Regency Relatives

People often ask me whether I’ve uncovered any family secrets whilst researching my ancestors. The answer is yes.

Not the sort of secrets that television programmes promise, with aristocratic scandals and royal mistresses lurking around every corner, but quieter discoveries that nevertheless make you stop and look at an ancestor in an entirely different way. Every family tree has moments that don’t quite fit the tidy narrative we like to imagine. A child who appears before a marriage. An unexpected bankruptcy. An ancestor who vanishes from one census only to reappear somewhere entirely different ten years later. Every now and then, however, you find something so unexpected that it forces you to put the kettle on before carrying on.

This is one of those stories.

Before I continue, I should confess that Harriet lived a little later than the period I usually write about. Regular readers will know that my research generally wanders somewhere between the Georgian and Regency periods, and Harriet, born in Birmingham in 1885, falls well outside that familiar territory. I hope you’ll forgive the detour. Then again, it’s my website and, every so often, I reserve the right to ignore my own rules.

When I first encountered Harriet, there was nothing particularly remarkable about her. She was born in Birmingham on 8 December 1885, the daughter of Thomas Henry Watts and Eliza Elizabeth Charles. Her father died when she was still a young child, she found work as a spoon and fork polisher in Birmingham’s thriving metal trades, and in 1905 she married William Glynn, with whom she would raise a large family. They were Roman Catholics, part of Birmingham’s long-established Catholic community, and on the face of it Harriet appeared to have lived the sort of ordinary working-class life that so many of our ancestors did.

To a family historian, that usually means a familiar collection of records. Baptism and marriage records. Census returns. Electoral registers. Parish records. They are the bread and butter of genealogy, and although they are invaluable, they rarely tell us very much about the person themselves. They tell us where someone lived, who they married, how many children they had and what occupation they followed. What they don’t tell us is what it felt like to meet them.

I’ve spent years researching people whose faces I will never know. I know where John Hardwicke collected Excise duty. I know where Elizabeth Harris may have been baptised. I know who witnessed their marriages and who stood surety on their bonds. Yet I have no idea what any of them looked like. There is always a tiny hope that somewhere, for a more recent ancestor, a photograph might survive. Perhaps a formal studio portrait. A wedding photograph. A family gathering. Something that allows a name on a family tree to become a person.

Harriet was the first ancestor to give me that opportunity. Just not in the way I had imagined.

Quite by accident, whilst following an entirely different line of enquiry, I found the first photograph I had ever seen of her. It wasn’t in a family album. It wasn’t attached to a passport application. It wasn’t even amongst family papers.

It was in a Birmingham Police register.

If I’m honest, I didn’t immediately read the words beneath the photographs. I was too busy looking at Harriet herself. After all the certificates and census returns, after years of seeing her represented only by ink on paper, here she was, looking back at me across almost a century. It is a surprisingly difficult feeling to describe. Family historians spend so much of their time reconstructing lives from documents that we sometimes forget the people behind them had expressions, mannerisms and faces. Harriet suddenly wasn’t an entry in a register. She was a woman with carefully pinned hair, a steady gaze and a face that no longer existed only in my imagination.

Only afterwards did I notice where I had found her. The register was not recording a family event or an important civic occasion. It was recording her arrest.

According to the accompanying details, Harriet, a fresh [sic.] polisher, appeared before Birmingham City Police in August 1928 accused of stealing. The surviving criminal register suggests that the offence related to the theft of a hat. You might imagine that discovering a great-great-grandmother’s police photograph would come as something of a shock. Oddly, it didn’t. Instead, I found myself grinning. Not because Harriet had apparently found herself on the wrong side of the law, but because this was precisely the sort of discovery that reminds me why I love family history. I had gone looking for one thing and found something entirely different. More importantly, I had found a mystery.

Who was Harriet, really? How did an apparently ordinary Birmingham wife, mother and factory worker come to stand in front of a police camera in the summer of 1928? Was this an isolated lapse in judgement, an act of desperation, a misunderstanding, or something else entirely? At this stage I have absolutely no idea. A single entry in a criminal register is no more capable of defining Harriet than a single census return or birth certificate. If anything, it has achieved the opposite. It has transformed her from a name on my family tree into someone whose life I desperately want to understand.

One of the greatest lessons family history has taught me is that people are never the sum of a single record. Harriet was a daughter who lost her father young. She was part of Birmingham’s Catholic community. She worked in one of Britain’s great industrial cities, married, raised children and lived through enormous social change. Somewhere within that ordinary life lies the explanation for this extraordinary photograph. Whether it proves to be a story of hardship, misfortune, bad decisions or simple bad luck, I don’t yet know.

What I do know is that I have a new rabbit hole. And if experience has taught me anything, it’s that the most interesting discoveries are usually found at the bottom of them.

So, this is where The Harriett Watts Investigation begins. Over the next few weeks I’ll be following Harriet through newspapers, court records, electoral registers and anything else that survives to see whether I can discover what really happened in the summer of 1928.

I have a strong suspicion that the stolen hat is only the beginning of the story.