This one’s for Lolly, a fellow genealogist who wondered if I ever blog about my family history research.
When you do genealogical research, let’s be honest, you’re hoping to find a murderer or two in your lineage. Or, anyone who lived an extraordinary life whether it were famous or infamous. Otherwise, one ancestor tends to meld into another and, well, ho hum. As a writer, I’m always on the lookout for the interesting, the odd, the distinguishing. And I’ve recently found one.
Bessie Carroll was born in the summer of 1908, Toronto. She was four years younger than her sister Minnie. Bessie and Minnie’s mother died of septicaemia when Bessie was just eight years old leaving their father, Frank (early coach of the pre-Maple Leafs hockey team, Toronto Blue Shirts), a widower with two young girls to raise. He married again a couple years later and three more children joined the family.
Bessie was the second wife of my father’s biological father, Frank MacDonald. Years before Frank and Bessie met, Bessie had been incarcerated for manslaughter. She was sixteen. But that’s not even the most interesting part. I went down a rabbit hole of research about the legal incarceration of girls and women in Ontario for offences like hanging around outside. Or, dressing like a man. Or, and this is real, “chronic intemperance”.
I learned all about industrial jail farms for incorrigible women and the parents who sent their young girls there to straighten them out. Perhaps knowing or not that abuses abounded. Physical and sexual assault. Medical experimentation. Food deprivation. Not to mention good old fashioned emotional neglect. This was a time in our history when women of any age could be incarcerated on the whims of parents, spouses, and the courts. This was also a time when the eugenics movement thrived. Poverty, low morals, and just being female were all good reasons to consider and perform involuntary sterilizations.
One newspaper article about Bessie led me to another and another. Soon, I was onto books and articles and archives. I’m a dog with a bone when it comes to research. I now have so many women’s stories to write about, not just in my own family but possibly also in yours.
Do you do genealogical research? Found any interesting stories that reflect the times in which your ancestor lived? Let me know! And stay tuned for more of Bessie’s story.
Oh, yes the skeletons are there!
My sister is the Ancestory.com expert but we have a relative who, when she was 16, was transported from England to Australia for the crime of stealing a handkerchief from the laundry she was doing. Sent alone.across the world to be in servitude for 25 years. We traced when she was pardoned and that she finally married and had children, and so, we hope she had a bit of happiness in her life as well.
Love your idea of following these stories of real people, from the past. I am so done with today's celebrity hype!