The theme for Week 24 is 'Hard Times', and every family has seen them, some more than others. Early deaths, lack of work, accidents and misfortune happen in most families at some time, although for poorer families hard times certainly hit harder and more frequently. My own family is no exception.
Just last week, in response to 'Health', I wrote about two of my great great grandfathers being committed to insane asylums late in life, likely suffering some form of dementia. I have also written about my maternal grandfather William Pummeroy, whose father died of pneumonia when he was only a month old, leaving behind a widow and 4 young children in desperate straits. William and his brother would eventually be surrendered to the state while their mother struggled on with their two sisters, but only after their mother had made a desperate plea for help at the local magistrate's court, where the three magistrates would grant her 10 shillings from the poor box.
Over the years of my researching, I have found a number of my ancestors, especially those who worked as agricultural labourers, at some stage found themselves facing hard times in the workhouse.
People ended up in the workhouse for a variety of reasons, usually because they were too poor, old or ill to support themselves. This may have resulted from a lack of work during periods of high unemployment, or someone having no family willing or able to provide care for them when they became elderly or sick. For the working poor, saving money to support themselves in their old age was often impossible, with wages only covering the bare minimum. For come, the dreaded workhouse was the only recourse available to them.
Did any of your ancestors find themselves in a workhouse? Want to know
more about the conditions and how workhouses operated? Here are a few
sites for information about and records of workhouses.
- The Victorian Workhouse
- Workhouse records
- Union Workhouse
- London Workhouses
- The Changing Face of the Workhouse
