Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy (66 page)

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Decrees and orders:
These can be found with the main body of Chancery decrees C 33, with a separate series in J 79.

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Visitor reports:
Visits made by officials are in LCO 10, starting in 1879.

‘Lunacy was seen as temporary, whereas ‘idiots' were of unsound mind from birth.'

As mentioned, asylums were not provided by the government until 1845 (with some local authorities building some towards the beginning of the nineteenth century). Prior to that, asylums were run privately although subject to licence after 1766. As such, any surviving admission and discharge registers, along with other administrative records, will be held with the local record office. It is possible to search for the locations of the records of a specific asylum or hospital by using the following sources:

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Hospital Records Database (Hosprec):
The database contains entries of over 2,800 hospitals compiled by the Wellcome Institute and The National Archives. It lists the location of any surviving records and the exact nature of the material along with dates. It is possible to search by name of institute or by locality. It can be searched free of charge online at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/hospital records/.

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Access to Archives:
This useful website (www.a2a.org.uk) also contains information on the location of surviving records for asylums and madhouses.

The National Archives also has a small number of records for asylums:

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A register of those admitted to private asylums outside London in MH 51/735 from 1798 to 1812.

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A list of insane prisoners held in houses of correction and prisons in 1858 in MH 51/90–207.

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Returns of mentally unstable individuals held in workhouses and asylums, 1834 to 1909 in MH 12. As discussed earlier, this does not contain any name indexes, and records are organized by county and Poor Law Union.

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The majority of patient files have not survived. A very small number can be found in MH 85, MH 86 and MH 51/27–77. MH 94 has registers of patient files from 1846 to 1960.

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The Royal Navy also had provisions and hospitals for naval lunatics. Records for these can be found within the Admiralty series, specifically:

    
  Hoxton House in ADM 102/415–420 (for 1755 to 1818)

    
  Haslar in ADM 102/356–373 (for 1818 to 1854)

    
  Reports on how naval lunatics were handled between 1812 and 1832 are in ADM 105/28

Suggestions for further reading:

• An Introduction to Poor Law Documents before 1834
by A. Cole (FFHS, 1993)

• Poor Law Union Records: 1. South-East England and East Anglia
by J. S. W. Gibson, C. Rogers and C. Webb (FFHS, 1993)

• Poor Law Union Records: 2. The Midlands and Northern England
by J. S. W. Gibson and C. Rogers (FFHS, 1993)

• Poor Law Union Records: 3. South-West England, The Marches and Wales
by J. S. W. Gibson and C. Rogers (FFHS, 1993)

• Poor Law Union Records: 4. Gazetteer of England and Wales
by J. S. W. Gibson and F. A. Youngs (FFHS, 1993)

• Lunatics in England and Wales for Family Historians
by Pamela Faithfull

Ireland did not have many hospitals until the eighteenth century as people's needs were cared for at home. In 1821 the first provisions for the mentally ill were made when 23 asylums were created. Records for hospitals and asylums will either be retained by the institution itself or held at the National Archives of Ireland or the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.

In Scotland, care for the sick and mentally ill became a responsibility of the heritors (see above) and church councils after 1560. Matters relating to lunatics were discussed in sheriff courts and their records will either be held locally or at the National Archives of Scotland. In 1857 the Board of Commissioners in Lunacy was established and records of this body are also held at the National Archives of Scotland, under the Mental Welfare Commission (MC). They include:

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Minute books, 1857 to 1914, in MC 1

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Admission books, 1858 to 1962, in MC 2 (subject to 75-year closure rules)

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Register of lunatics held in asylums, 1805 to 1978, in MC 7

Perhaps even more shocking than the discovery of poverty in the family tree is the realization that not all our ancestors were legitimate. Actually, there was far more illegitimacy around than you might perhaps think, and you may well find that all was not as it might appear. This chapter describes the changing attitudes towards illegitimacy and adoption through the ages, and how records were generated by society's attempts to deal with the issue.

Illegitimacy has been frowned upon and deemed a social evil for generations, yet most people will discover at least one illegitimate birth, if not several, in their family tree, regardless of their ancestors' social standing. The abusive connotations attached to the word ‘bastard' in the modern language bring home to us just how awful this label must have been to our ancestors who bore it on their baptism certificates. At worst the illegitimate child was blamed for the sins of their parents, condemned as being of ‘bad blood', ostracized from society and had limited prospects of finding employment. Records of the nineteenth-century assize courts show that an alarming number of murder cases were against women for killing their illegitimate babies, such was the shame of bringing a child up alone. Baby farming and informal adoption were preferable alternatives for many mothers, however, and a lot of us will discover that our predecessors covered up the existence of an illegitimate child within the family by pretending the mother and child
were siblings. Legally, illegitimacy hindered the likelihood of an inheritance being awarded if the parents died intestate, because an illegitimate child had no legal parents in the eyes of the law.

It is only recently that illegitimacy has started to lose the social stigma that has clung to it for centuries. Pressure from the Church and other religious institutions for couples to marry before having children was behind this, but a number of other factors came into play as well. Local communities begrudged having to financially support those children whose fathers could not be made accountable, and in aristocratic circles the continuation of the family's name and wealth depended on there being a legitimate heir.

Hundreds of ordinary families have been told stories about a distant ancestor who was the illegitimate lovechild of a Lord or Duke, and indeed there were many illegitimate offspring from upper-class affairs, especially as often aristocratic marriages were little more than arranged dynastic unions and wealthy husbands were almost expected
to take mistresses. However, the majority of us will stumble across illegitimate ancestors whose origins lie in the misery of a workhouse as opposed to the luxurious surroundings of a courtesan's bedroom.

Up until the mid-eighteenth century young women were known to consent to sex with a suitor after a promise of marriage, as common law ruled that a verbal promise of marriage should be binding. However, an engagement that took place in private could be easily denied when there were no witnesses, which often happened if the woman fell pregnant before she managed to get her lover to the altar. Men could escape their obligations by joining the army or fleeing the parish, and many women and babies were left dependent on parish relief (see
Chapter 24
for more details on the workings of poor law relief). Poor Law Administrators would investigate who the father of an illegitimate child was in an attempt to force him to pay maintenance, and from 1732 unmarried pregnant women were required to identify the father under oath. Hardwicke's Marriage Act of 1753 put an end to the ambiguity surrounding marriage and common law, requiring all legally upheld marriages to take place in the presence of a priest. However, the practice of sex before marriage continued to be widespread.