weeks; his eldest son William, with his wife and younger son; two out of three of his married daughters with their husbands and children as well as Sarah who was 16, emigrated to Australia in 1874 on board the Samuel Plimsoll from the south-east of England as assisted immigrants. The other married daughter also came to Australia with her family ten years later. William White continued his trade as a baker in Sydney and established himself quickly and successfully with his brother in Redfern.

Sarah was first admitted into the Benevolent Asylum on 11 April 1877. When the Committee enquired into the identity of the father of her child, she stated that he was William Johns, a painter. Their daughter, Mary Edith was born on 3 June 1877. Mother and child were both discharged from the asylum six weeks after the birth. Shortly afterwards, in August, Mary died of enteritis. On Mary’s death certificate, Sarah’s brother William and his wife were stated as her parents. Sarah’s brother was more fortunate than her. His bakery business later became Gartrell-White and he made generous donations to the charity later in life. His economic security had perhaps encouraged him to take on the potential guardianship of his sister’s infant. It is also possible that Sarah’s shame was to be obscured in this process.

Three years later, in March 1880, Sarah was admitted into the asylum again following a relationship with another man. Her son George had been fathered, she claimed, by George Taylor, an engineer. They both remained in the asylum until George was 5 months old. Two years later in July 1882, accompanied by George, Sarah was again admitted into the asylum to give birth to Leo. This time she named Louis Heinmouth (though the spelling was not clear on the document), a seaman as the father. Sarah told the authorities that she believed him to be dead. They were both discharged a month after the birth and she collected George five days later. Leo died later that year of dysentery. She gave birth to three more “illegitimate” children but she did not return to the asylum to give birth to these, which gave her some license to play with her life story for the authorities. Lies were written on their birth certificates, fathers were fabricated and two marriages imagined. She told those people in her midst that she was a widow and often changed the spelling of her surname in the process.

Her paper trail reveals the ways in which she was able to receive optimal care and support and how her family tolerated her misfortunes. Life-stories like Sarah’s reveal how individuals could slip in and out of poverty. Families with incapacitated or non-existent breadwinners were amongst the major client group of the charity throughout the century and into the next. Sarah lied about her circumstances in order to gain admission into the asylum three times to give birth but this charity was also known to turn a blind eye to women’s multiple “falls” because they acknowledged single women’s need. We have no idea what impact these pregnancies had on the prosperous and well-regarded White family but presumably she was deemed a disgrace of some kind. Nonetheless, she survived a series of liaisons with a variety of men, gave birth to, and lost children, with frightening regularity and presumably was provided with a modicum of support from her family. Her father left her some (though not a large) provision in his will. When working as a laundress in Miller Street, North Sydney, in 1894, she met and settled into married life with Alfred Hewitt from Hurstville. The couple had three more children, only one of whom survived to adulthood. Sarah died at the age of 59 in 1917 and is buried in an unmarked grave in Gore Hill cemetery. Sarah’s life had desperate moments of misfortune but she had resources at her disposal allowing her to access minimal charitable care on occasion.

I want to place the life-stories of clients of the nineteenth-century asylum alongside those of the family historians who have revealed them. When asked why she practices family history, Anne Coote stated that she enjoys “the thrill of the chase” and “being able to uncover as much as possible about previous generations ... [taking] a particular, if rather guilty, pleasure in uncovering the secrets some of them tried so very hard to hide”. This encouraged her to focus on revealing the complex history of her great-grandmother, Sarah White, a serial single mother in late nineteenth-century Sydney. She enjoys revealing the lies Sarah told to a variety of charitable authorities and looks forward to further research – “a treat saved for another day”. She has studied history at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and has also been a member of the Society of Australian Genealogists and the Genealogical Society of Victoria for over twenty years.

‘Sharing authority’ with family historians has allowed me to reveal many details of poor people’s lives, the intergenerational experience of poverty and changing meanings of illegitimacy since the 19th century. I look forward to reaping the fruits of continued collaborations with family historians and to practicing ‘critical family history.’ This project has led me to believe that the work of family historians is vital to enrich our understanding of nineteenth-century Australia. We’ll also learn more about the meanings of our past in the present if we explore the meanings of family history today.

Further resources:

Evans, Tanya and Curthoys, Patricia (2013), ‘Family history, identity and public history: writing a history of TheBenevolent Society in its 200th year’, Journal of Australian Studies. 

Charity and Justice, podcast detailing thehistory of The Benevolent Society in nineteenth-century Sydney on ABC RadioNational Hindsight.

Evans, Tanya (2011), ‘Secrets and Lies: The Radical Potential of Family History’, History Workshop Journal.

This guest blog is based on an article published in the Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 37, no. 3, September 2013. I want to thank the Journal and the publishers Taylor and Francis for allowing me to summarise it here as well as Anne Coote for sharing her research with us.

Dr. Tanya Evans teaches Australian history and public history at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

Why Study Family to Understand History

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In her book about the New Zealand McCullough family entitled Kin: A Collective Biography (published in 2005 by Canterbury Press), Melanie Nolan challenges us to think about the relationship between broad social structures (her main interest is social class and gender), individual agency, and the nexus of family. She explains that, “We choose our friends, our social networks and, to some extent, our communities in a way that we do not choose our family. Yet . . . family can influence where you live, what work you do, your political allegiance” (p. 187).

A friend who knew of my interest in family history sent me this book. I kept putting it aside to get to “later” for quite a while. Part of the reason was probably that even though I have spent much time in New Zealand, I wasn’t sure how a history of a New Zealand family would speak to my own work in the U.S. Once I opened it and started reading, however, I realized that the book sheds useful light on the relationship between studying family and studying history.

Nolan is a labor historian who grapples with the tension between studying the large picture of class formation as it played out historically in a specific country, and the particulars of individuals within a working class family. She argues that histories, which tend to be broad and sweeping, obscure experiences of subgroups and individuals. On the other hand, biographies and family histories, while rich in detail, are usually parochial, saying little about the historical landscape in which people lived. Ultimately, she argued that there is tremendous normal variation in how people live and shape social relationships; that variation is part of history and important to understand. Family history can unearth what normal variation looks like.

The McCullough family, which is the subject of her book, was not her own family. As a graduate student, she delved into the biography of Jack McCullough, who was a New Zealand artisan working class leader in the late 1800s and early 1900s. However, as she carefully read his diary and reflected on it in relationship to her own academic background (such as her interest in gender and history), she began to see many more dimensions both in his life and in working class experiences. By expanding her inquiry to his four siblings and their families, she was able to present a complex portrait of the New Zealand working class.

The five siblings shared having grown up in a working class immigrant family, but their lives represent different ways to be working class in New Zealand. Jack McCullough represents the skilled working class, committed to activist unionism and an international socialist vision of society. Margaret McCullough Norrie, who became an evangelical Christian, represents a religious “other worldly” vision of a large number of working class women. Jim McCullough represents locally active “municipal socialists” who devoted their attention to quality of life issues, friend societies (especially the International Order of Oddfellows), and family economic independence. Sarah McCullough Kennedy represents the “ordinary” working class women whose domestic, non-activist lives of patriotism, conservatism, and religion formed the foundation of New Zealand working class family life. Finally, Frank McCullough represents white collar managers who worked their way up, and as managers espoused values of teamwork, personal development, and good character.

Situated within larger formations of class, ethnicity, and religion, families embed us in the experiences and ideological contexts of those interconnected social locations. Studying the family and its historic and cultural context can reveal roots of our own values and perspectives today. Yet those social locations do not determine an individual’s life – there is an interplay between individual shaping of consciousness and choices, and that shaped within family, which one does not choose. What I appreciate about this book is her probing of that interplay.

Racism, Inheritance, and Family Financial Aid

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“I didn’t own slaves, why should I feel guilty?” is a common response of White people to hearing about racism today. This response regards slavery and theft of Indigenous peoples’ land as so ancient that paying attention to them today only invites anger and guilt. But I will show how racial privilege is a living inheritance. As a backdrop, consider data from the 2004 census, when the median net wealth of White non-Hispanic families was $113,822, of Black families just $8,650; and of Hispanic families, $13,375. Might these huge discrepancies have historical roots?

I was born into a White professional class family, daughter of a father who was a physician and a mother who stayed home to raise her children. When I was six, my father died suddenly of a heart attack. My mother’s parents came to our financial rescue: between them and my father’s life insurance, we were able to keep our home, and my mother was able to continue to stay home to raise us. Later my maternal grandparents helped put us through college, and my share of my grandfather’s will helped fund my graduate education. My grandmother established a trust; when my mother died, the share I inherited helped pay for my house. Where did these financial assets come from?

Strong contributors were a long history of inheritance and “family financial aid.” As Shammas, Salmon and Dahlin document in Inheritance in America (Galveston, Frontier Press), “The bulk of household wealth in America, perhaps as much as 80 percent of it, is derived from inheritance, not labor force participation” (p. 3). Lui, Robles, Leondar-Wright, Brewer, and Adamson, in their book The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide (The New Press, 2006) explain that large disparities in family wealth produce disparities in “family financial aid” to offspring, such as contributions to a down payment on a house or help with college tuition. About half of White families can afford this kind of aid, compared with only about one-fifth of Black families.  

Here’s a slice of how these processes worked in my family before I was even born. (For a more complete discussion, see my chapter in Critical (hi)Stories: Crafting Pedagogies of Collaboration, Inclusion, Re(presentation) and Voice edited by Kristen Luschen and Judith Flores Carmona, in press with Peter Lang.)

My maternal grandmother descended from the Appalachian Mountains. Growing up, I had assumed her family to be relatively poor. It turns out that while some were poor, others were not, including the H. and McC. families.  

George H., a land speculator, bought 160 acres from the state of Tennessee in 1827, land that was previously Cherokee. He bought other pieces of land as well, but this was the one he bought right after Indigenous peoples had been pushed off of it. County deeds records show a pattern of him buying and selling land continuously in Tennessee, which during that time that was mainly restricted to White people. In addition, between the 1830s and the Emancipation Proclamation, he owned between 3 and 6 slaves at a time. In the 1860 U.S. Census, his family wealth had grown to $30,000 ($719,152 in 2010 dollars).

He and his first wife had about 14 children. One of their eldest, Ben, from whom I descend, went to Arkansas where he bought a small plantation and six or seven slaves. When Ben and his wife’s three children (one of whom, Dewitt, was my ancestor) were still small, he died from injuries sustained in a duel, leaving behind debts, since apparently he had managed the plantation very badly. The three children were sent to Tennessee to live with their grandfather and his second wife; I am not sure why they did not stay with their mother. When George died, his will divided his estate equally among his children and the offspring of children who had died. Having being raised by a wealthy grandparent, then inheriting a portion of his estate, Dewitt was able to complete his education, buy a small farm, and later become County Clerk.

One of Dewitt’s daughters was my great-grandmother, who married a descendant of the McC family. William McC was a neighbor of George. In 1828, he purchased 67 acres from a trader who had earlier purchased the land apparently from the Cherokee Nation. Like George, he also bought more land, although not as aggressively, and without buying slaves. By 1860, William’s family wealth was $9,000 ($275,746 in 2010 dollars). His will directed that his wife and children each be given $700 ($16,766 in 2010 dollars) plus an equal share of his estate after other bequests had been made.

One of William’s sons was my great-great grandfather John. In 1860, William deeded 132 acres to John for the equivalent of about $40,000 (2010 dollars). At some point, John had a two-story brick house built on the farm. It still stands, pictured below in the process of renovation.

One of John's sons married Dewitt’s daughter; these were my great grandparents. They left Tennessee right after they were married, stopping for a few years in Steamboat Springs, Colorado (from which the Ute had just been expelled) and buying land there. A few years later, they moved the San Francisco area. My great-grandfather drifted from job to job and eventually abandoned the family. But my great-grandmother managed to accumulate money, I suspect with the help of her Tennessee parents. She passed down what she had to her children, one of whom was my grandmother.

My grandparents invested in property in the San Francisco Bay area; these were the grandparents that had helped us when I was younger. Their ability to invest in property needs to be understood in the context of rampant racial discrimination, such as restrictive covenants to prevent people of color from buying into White neighborhoods, and real estate practices that steer buyers of color away from White neighborhoods.The Federal Housing Administration, created by the federal government in 1934 to help lift (White) families out of the Depression by offering loans, was specifically constructed to keep people of color from buying in White neighborhoods. So, my grandparents were able to buy and sell property in a market structured by regulations and processes that explicitly benefited White property buyers like themselves.

I haven’t mentioned my ancestors working. Most of them worked hard, but with resources. Some augmented those resources, others blew them. But the point is that considerable wealth initially came from land from which the Indigenous peoples had been expelled so that Whites could have access to it. Slave labor augmented that wealth. And the wealth was passed down through the family in the forms of inheritance and family financial aid.

One cannot rewrite history, but one can author the present. For example, currently the land base of most Indigenous tribes is inadequate. Within the boundaries of many reservations, the U.S. government sold or transferred control of plots of land to non-Indians, resulting in a checkerboard pattern of land under tribal control, giving rise to economic difficulties for tribes as well as difficulty in building tribal sovereignty. Other tribes lost their land entirely during the Termination period the 1950s, and are trying to reclaim it.

To address these problems, several Indian-controlled organizations seek financial donations; anyone today can help out. Examples include:

• The Indian Land Tenure Foundation , which works with various organizations to address loss of land in Indian Country.
• White Earth Land Recovery Project, that works to help recover the original land base of the White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota.
• The Lakota Lands Recovery Project, a grassroots organization working to consolidate tribal control over the land and resources of the Pine Ridge Reservation.

If you are curious as to how inheritance and family financial aid played out historically in your own family, in contexts that enabled White families to accumulate resources on the backs of people of color, property records and wills are a good place to start.