Harriet Hall’s family
Harriet married Thomas Wells on 19th
May 1894 at the age of 26. Her address
at the time was 15 Walton Terrace, Wassand Street, Hull. Her father, Edward Hall, is deceased and had
been a plumber and gas fitter by trade.
Three years earlier aged 24, during the 1891 census, she was a servant
at the Hunt household, 36 Margaret Street, Hull. Ten years earlier during the previous census at the age of 14 she
is a domestic servant in a pub called The Crystal Hotel on Waterloo Street in
Hull. At the time other family members
were not faring so well.
Her father had died, aged 44, of
diabetes on 14th May 1880 while resident in the Sculcoates Union
workhouse. He is described as a tinner
and gas fitter. Maybe work was short
and he’d been unable to support the family, or perhaps his diabetes had
prevented him from working. The
following April during the 1881 census while Harriet is working in the Crystal
Hotel, her younger sister, Clara, is resident in the workhouse, listed together
with Thomas Hall age 7 and Minnie Hall aged 5.
Without a proper family context I need Thomas and Minnie’s birth
certificates to determine whether they are family, or whether this is
coincidence, Hall is a common name.
I can’t find Harriet’s mother, Jane
Hall, on the 1881 census. Ten years
later aged 53 she is a domestic servant to Timothy and Alicia Lynch from
Ireland who live on 123 Spring Bank, Hull.
Another ten years later and she is a retired domestic servant in the
workhouse. Jane died on 27th
December 1902 at 61 North Street of a rupture of Aneurysm of Aorta PM. An inquest into her death was held and the
following article appeared in a local paper days a few days later:
“Aged
Hull Woman and Her Relatives
At an inquest on Saturday evening as
to the death of an aged widow, Jane Hall, the Hull Coroner made some strong
remarks with respect to the action of relatives who had left the deceased to
earn her own living. It appeared that
the woman had three sons and four daughters.
Five of the children were married, and yet the woman had been left to go
into the workhouse when she could not work, and had actually died at a lodging
house. The deceased had been
insured. The Coroner added that he
hoped the parish in which the woman died would make the family pay the cost of
the funeral. The Coroner also intimated
that would communicate with the Clerk of the Hull Guardians (Mr Winter) on the
matter.”
This paints the
sad picture of a lonely end to Jane’s life and is another example of how
difficult life was for widows in Victorian times. The Coroner is less than complimentary on the support Jane
received from her children, however they may not have had the means to support
their mother. Jane had life insurance
which I find remarkable for someone who had endured such poverty for over
twenty years minimum. She clearly didn’t
want to be a burden on her children who already, no doubt, had enough mouths to
feed. For example, Harriet had four
children the eldest of which was seven.
The
article tells us that Jane had three sons and four daughters, so either Thomas
and Minnie were not Edward and Jane’s children, or two of their children
died.
Edward
and Jane were married for 24 years before Edward died. Their wedding took place on 5th
May 1856 at the Catholic Chapel on Jarrett Street, later to become St Charles
Church. Their first daughter was born
later that same year, not as unusual as you might think in Victorian England. I assume the Catholic faith came from Jane’s
mother, Mary, who was Irish. The Catholic
faith was lost somewhere along the way because Harriet’s grandson, Edwin, was raised
in the Church of England and converted to Catholicism as an adult.
Edward and Jane were both born in
Hull, but as already mentioned Jane’s mother was Irish. The potato famine was in the early 1840s and
Jane was born in Hull in 1838 so Mary wasn’t a potato famine refugee.
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