My maternal great grandmother Rose Minnie Harding was born in Lower Beeding, Sussex, England in June 1879 to parents Thomas Harding and Jane (nee Tyrell). In 1900 at the age of 21 Rose Minnie married Albert Restall. They went on to have a number of children including Constance Restall, my maternal grandmoher, before immigrating to Australia. According to the family oral history Rose Minnie told her children that as a child she was dropped off at a Catholic orphanage by her mother, Jane, and that Jane never returned to collect her. That was the last Rose Minnie ever saw of her mother. As an aside, young Rose Minnie must have been desperately unhappy during her time in the orphanage as she had a life long “dislike” of Catholic Nuns.

So what does what does this have to do with this weeks 52 ancestor prompt “In the Census”?

What I’ve told you above is background, part of my families oral history but it begs a couple of questions. Why was Rose Minnie placed in an orphanage? What happened to her parents Thomas Harding and Jane Harding nee Tyrell ?

I found some of the answers to these questions as I traced Rose Minnie and her immediate family through the English census records. I love the UK census records. They are a gold mine of information. Starting from 1841, every 10 years you can get a snapshot of your ancestors in their family groups, right up to 1911. First up, it was apparent that Thomas’s marriage to Jane was actually his second marriage.

 

In the 1861 census we find him living in Bolney, Sussex with his first wife Mary Ann and two children, a daughter Ann aged 1 and an unnamed son listed as 1 day old.

The next available census was taken in 1871. By this time Mary Ann had died. Thomas is left caring for their children, Ann now aged 11, Thomas now aged 9 (the unnamed 1 day old son from the last census) and Eliza aged 2. There’s also a housekeeper, Susanna Gamarra, named in the household. No doubt she was hired to take care of the children following Mary Ann’s death.

In the 1881 census, Thomas has remarried. His new wife is Jane Tyrell. Ann and Thomas (Jr) from the previous marriage have left home. Eliza, the youngest child from the first marriage is still living with her father Thomas and his second wife Jane. Also listed are Thomas and Jane’s children, John, Sarah, James and Rose. Rose is my great grandmother.

The next census, taken in 1891, show the family still living together, with four additional children, Emma, George, William and Charley. At this point everything seems normal. Eliza, the youngest child from the first marriage has left home. Thomas and Jane are living with the eight children they had together.

So my next step was to find the family in the 1901 census…. and this is where things went horribly pear-shaped. I couldn’t find my Thomas Harding in the 1901 census, and with a bit of additional research I realised this was because he died in September 1894, 3 years after the 1891 census that showed him living with wife Jane and their 8 children. I was able to find my great grandmother Rose Minnie in the 1901 census. She was now 21 years old and married to Albert Restall, my great grandfather.

But where were the rest of the family ? I started looking for Jane in the 1901 census, expecting to find her living with the younger children. What I found was very different, and it explained why Rose Minnie spent part of her childhood in an orphanage. In the 1901 census Jane is a patient in the West Sussex County Lunatic Asylum. I did a little more digging and found that she was admitted to the Asylum in January 1895, four months after the death of her husband.

I haven’t yet accessed her admission records, but I suspect she was suffering from severe depression and anxiety following the death of her husband. This was the late 19^th Century. She was not only coping with the loss of her husband, but she also left with eight children and no means of support. So with their father dead and the mother in an Asylum what happened to the children, particularly the younger children? I know from the oral history passed down from my great grandmother that she spent time in an orphanage. I suspect that this was the fate of the other children as well. The only record I have so far found for the younger children in the 1901 census is for William, the second youngest. In 1901 he is 15 years old and is living with his older half sister Eliza and her husband Henry Ede. I don’t know where Emma, George or Charley were in 1901. I suspect they were in an orphanage.

I can find all the family members in the last publicly available census: the 1911 census. Most are married and have started families of their own. George is working at the same place as Rose Minnie’s husband which implies they were still in contact with each other despite the disruption in their family. William is not yet married, he’s now living with his paternal Aunt Harriet. Charlie is in Wales working in the coal mines.

Their mother, Jane, is still in the Asylum where she is listed as a “Lunatic”. I find this confronting to say the least. As I scanned down this list of patients some were listed as Lunatics, others were listed as Idiots. It’s easy to take offence at these terms in our day and age, but to try and put them into perspective in the early 1900s, a “lunatic” had a curable mental illness, an “idiot” was intellectually handicapped.

In 1913 Albert Restall, Rose Minnie’s husband, was suffering terribly from arthritis. His doctor told him to move to a warmer climate or he would end up crippled. The choices were South Africa or Australia. Luckily he chose Australia, but this was probably influenced the fact his brother, Robert, had immigrated to Australia a few years earlier. Albert and son Robert left first, presumably to find work, accommodation etc for the rest of the family. Rose Minnie followed with the rest of their children. The picture below is one of the last taken in Sussex, England: Rose with Ethel Alice, Albert, Ivy and Constance. When this was taken Albert and son Robert gad left for Australia.

So, by 1913, Rose Minnie, her husband and children had settled in Australia and started a new chapter in their lives. The family story that Rose Minnie told her children was that her mother had dropped her off to an orphanage and that she never saw her mother again.

The records show that in 1894, when Rose Minnie was 14 years old her father died and her mother was committed to an Asylum. In 1913, when Rose Minnie left England with her husband and children, her mother Jane was still alive, and still in the Asylum. In fact the records show Jane remained in the Asylum until her death in 1923.

So, the census records answer the question about why was Rose Minnie placed in an orphanage. The question that those records can’t answer is did Rose Minnie know where her mother was ? Or did she believe her mother abandoned her ?