Tag: Joseph Truelove

In Search of Uncle Joe

Joseph Truelove 1860
British Newspaper archive, Find My Past

On the front page of the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, Monday 26 November 1860, between a notice about a Full Dress Assembly at the Bath Saloon and an invitation from the new landlord of the Newcastle Arms comes this notice from my great, great, great uncle Joseph Truelove that from that date forward he’s not going to be responsible for his wife Mary’s debts.

Joseph had a colourful life. He had married Mary Tinker twelve years earlier on Christmas Eve 1848 at Sheffield Parish Church. By 1860 they were both in their early thirties and evidently the marriage wasn’t going smoothly. Unfortunately things were going to get worse.

I don’t have a photograph of Joseph and Mary but here’s his elder brother, William, born 1825, my great, great grandfather.

1895 Joseph’s brother William, born 1825, (centre), with my great grandad George Swift on his left and his wife, my great grandma, William’s daughter Sarah Ann standing behind him. On William’s right Joseph’s nephew, another Joseph Truelove with his wife Mary Jane standing behind him.

A ‘Curious Charge of Assault’

By 1868 Joseph was away in America and Mary was, according to the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, living with George Baxter, a beerhouse keeper in Attercliffe. Bringing a charge of assault against him, Mary claimed that Baxter had assaulted her and had threatened to shoot her. A servant girl from the beerhouse and a woman who Mary called as a witness denied that George had ever used violence towards Mary.

As Mary had called the unnamed woman as a witness, presumably to back up her claims, I can’t help wondering if someone had persuaded the woman to change her story.

Attempted Murder

By Wednesday 26 October 1870 we know that Mary was back with Joseph in Allen Street near the centre of Sheffield. They were both ‘the worse for liquor’ and after a quarrel she attempted to murder him, stabbing him in the neck with a pair of decorator’s scissors. Pleading guilty, she was sentenced to penal servitude for life.

A condition of her release on 19 January 1881 was that she should remain in Lincolnshire but she immediately started to make her way back to Sheffield.

George had remarried, again to a woman called Mary. I’d love to know what happened next.

Joseph died in 1883, the same year that his new wife Mary gave birth to a daughter.

I’m hoping that some day I might come across a photograph of Joseph’s first wife, Mary Tinker, amongst her prison records.

The Search for Truelove

Railway advertisement
The York Herald

I LOVE A GOOD detective story and it’s the detective work involved in researching a family tree that makes it so fascinating. The end result is interesting too, but if you had it handed to you on a plate you’d miss out on the fun and the frustration.

Sheffield IndependentBirths and deaths, marriages and census returns give you the bare bones but I like anything that gives me a sideways look at my ancestors, that pops up some tiny detail of their everyday lives that I never imagined that I’d discover.

Any kind of crime is welcome; not for the distress it gave my ancestors of course, but for the intimate details that come out in the testimonies of victim, accused and witnesses which would otherwise have gone unrecorded.

Nineteenth Century Newspapers

newspaper search

Wakefield libraries offer online access to the British Library collection of nineteenth century newspapers. Twenty years ago, before computers came in, I tried going through a run of Victorian copies of The Wakefield Express to try and find reports of the early days of Wakefield Naturalists’ Society, then the Wakefield Natural History and Philosophical Society, but after an hour or two of page turning I came up with nothing.

This morning I’m having a session tracing one line of my family, the Trueloves of Sheffield, that, over three or four generations always included a Joseph.

accused

In seconds I can scan through thousands of pages of complete runs of Victorian newspapers in the British Library collections and turn up stories that I would otherwise stand no chance of stumbling across.

I’m currently reading the details of a charge of larceny brought against my great, great, great grandfather, referred to in the reports as Joseph Truelove senior and one of his sons of the same name. I’ll tell you the whole story later but don’t panic, they were both acquitted (or I might have been writing this from Australia as in 1847 transportation was still an option).

Historical Themes

There’s a quote from The Go-Between, ‘the past is a different place’ and I must say that I feel a bit guilty that I just dip into it as though it was a different place, kind of theme park, but to enjoy your visits to the past and feel the emotional tug of a personal connection seems to me a good way to learn a lot about it, to connect all those bits and pieces that you picked up at school or from television documentaries.

Game licence list

But, as I browse through the pages brought up in my search results, certain aspects of the past do look as if they’ve been put together by the overenthusiastic designers of a historical theme park

I love the Birmingham and Derby Junction advertisement (top) on the front page of The York Herald, 10 October 1840, inviting interested parties to deliver Tenders to the Company’s Office. The little engraving features two men in a tender urging on their loco enthusiastically.

And the notice of Joseph (senior, I guess) obtaining a game certificate appears right next to an advertisement for the latest bestseller by Charles Dickens, an author so well-known that they don’t even need to mention his name in the advertisement.

If I’d been concocting a historical newspaper I would never have put that in, it would seem too contrived, like having an Elizabethan character in a novel saying ‘I say, have you seen the new play by William Shakespeare?’

But I better stop getting distracted and continue my search for Truelove . . .