Raising the Dead - Behind the Scenes of Bad Women

subject has for me started to feel instinctive. But there's a method to all of this, a logical way of putting the pieces together and of using sources to revive lost stories. Researchers and historians are fundamentally detectives. What we do in the archives and libraries can be absolutely rilling, holmsy and feats of discovery, chasing clues from one collection to the next, sometimes across the country, sometimes across the world.

I've often said to people who love reading crime fiction and murder mysteries that they would equally loved being a historian, or, as in the case of Kate Healy, a genealogist reconstructing the lives of the women in this podcast series has been an enormous task, and Kate's helps us with the work.

She's got over thirty years of experience in the field of genealogy, and she assisted us by building out the family trees of the victims of the Black Out Ripper, as well as of Rachel Dobkin, Doris Staples, Kathleen Patmore, and Marjorie Stephens, the wife of Gordon Cummins. Her expertise has enriched our understanding of where these women came from and of who they were. Today, Kate's joining us for a special bonus episode of Bad Women to tell us

all about her work as a professional genealogist. Kate, Welcome to the show. Hello, So, Kate, I wonder if you can start by telling us what does the genealogists do in a nutshell? Well, the term genealogy is actually referring to the study of lines of descent carried out for wealthy families to establish inheritance of land or titles. But what we do is more family history, and over the time the two terms have become interchangeable. Some people use

the analogy of a tree. The branches of a tree are the family members, and then you'll add the foliage for the information about the family, what they did, their relations. So essentially, you're gathering lots of raw data about when and where people lived through their birth records, through their marriage records, through their death certificates. And that's material that we use on bad women. But hallet, do you want to talk a little bit about how genealogy and wider

historical context interact. Yeah, what Kate is doing is going and almost putting pins in a map of places where we knew people were all incidents in their lives and dates when we knew things happened that turn up on the records, and then you can fill in the blanks around that. And that's I think where history and genealogy

intersect and helped create a much bigger picture. So, for example, Kate was fantastic and helping us put together Evelyn Oatley story and for me personally, I found that one of the most emotive stories from season two because we were able to come up with so much information about it, not only her, but her mother, Rasina, and Rasina's experiences coming from Germany and living in the UK and what it was like during the First World War and how she lived with a German community at a time when

Germans were persecuted. There was this upsurgeon germanophobia and the butcher shop she was living above as attacked. So we have a very intimate understanding of where Evelyn came from and her mother's experiences. So what a genials just brings to it, it's fundamentally important. It's the first step in

reconstructing a life. What we're saying is that that data we get through genealogy about where people are born, where they live, who they marry, where they work, together with wider context, those are essentially complimentary building blocks when it comes to creating a historical narrative. And it strikes me that what we don't see in those official records can also be important and can also work alongside wider historical context to tell us about a person. I think the

example of Evelyn Otle is a really poignant one. As you say, Hallie, we know from the police reports and the witness statements after she dies that she has this very full, very animated life in London. She's got lots of friends, there are clubs and bars she likes to go to, she works there, she's got a client base. At one point she's allegedly engaged to another man. If you look at the official records of her life, none

of that appears. If you just looked at the nineteen thirty nine register, you would think that she was a housewife living on a poultry farm in a bungalow near Blackpool. So this is an example of how we need sources beyond what those records can tell us. In this case, it comes in the form of witness testimony from her husband, Harold,

and from friends, acquaintances, clients. But the fact that none of that appears on the official record, and the fact that also that life in Soho is embedded in a particular type of counterculture, contributes to the sense that she's keeping secrets, that she's hiding things, that she's living a double life. And so when you put all of that together, what we do know what is officially recorded with what is flying under the radar, her story almost becomes more

than the some of its parts. Yeah, absolutely are very fortunate in Evelyn's case in that we did have a lot of disparate sources to draw from. And this is why people who were involved in crimes are such brilliant material for historians, because there's press coverage, and then there's a whole other layer of records, court records and various

criminal records and things like that. That means that you can really dig into these people's lives, the witness examinations, and you can get intimate details of what somebody was doing precisely, almost like every hour of a particular day. And so with Evelyn we had some of that, We had newspaper reports, and that really means that we can piece together that life. But in many cases, you get

glimpses into lives and then that's it. It's like this window opens and then it shuts again, and you have a partial bit of a life, and it makes you wonder and it makes you think, and it makes you desperately want to know more. Why did that person immigrate, Why did that person marry that person? Why did that person walk out on that person? And sometimes you don't have the answers, and that can be as scintillating as

actually even finding them. And as you mentioned earlier, Pari, part of the appeal of historical research is for both of us. I think that element of detective work of getting those glimpses and then seeing what you can work out about what went on in their life in between following the clues. Kate, what's the appeal for you of

genealogical research and how did you get into genealogy. Well, I first got into it when I was a child and my mum's family came from Scotland, although she was raised in England, and my mum inherited my great granddad's World War One medals, and that led me to want to learn more about him and more about the Scottish side of the family, and so I then embarked on a quest to try and find out about that side

of the family. A lot of genealogical research can be done online now, But you were going to physical archives, weren't you. Now a lot of it is online and it's amazingly useful. You can do a lot of it from your living room. But yes, but then it was visiting local or national archives to dig out records and to view original certificates and censuses to find the information. And what was that like for you? Going and reading around in libraries and archives. It is fascinating, but it

can also be quite daunting and intimidating. A lot of the archives have now moved to more modern family history centers as the hobby has become a lot more popular. But many years ago they were big, dusty archives and you can imagine someone behind the desk saying, yes, what do you want and you feel quite intimidated by all these big old documents around you. But now it is so much more welcoming and there's often people to help you. And what did you find out about your family in Scotland?

One brunch was quite surprising. My great great grandfather he was a fisherman in a little village and I discovered that he drowned at sea. There was a hurricane and the boat overturned and that left my great great grandmother a widow with a five year old, and my great grandmother who was one and it just makes you feel so sad and want to find out how they survived. And because it was such a small village, everybody was related to each other and intermarriage, and so it would

have impacted the whole community. And in fact, ten years after, another huge hurricane killed a lot more. It gives a huge sense of perspective. It certainly does. The cottages that my great grandparents lived in, the little Fisherman's cottages and now actually holiday lets. So we went and visited and stayed in there. And now, of course they're nice and centrally heated, but you can imagine the coal fire and in a home from a fishing trip, all wet and

dripping and all living in practically one room. It does bring it home and easily we have it now. So what was their quite small home that they worked really hard to have and we're probably quite proud of, has now become a leisure space basically, which shows us how much society has changed that. You know, I went with

my children. They're playing on the rocks that were the danger to the fisherman that fish there doing a piece of historical research, it's really like solving a puzzle that sort of gradually reveals itself, or you're moving the pieces, you're trying solutions out, and the more clues you gather, the more suggesting themselves to you. In a sense. Just thinking of an example again from Evelyn Oatley's story, you identified in the census Kate that Walter Judd was absent

in nineteen eleven, Walter Judd being Evelyn Oatley's father. No, we couldn't find him at all. These on the census but did manage to find him on an electoral register the year before, so we assume he's in the area, but it could be that he was sleeping rough that night, or he was maybe in prison. What happens quite often is he has been mistranscribed and just can't be found

because his name's been put down wrong. I think what was curious at the same time was that whilst Walter Judd was absent and couldn't be found, his wife, Rosina and their two young children, Herman aged roughly five, and Evelyn, aged roughly three, were all living apart. So Rosina was working for a German butcher and herman Evelyn were boarding out,

which means they were being fostered. Yeah, that's true. I managed to find Evelyn first living with another family boarding out as you say, and then I discovered her brother was with her as well. But then of course that raises the question where's her mother, And it did take me a bit of digging to find her mother. She was again mistranscribed as Rye jud but with the knowledge now that she was from Germany, we could be quite

content that we got the correct person. But yeah, it was quite surprising to find her away from her children, obviously trying to make ends meet working for another family and having to put her children out to fostering. I got a bit hooked on this mystery, actually wondering what circumstances could have given rise to this. How have we ended up with this absent father, this mother living a few streets away from her children working, and then these

children living with another family. And as you say, there was no sign of Walter anywhere on the official records at that point. In compliment to your work, Kate, I started digging around in the newspaper archives looking for Walter and found that before he had his children, he'd been involved in strikes. So the taxiles industry is very big

in the local area. There were strikes over pay and working conditions, and in the late nineteen hundreds, Walter was named in an article as participating, and he actually got a conviction for doing some damage to someone's property. You know, that doesn't tell us where he is in nineteen eleven. But then we start to build out a bit of a profile of Walter, he starts to seem like a bit of a rabbel rouser. Could he be a bit

of a troublemaker? You wonder what impact that conviction could have had on him, his work prospects, his employment, things like that. Then off the back of that article, I found a second article which said he'd actually threatened a local landlady. He threatened to cut her throat, and he used other abusive language towards her. He'd been drinking, And here in this article we learned that he's got eight previous convictions, and that starts to cast what seemed like

just rebellious behavior in a slightly different light. Now he's not just a rabbel rouser. There seems to be something a bit darker to him. There's violence. Is he violent towards his family? And so Kate, you and I discussed that, and we wondered if maybe he could be in prison at the time of the nineteen eleven census and looked at the records, couldn't find him. But then a third article from nineteen ten starts to illuminate the picture even more.

Rosina Weber, his wife, Evelyn's mother, has summoned Walter to court for a separation order. He's again absent, but we learned there that he's incredibly difficult to live with. He's stolen a truck and sold it. He's routinely out of work, and Rosina is so desperate that she lays out this plan that we then see materialize in nineteen eleven. Her plan is that she will get a job and her children will go into foster care because she cannot live with her husband anymore. He's not holding up his end

of the bargain. He's not being the breadwinner he's supposed to be. And so, no, we still don't know where he is in nineteen eleven. But by building a profile of him and by following those clues, we've been able to elucidate a bit more of the picture of what's going on with this family. With this type of research, you begin with what feels like these infinite narrative branches.

Is Walter abroad, who knows what's happened. But you know, the more research you do, the more those branches start to Now, I just wonder what both of your experiences are of this, Hally, Can you talk about that at all? Oh gosh, you know, when you start out on one of these journeys, you never know what you're going to

find and what you're describing. I have gone through countless times and I'm sure Kate has even more, for example, trying to eliminate somebody from the record, or referring back to season one, when I was researching Annie Chapman's family and George Smith. Can you think of a name more common than George Smith? Trying to find a George Smith

in the record. So in season one we were looking at the lives of the victims of Jack the Ripper, and of course Annie Chapman was Jack Rippers second victims, had a very full life before she became second victim, and George Smith was her father, so she began life as Annie Smith. Yes, also a very common name, that's right, absolutely, and in fact looking for George Smith was difficult. But what did help was that he was in the army,

so we could find army records. But you had to look through everything and then narrow it down and narrow it down. The thing is, then once you've got purchase on a bit of information which you know is pretty much water tight, then that can open other doors for you. We know. According to an article that appeared written allegedly by Annie Chapman's sister after her death, she gave a number of details about their childhood and One of the details she gave was, our father committed suicide by cutting

his throat. God, that's really that's awful. That's got to appear in the record somewhere. And of course we couldn't find, well whatever reason, a death certificate or any death registration for George Smith. But eventually what I did find was a small news item which opened up a whole story surrounding his death, which was truly shocking and sad. That

he was working as a gentleman's valet in Wales. He was traveling with this man he was working for in a particular regiment, and he cut his throat one morning and it was in the newspaper. It was a little tiny article in the newspaper. Oh my god, that's just extraordinary. And that was obviously the right George. That was George Smith. So these little bits come together. Newspapers are very useful that sometimes they're unreliable, but they are incredibly useful for

the historian. You're listening to a bonus episode of Bad Women, all about genealogy. They'll be back after this short break. Okay, what about you? If you need to find a needle in a haystack, how do you embark on that type of research project, where do you begin looking for a person. Going back to Walter Judd, it was only later that we've managed to discover his character. When I started to research him, one of the first things I came across was his pension records that stated that he had been

injured in World War One. It actually suffered a gunshot wound to the arm. You start then to think, oh, poor Walter. When he couldn't be found in some of the records, you think maybe he's suffering, So you're feeling sorry for the man, and coming from a military background myself, knowing people who have suffered in post traumatic stress and

gone through hard times. It was only later that you then discover a bit more about his character and you think, oh, yes, well he was troubled before the war and court martialed as well. So it just shows that you really do have to use lots of different sources to build out a picture of the person and a family and not just rely on one sort. The census, though, can be an absolute treasure trave of, can't. It's the official survey of a population, and in Britain and the US it's

taken every ten years. It's a good starting point, isn't it. So what can the census reveal? Kate? Yes, well, I love SENSUSS because they are great. I love them too, Kate, that's something we share. They are amazing, aren't Oh? Yeah, they are. They are a snapshot of one night every ten years. But the amount of information you can get

just from that, it is amazing. Who's in the family, what children they have, and then when you move on ten years, if children are missing, what's happened to those children? Have they died or if one of the spouses has died, we can go to look for their death record, and then quite often, certainly it's happened in my family that I've discovered a complete new branch of a family because there's a border staying with them with a name that

I've not come across before. But if you dig into them, they might actually be a cousin or an uncle, and that can lead you in a completely different branch of the tree. Hally, what about you, Why do you love the census? Oh? My gosh, I love the census so much because I think at first glance, to the untrained eye, the census is just what is this? This is somebody's name,

and what is this telling me? But as a historian, it tells you so much that you can just unpack and unpack and unpack, and then with every bit that you take out of the census, you can build onto that to their ask for everybody who lives at a particular address or in a particular building, who the head of the family is, all of the names, where they're from, what their occupations are, how old they are, if they're married, if they're single, if they're widowed, and sometimes other bits

of information creep in as well. It depends who the enumerators. And sometimes and I've come across a census and is the Jackson family? And somebody had written in scrawled into the margin, miss Jackson did not sleep at home last night, And you think, oh my goodness, what was that about? Something happened there. But the amazing thing about the census is it's not just the family you're looking at, but

it's also who lives around these people. So what type of house are they living in, Who are the people who live next door to them, who live upstairs from them, what do they do? Gives you a sense of a social class. And then again one of the fascinating things about the census is that you can actually overlay this information onto a map, both contemporary maps and also modern maps.

So to be able to see the type of neighborhood that somebody lived in and the type of neighbors they had and what the surroundings were like is really important in understanding what their lives would have been like, what were the local shops like, how crime ridden was it? And so again you're getting this layering effect and all of this. So the census is the starting point. You just grow it and grow it. You get this tremendous picture.

And sometimes people can inadvertently reveal things about themselves, can't they in the way they choose to make entries in the census. I'm thinking of the gain Another example pertaining to Annie Chapman from season one, when her husband describes himself on the census as a coachman and she describes him as a stud groom, which is a slightly righer ranking class. Or talk a little bit about that. You know, if you're looking with a historian's eye, you're looking for nuance,

and that is a perfect example of that. So John, her husband, who were at Saint Leonard's Hill, where he worked at that time when the census was being taken. He told the enumerator that his title was a coachman.

And Annie Chapman was at that point staying with her mother in London when the enumerator came round and said that her husband was a stud groom, and a stud groom held a very esteemed position within a gentleman's house in the countryside because he managed the racing stock, and he would have had a relatively intimate relationship with the master of the house, which would have put him in

a position above many other servants. This disparity is very interesting because it shows aspiration, and it shows how Annie saw her life and saw her husband and how he saw the realities of his life, and it makes you wonder what was really going on there. There was a lot of middle class aspiration, that's for sure, but it's very intriguing. So even on a document like the census that appears to be quite black and white, there are

things we can read between the lines. There's a lot we can read between the lines, and that's one of the joys of it. And in fact, every time you look at a source, it answers questions, but it asks further questions. This is what I mean by a sort of Holmsy and Chase. It's uncovering clues and you're finding stuff that you didn't know about, and then you have to answer those questions, which leads you somewhere else. And you actually, again, thinking of season one, you made some

really quite surprising discoveries. Didn't you that if we just heeded the census might not have been apparent? Yeah? Absolutely, And this again came from that same letter about Annie's childhood and her background. One of the things that her sister said was effectively that she went into a rehab center because she was an alcoholic. I thought, God, that's really amazing. This was in mid eighteen eighties, and I started researching, Well, we're worth these places? How many were there?

And I created a list and narrowed it down. Can see to about a handful I think maybe three that she could have been at. And then I traced the records for a spell Thorne sanitorium to a convent of Protestant nuns just outside of Oxford, and I'll just get in touch and let's see what that turns up. And remarkably, one of the sisters got back to me and she said, we do have these uncataloged log books from the time. Do you want to come and have a look at them?

And I thought, oh God, yeah, of course. And I remember that day going out. It was a beautiful summer's day, driving out into the countryside with swaying poppies and big butterflies, and going to this rather secluded romantic convent and being taken to this library, and the sister brought this archived box out and put these ledgers down, and I just knew. I knew I was going to find her in it. I knew it. And I opened up these books and

I'm going through it, and there it was. It was Missus Chapman was brought into by her two sisters, and the date was right, and then Missus Chapman's taken home to Windsor and various of the little entries, and it was just so gratifying to be able to see that nobody had seen that, nobody knew it was there. It's

not cataloged, and sometimes everything aligns like that. For me, when I learned Auntie Chapman's story, that detail about being in a sanatorium made it even more tragic because when you look at the word of context about those sanatoria and the approach to quote unquote treatment there, you start to understand just how little society at the time understood about addiction. Alcoholism and drunkenness in particular were seen as shameful.

They were an example of moral failing. But at these sanatoria women were expected to do feminine activities, to get fresh air, to exercise, to embroider. The idea is that you can be cured from your alcoholism by being reminded of your feminine duties. There's no dealing with the root cause, and us shows that Annie never really had a chance, and so that one detail you found about the fact that this was where she ended up, when you couple it with what we can learn about these institutions, just

makes our story so much more poignant. I think, Kate, were there any really surprising moments for you, any twists and turns like this In your research of the women in our series. You often hope that her family is going to be quite straightforward, that they're going to live with their parents and go through life and marry and

go on. But in the case of Catherine Mulcahey, when I discovered that she was orphaned at the age of eleven, questions of who then looked after her, And what I found surprising was that the grandmother was receiving payment as guardian for the children. But the grandmother was named as a Phoebe Jones, and this was a complete a new name.

So then I had to look into who Phoebe Jones was, and then that led to finding more out about Catherine's father and discovering that he was actually born out of wedlock and his mother was Phoebe Jones, and that's quite unusual for a child to be raised by the father's parents. One of my favorite subjects as a historian is the stories people tell about themselves versus what the records say

about how people really lived. And one of the interesting things that Kate's picked up on about Kavin McCarthy's life is that she came from a family with a kind of very mixed background. There was a lot of illegitimacy, and illegitimacy is hidden, but it often comes out in the records. Birth records are fascinating for that uncover these family secrets. You think that somebody, somebody's cousin and they're

actually their brother. It's happened in my own family, where I think my great grandmother had so many children that she gave one of her sons to her sister to raise and he never knew that he actually belonged to somebody else. And that happens so frequently, and it really

comes out in these records. We tend to think they'd be Victorians, when Eduardians are all very straight laced and well had illegitimate children left right and center, people had mixed families and deaths and remarriage, people working much closer to death and tragedy than we can even imagine in the modern world. And that becomes very apparent in these records, and you stumble across these family secrets and it's a revelation, but also I think you need to tread very carefully

because it is somebody's history. And of course, as an example of illegitimacy in our story in season two of Bad Women, isn't there in the form of Doris Joanne, who is raised by her aunt and her mother and who never knows her father, although she does invent one on her marriage certificate. Kate, do you ever find that you come across family secrets in your work, Yes, certainly,

illegitimacy is the main one you do come across. And a lot of people will think, don't know any cases of illegitimacy in my family, but you can guarantee there's always one lurking around somewhere. Every client is different and

how they might react to that news. The older generation might be a bit more touchy and upset about it, because along with all of that is you know something that isn't picked up in the records, but is part of life experience, certainly in the past today as well, is shame, absolutely crippling shame that people experienced around these things. It comes out both in season one and season two

of The Women's Lives. We looked at absolutely and because there's so much secrecy surrounding this issue of illegitimacy, it won't be spoken about, so there are silences in the records. In Doris's case, we looked too a proxy to try and understand what she might have experienced. One who has spoken about being called a quote unquote bastard is the prolific British writer Katherine Cookson, who came from a similar area to Doris and who's written about her experiences and

the stigma that she bore. So we were lucky to find that, but often these things do remain covered up. You're listening to a bonus episode of Bad Women all about genealogy. Will be back shortly. I'd love to talk a bit more about the women from season one and season two. Were there any kind of particular sources or moments in your research, Kate that helps you really connect with these women and made you feel that you understood

them a bit more. Yes. In the case of Kathleen Patmore, I was lucky enough to read the police report and it really gives you an insight into her life and her personality. So Kathleen Patmore was of course a victim that we looked at in our final episode, whose husband murdered her when he returned home from war. Yes, we're not usually privy to police reports, but once you delve into it, parts of it quite harrowing. Knowing what happened to Kathleen and the reputation that was attributed to her.

Reading those witness statements, it made me quite angry what they were saying about her, and she wasn't there to defend herself. The fact that she was pregnant whilst her husband was away in the army shows that she was unfaithful, but the way that they went on about her and her behavior with the soldiers, and then to top it off, the police inspector practically opened the report by saying, it is clear that this woman is immoral and brought it

on herself, and it really did make me angry. On Kathleen's behalf, I felt the same, and I think you know, we've worked with a police documents on this series and prosecution files, and they're complex to work with because, on the one hand, you can hear the voices of the people who were in the lives of the person that you are studying and trying to understand. Sometimes you can hear them reporting their speech and it can feel as though your subject is reaching across space and time to you.

But on the other hand, they are filtered through a very powerful institution in the form of the police. Sometimes they're doubly filtered because if it's a witness reporting speech, you have their voice layered on top of the original speech, and then their voice has been elicited by the questions of the police officer who actually is invisible. We don't

see those questions. But the story that the witness is telling has been extracted very carefully by someone who knows exactly what they're doing, and who isn't necessarily as you've just illuminated, Kate impartial. They may well bring their own prejudices to the matter. Allie, I wonder if you can tell us a bit about any experiences you've had with the voices of the women that you're studying. One of the things that I set out to do as a historian is to try to restore voices to the voice list,

so the people who've been written out of history. Through the various techniques that we've described, there are ways in which if you cannot resurrect a person and hear their voice directly, you can create an outline of that person, so you have an idea of what their preferences are, what sort of experiences they had, and Matt gives us something towards understanding who those individuals were. Often women's voices,

especially poor women, or they dispossessed. Their voices just are absent from a record because men are speaking for them, authorities are speaking for them. As you said, with the police for example, with the victims of Jack the Ripper, they're very few occasions where we have somebody's actual words that they spoke recorded, and one of them was Polly Nichols.

And interestingly, towards the very end of Polly's life, you can trace all of the various places she went to because she was in and out of workhouses and casual wards and they tend to keep quite good records. I

was looking through something which were called settlement examinations. So when you went into a workhouse, they tried to determine whether you actually belonged in that parish or not, because you're accepting charity, and if you don't live in that area, they don't want you there, so they'll send you on to where you're from. So what they do is they question you of trying to figure out where you're actually from and where you can be shunted onto. Nichols turns

up at the Hulburn Union. They want to find out where she belongs. Her answers are written verbatim. They're written, as I used to live in the Peabody buildings on Stamford Street and Lambeth. What was it like for your reading that it was Wow, it just jumped off the page because here she is speaking for herself in the

midst of this very regimented, very bureaucratic structure. Here was the voice of a workhouse inmate, you've both touched on how in the course of your work you might learn about family secrets before the actual families themselves might know them. It seems as though there's a huge amount of ethical responsibility that goes along with what you both do. I wondered if you could talk about that a bit, Daddy,

do you want to start. Yeah, Like, for example, in the work I'm doing now, which was about the murder of Bill Elmore by doctor Crippin in nineteen ten, I have been trying to find the descendants of his first wife, who died in very mysterious circumstances in Salt Lake City, and her family was originally from Ireland. I was actually working with a genealogist to try to find out where these relatives ended up, and she located this branch of the family in the United States, and I thought, oh,

that's interesting, how did that happen? And then I started looking into this daughter of the brother of Crippen's first wife and found out when she came over to the United States, and I was surprised how much I could find out about her, the name of the ship she was on, where she settled, who she married. And I suddenly felt really embarrassed because I then had to talk to this woman's daughter on the phone and she was telling me about her mother, and I was saying, yeah,

I know, yeah, I know. Oh God, I shouldn't say that because it feels so intrusive, and you realize the sort of power that you have, and the power that these records have, and how delicately you should be handling this material and this information because it is somebody's life that people alive care about today. Kate, how do you feel when you end up in the position of learning people's secrets and how do you regard the ethical responsibilities

in the role of genealogists. Well, yes, you do have to be careful and make people aware that they might find things that they were not expecting and that might be upsetting, particularly if you're dealing with more recent families. And I actually tried to die away from any adoptions or living relatives because I think that really does need a specialist. I do say to people, I only deal with dead people. I've recently traced a family and they've

got some minor criminals in the family. That personnel I found fascinating and really quite amusing. I'm going to have to be careful with how I present the information. And then, of course you also get the situation that people are convinced that they are related to somebody. They've been told this family story, particular one that being from the Midlands,

I get people who think they're related to Shakespeare. I had to tell somebody that the family that you thought you were related to, you're actually not related to anyway, because of illegitimacy. They'd done this whole big family tree and it turned out that they weren't actually part of that family. Of course, it was quite disappointing, but not

too upsetting, hopefully. What advice would you give to aspiring genealogists, Kate, Well, the first thing we always say if you want to look into your family history is to speak to your living relatives before it's too late. Find out as much as you can about their history, about their parents, their grandparents, and dig out any family records you've got, certificates, birth certificates, anything,

and particularly when you are talking to. Your family is not just about the dates and places, it's family stories of your parents growing up. I speak from experience that my mother died recently, but luckily we did share the love of family history together, so I did make a point of trying to ask her questions about her family. And those stories are invaluable because I'll never learn them once they've gone. But if you want to pursue it, there's certainly lots of help out there. There's lots of

good books, online courses. Then you've got the ancestry and pharmo passed websites and other subscription websites that are fantastic, and you have to use due diligence and check your sources and cite your sources. We're talking about the birth certificates, the marriagetificates, the censuses. If you do a bit of digging down into some of these trees, you can find some glaring errors. You'll have a man who's died and

then father children a few years later. And I think that's possibly why historians may give genealogy a bad rep and think that we're almost hobbyists doing it online. But as long as you are going to do diligence to make sure you're sources are correct, then I think the stories are worth telling. I think you've hit upon something really important there, which is that some people do under value genealogy. They might think it's not rigorous, they might

see it as backward looking. Why are these microhistories, the types of stories that you uncover through your work, both of you so important. Well, first, I wanted to address this snobbery around genealogy, which I think is very misplaced, and that comes from a larger problem within history, which is defining what is history, and this idea that history is only the history of the great and the good,

which is totally antiquated. And you speak to any academic in any history department in the world and they will say that is not working definition of what history is. Histories, all the nooks and crannies and niches, and in that

the work of the genealogist is absolutely key. Yeah, I would agree with that history does often focus on the great deeds of men, doesn't it on politicians and leaders, not the ordinary people who are actually subjected to the follies of those politicians and those leaders whose lives slip through the cracks you mentioned earlier, Halle, this idea of

giving voices back to the voiceless. If we don't try to exhume those lives, if we don't try to imagine their experiences, recreate them, walk in their footsteps, then we let those voices be silent. We conspire in that silence. We conspire in the silence. We conspire in the prevailing prejudices too. Kate, what do you think about all of that? Why is genealogy so important because the ordinary person is the history of the country. That they are the people

that have made the country what it is. I remember studying history at school and learning about the Poor Law and the Factory Act and things like that, and it was all quite dry. But then when you look at your own families or other people's families, and you can see these laws actually having an impact on people's lives.

Particularly using where I'm from as an example from Birmingham, a lot of families were that working class person working in the factories, living in these back to back homes, but they're the ones that fuel the growth of the city. History doesn't cover these people generally, but it's all of our histories and knowing about how our ancestors lived. Certainly, for me, I think it puts my life into perspective.

This is the true value of history, Kate, And what genealogy helps us get closer to is that very fundamental human experience, individual lives. And I think if history serves a purpose, it's to we connect us with those human experiences to inform our own experiences to understand all of this better. And that's really what we should be focusing on. Kate. I wonder if you have any wider reflections on the research you've done for us on bad women, or if

there's anything you'll take away more generally. I think certainly I got the feeling that all of the women were very strong, independent women. They tried to forge their own way in life despite their not backs, usually by men, And well, it's been a privilege to get to know them personally. Same here me too. But the sad thing is knowing that things haven't really changed much, that these issues are still going on today. A woman walking home from the pub late at night being blamed for being

attacked because she shouldn't have been there. It's just sad that things haven't really moved on. Kate Healy, thank you very much for joining us. It's my pleasure. That's it from us. But if you're interested in finding out more about Kate's work, or even engaging her services, you might like to check out her website www. Dot Oakwood Family Trees dot co Hey