Eureka Moment
Enda McEvoy uncovered a secret in the life of a Victorian gamekeeper and solved a mystery that puzzled researchers on both sides of the Atlantic, says Rosemary Collins
The article that solved Enda McEvoy’s mystery
The first official newspaper in Britain was the Oxford Gazette in 1665; in Ireland it was the News-Letter in 1685. Newspapers have been vital in recording what’s happening in their communities. If your ancestor appeared in an article, it can reveal the sort of story that brings your tree to life – from the comic to the heartbreaking.
Old articles from hundreds of British and Irish newspapers have now been digitised and published online. For Irish local historian Enda McEvoy, they led him to a breakthrough in his research into a 19th-century gamekeeper.
My Brick Wall
In October 2010 I was working at Abbeyleix Public Library in Co. Laois, Ireland, when an English couple walked in, looking for information about a gamekeeper called John Harrod who had lived in a rural area called Clonterry at the opposite end of the county. By coincidence, Clonterry is where I’ve lived all my life. The chance encounter inspired me to research the life of John Harrod (1852– 1908), which I wrote about in a book, On the Gamekeeper’s Trail.
In September 2014 I received an email from a lady in England
‘I could not find a connection that linked my John Harrod to Rachel’s family’
named Rachel. She had found a marriage certificate from 1927 belonging to her great grandmother Rose Harrod. Rose’s father is named as “John Harrod – game keeper”. Rachel’s search had brought her to my publication, and she wondered if ‘my’ John Harrod was her great great grandfather.
Rose, along with her mother Isabella Harrod and sisters Lizzie and Maggie, appears on the 1901 Irish census living in Mullingar in Co. Westmeath. The family are all living together 10 years later in the 1911 census for England and Wales, where they are based in Harpurhey, Manchester.
Despite my best efforts, I could not find a connection that linked my John Harrod to Rachel’s family. In fact, I could not find records for any of the family members that she mentioned prior to 1901.
The case remained unsolved until August 2018, when I began my research into this family again after receiving an email from a gentleman living in the USA named Sean. He too had heard about On the Gamekeeper’s Trail, and his query was almost identical to Rachel’s from four years earlier.
My Eureka Moment
I had resigned myself to having to leave the case unsolved until I tried the archive of historic newspapers on findmypast.ie.
I found the answer I had been searching for in the Kendal Mercury from 20 July 1878. The article had the headline ‘Alleged concealment of birth at High Bendrigg’, and concerned the tragic case of a young woman, Barbara Isabella Gregory, who had been charged with concealing the birth of her newborn, and subsequently deceased, daughter.
She was the housekeeper of Mr John Harrod, who was the gamekeeper for the Earl of Bective on his Underley Hall estate in Kirkby Lonsdale, Cumbria.
This was the same John Harrod in On the Gamekeeper’s Trail.
I had found the missing piece of the puzzle.
My Breakthrough
The newspaper article reported that Dr Leeming, who carried out the postmortem on the baby, found that the death was caused by haemorrhage from the umbilical cord as Barbara gave birth alone without medical help. The conclusion reached was that there was no evidence of malice on the mother’s part that had resulted in the infant’s death, but that she had been “very silly”.
Barbara was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment with hard labour at HM Prison, Kendal, in 1879. Although I can find no evidence that the couple ever actually got married, and no father is named on any of her three daughters’ birth certificates, it seems that for approximately 20 years following her release from prison Barbara and John Harrod lived together with their children in Ireland and England, including of course Rachel’s great grandmother Rose.
However, while they never seem to have made any of these familial relationships ‘official’, and the couple were estranged in later years, Barbara’s death certificate from 1913 does state that she was “widow of John Harrod – a game keeper”. It is truly poignant that Barbara and John’s names appear together on such an important civil document, perhaps the first and only time that it ever happened.