Books & Digital Picks
This month’s family history inspiration
A Guide For Family Historians MICHELLE HIGGS
Pen & Sword, 196 pages, £14.99
Records of mental illness can be among the most poignant, visceral and startling evidence available to family history researchers. The revelation that your relative was regularly found “wet and dirty” – informal terminology for doubly incontinent – might upset with its blunt intimacy, yet there is no doubt that notes kept by nursing staff about patients in state-run lunatic asylums are among the most enthralling documents held in local archives. What, for instance, could be more moving than the discovery of a sick mother’s recurring delusions
that “all her children were being murdered”, or that “her room was full of electricity”?
Such dramatic accounts of individual debility are not available for everyone who suffered from mental illness in the past. Indeed, accounts of named inmates in institutional casebooks and case files – with which this book is richly illustrated – are rare archival treasures. Nevertheless, there are a surprising number of sources that can help plot the psychological trajectory of your ancestor’s life from the mid-18th century onwards. Crucially, from 1851, instances of familial ‘idiocy’ were expected to be entered in censuses (the lexicon of insanity changed over the decades to reflect social attitudes and political priorities). Further detail of cases of shellshock, epilepsy, puerperal insanity, dementia and so on can be found in newspaper reports; Poor Law, prison and workhouse records; and asylum admissions documents and discharge registers.
In this book, regular WDYTYA? Magazine contributor Michelle Higgs deals expertly with the complex ways in which the treatment of the most vulnerable was influenced not only by the era, but also by factors such as geography, age, class, gender and the severity of their illness.
Ruth A Symes is a historian and author of Tracing Your Ancestors Through Letters and Personal Writings (Pen & Sword, 2016)
‘Instances of “idiocy” had to be entered in censuses’