The Census Detective - What clues are you leaving behind?

It all started with the will of Mary Crewe, spinster, late of Watergate Street in Chester. What struck me was the fact that she had left quite substantial sums of money to her family and to charity but made her mark with an 'X' in her will. How did she have almost £20,000 in today's money but could not write her name?

The will of Mary Crewe, 1875

Intrigued, I decided to find out more about Mary's story. What followed was a detective trail involving several sources, highlighting the strengths – and weaknesses - of census returns as evidence.

A look on Cheshire BMD shows Mary’s death registered in 1875 and reveals her age as 82, which gives us a birth year of about 1793.

Entry showing the death of Mary Crewe in 1875 on Cheshire BMD

This approximate year of birth was my next step for a ‘quick look’ at the census returns for where she lived and who with. Not so quick! A search on Ancestry in the 1871 census for ‘Mary Crewe’(exact) born five years either side of 1793 in Chester gave no results.

However, widening the search for similar names and for places in ‘Cheshire’ instead of Chester provided a promising result. 

Mary ‘Creeve’, a 76 year-old cook born in Tilston, is living with her employer, Miss Maria Wynne, a ‘Lady’ and a 19 year-old housemaid, Phebe Williams.

The census return for 1871 showing Mary Crewe living with Miss Maria Wynne and Phebe Williams in Chester

A look back at Mary’s will reveals something interesting. Mary names Miss Wynne, spinster, as her executrix (a female executor). So Mary had appointed her employer to carry out her last wishes.

Extract from Mary's will showing Miss Wynne as her executrix

The same search using Find My Past correctly identifies Mary’s surname as ‘Crewe’ in the 1871 census. It also gives an entry in 1851 for her as a servant aged 55 in the household of Hugh Calveley and his niece, Miss Wynne, in Northgate Street, Chester. Both Hugh and Maria are described as ‘independent’.

I couldn’t find an entry in Find My Past for 1861 looking for Mary Crewe. However, she’s there in the entry for Miss Wynne and Hugh Calveley, now in Watergate Street. This entry for Mary Crewe aged 63 (born around 1798 at ‘Sellstone’) is picked up clearly by Ancestry, but with an obvious mistake in the index for her place of birth!

With the 1841 census, it’s only when I searched for Mary and Miss Wynne in vain that I found them in the household of Hugh Calveley. The 1841 census rounds ages up to the nearest five years, so Mary’s age here is given as 35 - now we've got a birth year around 1816!

1841 census return showing Mary Crewe living with  Hugh Calveley and Miss Wynne

Lessons learnt

·       Even when the name of a person or place seems clear, be aware that the census returns were transcribed by people with no local knowledge and there are mistakes

·       There are clearly differences in transcription between  Ancestry and Find My Past. If you can’t find an entry on one, try the other!

·       If the person you’re looking for doesn’t appear, try and find other members of the same household

·       Using ages can be tricky. Mary's birth year ranges from 1795 to 1816 according to the census. It could be deliberate or careless reporting, and perhaps the correct age of a domestic servant wasn't a matter for great accuracy?

Going back to Mary’s will and my original question for a moment …

Mary left £25 to each of her four great nephews and two donations of £19 19 shillings to charity. As a domestic servant, how was she so well provided for?

The answer lies in the will of Hugh Calveley, who leaves Mary the sum of £100 in 1868, with the condition that she is still in his service at the time of his death.

Extract from the will of Hugh Calveley, 1868

Miss Wynne’s will, made in 1868, leaves an annual allowance to Mary of £26 and a codicil, amending her will after Mary’s death, leaves £19 19 shillings to Phebe Williams, the housemaid). Curious that same amount appears in both wills, just under the £20 limit that you had to pay legacy dues to the taxman!

What does this indicate about long term employees and their employers?

Clearly both Hugh and Miss Wynne valued their staff, Mary Crewe in particular. There’s an entry in the Cheshire Observer on 11^th December 1875 for Mary’s death, which describes her as ‘…for 60 years the faithful and attached servant of Miss Wynne’s family’.

Cheshire Observer, 11 December 1875

Another thing that struck me looking at this story – it is far from the full story! We see Mary’s life and circumstances as a glimpse every ten years and have to piece together what we can from the fragments the census returns give us (and not always willingly!).

Looking for Mary, we find Maria and her bachelor uncle, Hugh. How did they become a household for so long? What else can we discover about them?

Our Overleigh Cemetery database shows an entry for Mary and the UK Find a Grave database on Ancestry takes us to an image of Mary’s grave there. She’s buried with her brother, George and somebody called Hannah... but that is another story!

Think about the information we have provided on the census returns throughout our lives, what would a researcher far in the future make of our stories?

 

Women of Cheshire

You will go back a long way to find your first significant woman in Cheshire history and Aethelflaed, Saxon Lady of Mercia, rebuilding Chester in 907, but to make it onto our list you need to find their stories in our archives...

Cooking the books

Elizabeth Raffald honed her skills in domestic service for 15 years. Her final job was housekeeper at Arley Hall in Cheshire before she married and went on to be a formidable businesswoman with a keen eye for an opportunity in 18^th century Manchester. 

She ran a cookery school, domestic staff agency, delivered high end dining to Manchester’s new money homes, used the information she collected to publish Manchester’s first trade directory listing businesses, services and potential clients. And in 1769 published the first cookbook in English of original recipes – 800 of them – we made and loved eating her Herb Pie.

Elizabeth Raffald Society

For the record

Women appear equally in official records but these are bare glimpses and hints at lives lived. Take Parish registers recording baptisms, marriages and burials since the 1500s. In Taxal in 1707 there is a record of Hannah Wright and Anne Gaskill marrying, and in 1750 in Middlewich Maria Sproston marries Sarah Richardson 'commonly called Peter' – of course we will never know the whole stories, but this doesn’t make them any less fascinating.

We have managed to put some flesh on the bones of the life of a woman whose headstone has become famous in Overleigh Cemetery in Chester. Mary Jonas ‘the mother of 33 children by one husband’ - this note appears with her final contribution to the parish registers when she died aged 85.

Dear Diary

Women’s voices are hard to hear in official record-keeping but diaries are where lots of women have found their voice in recording their lives, experiences and feelings. Frances E. Crompton goes on to become an author and her diary is written in a way that you can imagine she was looking forward to telling her friends and family tales of a honeymoon gone wrong. There is lots to relate to … reality not living up to expectations … and that impractical and uncomfortable new frock that you love anyway.

Aged 22 in 1686 Sarah Savage began keeping her ‘spiritual diary’ and she kept writing until her death aged 87. And we have the first tiny volume of fewer than 100 pages, with such small writing and so many words. Yes, there is lots about sermons, her faith and life events, but there is so much more. In 1716, the person closest to her, Jane Hunt dies unexpectedly, and Sarah keeps her alive in conversations with her through her diary-keeping. Evidence of enduring best friendship.

Diaries in our collections have one thing in common. We know all about the authors because we can ask questions when people offer them to us. But this one came to us via a secondhand shop, the only clue to the writer's identity is an entry on her birthday. We can tell that she had Warrington connections and was nursing during the Second World War in Morecambe. The diary is intimate, full of detail, she is a complicated woman living through extraordinary times – one day we will perhaps discover who she was and what happened to her. We had to use our imagination and images from magazines to picture her. Or perhaps she would prefer to remain a mystery?

Women in politics and activism

We can't put together a blog celebrating the women of Cheshire without mentioning some of the inspiring women leaders and activists who have shaped our county. 

In 1894 a 24-year-old tailor named Ada Nield was sensationally dismissed from the Crewe clothing factory Compton Brothers clothing factory. Her offence? Inciting female co-workers to unite and demand a “living wage” instead of their current “lingering, dying wage”. For weeks Ada’s anonymous letters, signed “A Crewe Factory Girl”, had been printed in the Crewe Chronicle, garnering support from men’s unions as well as the local MP. As a result of these letters she had to leave Comptons, but working arrangements were improved.

Her letters attracted the attention of the Independent Labour Party, who offered her employment when her identity as the Crewe Factory Girl was eventually discovered. Ada became active in the ILP and by the end of 1894 she has been elected as a Nantwich Poor Law Guardian (one of the very first working-class female Guardians). In the years leading up to the First World War, Ada (now married as known as Ada Nield Chew) became an active supporter of the movement for women's suffrage.

Councillor Alift Harewood MBE was born in Anna Catherina, a sugar planting village in Guyana, in 1934. She trained as a nurse and midwife before coming to the UK and settling in Macclesfield. 

Alift worked as a nurse for 59 years, and during that time became very politically and socially active within the Macclesfield community. In 2012 she became the town's first Black mayor, and was re-elected again in 2016. She remains active in local politics and is a passionate advocate for gender equality. 

Alift shared her incredible life story with us in 2011 as part of CHAWREC's Journeys to Cheshire oral history project. 

Home front

We are all aware of the impact of turbulent world events on women’s lives. The First World War was the first global conflict to have a ‘home front’ and arguably accelerated change in women’s roles in society generally and some women’s lives were changed forever. In the ICI collection you will find inspirational photos of women working in Brunner Mond’s chemical works at Northwich that captivate with their camaraderie. Kept with them is a newspaper clipping – Florence Gleave died aged 20 and was a ‘canary girl’ – women turned yellow as working with TNT caused toxic jaundice.

See them in West Cheshire Museums' Working Women online exhibition

You will find women in our ‘First World War Servicemen’s Index’ … a project that we named without realising that women in nursing units were still serving abroad in 1919, and of course that women over 30 had just got the right to vote. Search ‘nursing’ in Unit Keyword to find five women.

What has she got to do with Cheshire?

So Eleanor Ormerod wasn't born or, as far as we know, ever spent time in Cheshire – but, bear with us, if her father had not produced his ‘History of Cheshire’ she may not have had the skills or means to follow her own path as an insect expert in Victorian England. Her impact on farming was global as she reported on 'injurious insects'. Not that her father was impressed, his papers only record his sons' achievements. He surely would have been if he knew she keeps remarkable company with Darwin in having a ‘self-replicating manufacturing machine’ or free 3D printer model named after her! (And there is a Cheshire connection, her assistant was Robert Newstead, first curator of the Grosvenor Museum in Chester.)

Watch an interview with George Ormerod's biographer discussing Eleanor here

You can find all these women in our archives - and millions more - who would you add to the list?