Family Worth – Part Two.

The Miners.

It’s time for the second instalment of the family tree! Last time I wrote about my grandmother’s mother’s side, so all the folk that led to my great grandmother, Dorothy Amy. This this time I’ll write about my grandmother’s father’s side stemming from my great grandfather, Bill Wood. I hope that’s not too confusing and, as before, I hope it’s broad enough that you’ll find nuggets of interest even if you’re not directly related to me!

Dorothy Amy’s ancestors were largely nailers (people who made nails), and even though I haven’t quite managed to finish this line yet, I can tell you now that my great grandfather’s ancestors were overwhelmingly coal miners. My great grandad Bill was the most recent coal miner on my family tree and it makes sense to start with him. William Henry Wood was born in Belper in 1908 and is frustratingly difficult to find records for! But what I can tell you is that he is listed as being a ‘colliery coal cutting operator below’ in the 1939 census. Let’s unpack that for a second. So, a colliery is a coal mine, which means a collier is a coal miner, and in lots of the census records I read they specify whether the miner worked above ground or below by just writing the job and then adding the caveat ‘above’ or ‘below’. Having not worked in a coal mine myself and being unfamiliar with the workings, I googled for images of coal cutting machines around the 1940s and the results are pretty much as bleak as I imagined (see image below)! I couldn’t find any more official records of his mining activities, but my grandad remembers him working with the classic mining tools of pickaxe and shovel and that he came home covered in coal dust from his job at the Denby colliery in Derbyshire. My mum has fond memories of him telling her as a child that he’d been mining below the house that day (her parents and grandparents lived next door to one another). I mean, that obviously wasn’t true, but it’s really very sweet!

Great grandad Bill was following in his father’s dusty footsteps. William Wood (my great great grandfather) was born in 1879 and died in 1915 at the age of just 36. In that time, he was listed as working as a ‘colliery engine fireman above’ in 1905, a ‘collier fireman’ in 1908 and finally a ‘boiler fireman’ in the electric works in 1911 for the Derby Corporation. He died young in a hit and run. According to rumour, and I guess family legend, folk knew who it was but as they were wealthy they got away with. Folk also say that William was robbed as he lay there in the middle of the road but I have no idea if that’s really true. Elizabeth, his wife, lived over 40 years without him! She was never listed as having a job, but that’s the case for most of the women in the tree.

Moving on, William and Elizabeth’s parents are definitely an interesting bunch. William’s mother and father (my great great great grandparents) are John Wood (1851 – 1909) and Emma Wood nee Morris (1853 – 1929). John is, you guessed it, a coal miner! In fact, he started mining at the age of 10 and then continued to work as a miner for at least the next 20 years. Around the time he started working a new mining act came in that actually raised the working age to 12, several years before that you could find children as young as 4 working in the mines. It isn’t clear what John did in the mine but in particularly narrow spaces that could hold pit ponies, small women and children hauled the coal out on their hands and knees whilst harnessed to a cart. As well as being smaller, women and children were often cheaper than ponies. Younger children around this time were often sat at trap doors used to periodically ventilate deep shafts and passageways as it was reportedly so hot in some parts of the mine that folk worked whilst nearly naked. It’s generally reported that these children spent most of their developmental years in darkness.

At 40 years old John is mercifully back above ground and actually listed as a beer house keeper and licensed victualler (a person licensed to sell alcohol). I don’t know if he owns the pub or manages it, but he’s listed as being the beer house keeper of ‘The Stanhope Arms’ in Castle Gresley until his death in 1909. A few years after John dies it appears that his wife, Emma, has taken over the alcohol license and she is listed as having an off license. She lives with her sons who are all colliers, one of them is a boiler fireman and another works in motor haulage underground, her daughter doesn’t work. That, to me, seems like a pretty badass thing for a woman to be doing around the turn of the century!

So that’s the parents of William Wood but what about the parents of Elizabeth Wood nee Wagstaffe (my other great great great grandparents)? Well, Thomas Wagstaffe (1856 – 1916) was a miner (obviously!) and Catherine Wagstaffe nee Oakes (1856 – 1937) was a miner’s wife…like, she was literally listed as ‘miner’s wife in the 1881 census! The interesting thing, for me, about Thomas Wagstaffe is his clear job progression through the census records. In 1861 he is a young scholar, but by 1871 at the age of 14 he is already working in the mine. In 1881 he is still a coal miner but 10 years later in 1891 he is the colliery deputy. By 1901 he is the colliery under-manager and then on a marriage record for one of his children in 1905 he listed as colliery manager. When he dies at around the age of 60 he leaves £916 to his wife, Catherine, and daughter (Elizabeth – who is also a widow by this point). I used an inflation calculator (I have no idea how accurate those things are) and it suggested that £916 is worth about £80,000 now! I’m not sure how much colliery managers earned annually but it sounds pretty good to me! In addition to that, on the ancestry website somebody has uploaded pictures of Thomas and his wife Catherine. I don’t think I have any way of proving that these people in the photos are really Thomas and Catherine Wagstaffe, but they seemed to have enough money to afford nice clothes and get their photographs taken, so I’m happy to go along with it and accept these photos at face value.

• 

• 

Both Thomas and Catherine’s parents and parent’s parents are, of course, also coal miners…but there are a couple of other interesting nuggets of information here. Thomas’s father, George Wagstaffe, who is my great great great great grandfather not only worked in a mine but perished in one too. Now, coal mines are dangerous places so maybe some of my other ancestors died in mining accidents as well, but for George I have the receipts! Whilst he was working as a loader in one of the pits (coal mines) owned by Crewe Coal and Iron Company he was crushed underneath about 12 tonnes of coal. An inquest was held where they decided it was an accident and that whole incident made the papers. How awful though? It gives me shivers to think of it. …and also, how awful to have been the man that checked the props and declared the tunnel as safe?

The other interesting nugget I found out is that Catherine Wagstaffe nee Oake’s mother, Elizabeth Oakes nee Williams is Welsh. This excites me because finding ancestors that existed outside of the Midlands is like GOLD DUST! It also means that I’m at least 1/64^th Welsh and that’s just delightful. I always thought I had a drop of Celtic blood in there somewhere! Elizabeth was born in Llansanffraid Glan Conwy in Caernarfonshire (North Wales) and I have no idea how she made it over the border to marry an Englishman. In 1851 she was working as a servant in Llynsfaern, Caernarfonshire and it’s possible (although the records were sketchy) that her soon to be husband was also working as a servant, but over the border in Cheshire (don’t worry he later became a miner and returned to the midlands!). Did servants have training? Could they both have met there? Did they have family friends that introduced them? I have so many questions about how these folk met…and met for long enough that they decided to marry! Anyway, I know that Elizabeth’s parents were Ellis Williams and Elizabeth Williams nee Roberts and I really wanted to explore my distant Welsh roots, BUT, it was a total minefield. There are multiple couples called Ellis and Elizabeth Williams who have daughters called Elizabeth in that area of Caernarfonshire AND all of the Ellis’s are farmers or agricultural labourers. It’s insane. I eventually want to have another go at unpicking the records, but it’ll be a mission that I come back to another day.

As I mentioned before, there are still a couple of lines I haven’t finished following from this part of the tree, but I always like to make note of the earliest records and have a little investigate of the time period. At the moment, the earliest records  from this line are of my 11^th great grandparents, John Mather (1634 – ?) and Elizabeth Mather (1636 – 1662) who lived in Staffordshire. This means that they grew up under the rule of Charles 1^st and throughout the English Civil war (Staffordshire supported the parliamentary cause…who ultimately won). The war was one of the catalysts or contributing factors for the worst witch hunt in English history. Luckily for John and Elizabeth the puritanical witch hunting craze didn’t reach as far as Staffordshire. I’m actually reading a book about those witch hunts at the moment so it’s on my mind a lot! They then lived through the period in which England had no reigning monarch and the parliament ruled under Oliver and then Richard Cromwell (1653 – 1659). Oliver Cromwell divides opinion. He’s hailed as the father of English democracy and was celebrated as bringing in a new wave of tolerance (tolerance by 17^th century standards!), which makes him a fairly popular figure in English history. But, he also invaded Ireland and his name in that regard is linked to words like genocide, massacre and ethnic cleansing. The war he led with his ‘New Model Army’ triggered a famine which was then worsened by bubonic plague. Understandably, in Ireland, Cromwell is not a popular historical figure. After living through such an interesting and tumultuous period in history John and Elizabeth died in more peaceful years under the rule of Charles 2^nd. Phew! Anyway, that’s it for this ancestry instalment. On the Worth side I still have my grandad’s mother’s line and my grandad’s father’s line to do and I’m hoping to get these completed this year…so you’ll get two more family Worth blogs whether you want them or not!