Following the female lines has become the most important part of this family history research, though I didn't plan it that way. I just got drawn in to these 19th century and early 20th century women's lives, mainly through the census returns. While in some cases the men in my family tree were absent from home and hard to find, the women, usually more settled in one place, bringing up the children, were there on the census.
The photos on this page, from around the 1920s, come from the family collection, though I'm not quite sure who these ladies are.
This seems rather fitting, as in the historical records, the women are less visible than the men, and sometimes harder to trace, giving up their names when they marry, usually not shown as having a trade or profession on the census returns.
The history I was taught at school didn't seem to include women either, unless they were the queen.
My family history research has given me a clearer picture of many aspects of my female ancestors' lives. I know that childbirth was something most of my 19th century female ancestors experienced every two years or so, through their childbearing years. I know that two of my ancestors died in childbirth, in the later part of the 19th century. It seems too that in the early part of the 20th century one of my female ancestors apparently couldn't handle being a mother and a wife, and ran away.
I have no writings, no letters, no diaries, to shed any light on what they thought about motherhood, or anything else.
I know that in the middle part of the 20th century, my mother wanted to be a teacher, but she had to leave school at fourteen, and instead settle for working in the Smith and Nephew factory in Hull, in the production line for sanitary towels. Her father, presumably reflecting the general attitude of his peers, didn't think girls were worth educating. When my sister and I went to university in the late 20th century we went with the knowledge that we had opportunities denied to our female ancestors.
During my grandmother's childhood, women were campaigning for the vote. No doubt Doris, born in the first decade of the 20th century, just before the vote for women was won, was aware of its importance. Even when disabled with MS, in the 1940s, she made sure she went to the polling station - my mother remembers pushing her there in her wheelchair. (Sadly, sixty years on, many of us can't get ourselves to the polling stations even when we have full use of our legs.)
Compiling these pages has reiterated for me, in a very personal way, how lucky I am, how lucky we are, compared to the women of earlier generations. Compared to having no control over our fertility, no education and no vote.