Courtesy of my sister–who offered me a challenge–I’ve been on a bit of an “Ancestry” kick lately. She mentioned an old family mystery, a story oft told by my mother, about a much-loved relative who’d died–it was said–under suspicious circumstances, and whose husband the family (my family) had always suspected of being a fortune hunter and of doing away with her.
So I got to looking. And certainly, things do appear (at least to someone with a questioning mind) a bit off.
This particular Auntie (her relationship to me is the same as that of Auntie Betty, in that she is my great-grandmother’s niece, perhaps my “first cousin twice removed,” or something of the sort) was known through the generations as “Auntie Girlie.” Probably because–as with Auntie Betty, none of whose three given forenames was “Betty”–her own given name was already taken by three or four others in the family. Indeed, the profusion of “Georges,” “Mauds,” “Matildas,” “Florences,” and “Mays,” across four generations almost drove me mad when it came to running them–male and female–down accurately and keeping them all separate and distinct.
But (as one does), I persevered, eventually discovering Auntie Girlie after pulling on a thread starting with her brother, who–thankfully–went under his actual given name all his life, and of whose life I remember some details. He was rather better off than many members of the family (he owned a lovely Bentley), and he would sometimes take us for rides in it. Children do remember such things.
Auntie Girlie, who was single for almost all her life, and who loved her cats, worked for many years as a shop assistant in the English Midlands, and finally walked down the aisle at the age of 48, in the summer of 1959. The groom was 60.
Four months later, Girlie was dead. Mutterings in the family were to the effect that he’d pushed her down the stairs in order to collect her £4,000 fortune (about £80,000 today).
What I found most interesting, when I discovered the published notice of probate after her death is that Auntie Girlie’s “fortune” was dispensed, ten months later, to her brother.
Not her husband.
(This is probably the point at which I should interject some more of the story, as told to her daughters forty or fifty years ago by my mother, which was that–on the morning of Auntie Girlie’s marriage to “that man”–my grandmother (Girlie’s first cousin) sat Girlie down and insisted that she secretly draw up a will on the spot, leaving everything to her brother rather than her husband, because the family feared for Girlie’s future, even her life.)
So perhaps there’s a story there after all, even if it has only to do with the folly of a stubborn woman. (Girlie isn’t the only member of the family who has stepped up and qualified in this capacity over the decades. Sometimes, it’s a feature. Sometimes, it’s a bug.)
Less than a year after Girlie’s death, the widower married again, this time to a widow a decade older than he. I don’t know what happened to her, and I think I’ve about exhausted the limits of what I can find out on Ancestry, unless I start contacting folks who have information about this man in their “private” family trees.
I’m imagining the approach:
“Hello. Jolly hockey sticks, and a very good day to you! I see you have a private family tree containing some information on [So and So], who was married to my Auntie for four months in 1959, and who my family suspects of pushing her down the stairs to her death. Do you mind sharing??
Ermm…No. A bit too crass, even for me, and that’s saying something.
Along the way of this little investigative journey, though, I found an instance of serendipity:
The first decade of my life was spent mostly in Northern Nigeria, where–due to Dad’s position in the British Colonial Service–we moved around a lot, in a way very similar to that of military families. Dad was at the government’s beck and call, and we went wherever we were sent. Occasionally, we were sent home to England “on leave,” and I treasured those short intervals of predictability and stability.
That stability in my early life, such as it was, came from previous generations of my family–my maternal grandparents, and my paternal aunts and uncles, all of whom were firmly rooted in the English Midlands, and most of whom provided a welcoming embrace to our young family on our sojourns home.
All that being said, my great-grandmother on my mother’s side (born 1869, died 1968, when I was fourteen years old), was a striking old harridan, a sort of composite of the worst bits of Miss Havisham, Mme Defarge, and Aunt Ada Doom. She almost always wore purple. And a hat like the Dowager Countess (although without the benign expression or the humorous, if rather acidic, disposition). Her posture was ramrod-straight; her attitude unyielding. The sort of woman around whom youngsters were expected to be seen and not heard, and who expected little children to back out of the room, while genuflecting when leaving her presence.
And all her life, she had a housemaid. For the portion of her life which involved me, that housemaid was “Maudie,” the only presence in Great Granny’s life that made the required Sunday visits tolerable, and even inviting.
Maudie loved children. She’d tended my mother and uncle when they were young, and she lavished attention on me, pushing my perambulator to what was then Victoria Park, where she’d take me out and we’d feed the swans and the ducks. She’d “rub-a-dub-dub” me in Granny’s enormous old cast-iron bathtub, then dry my hair with a bakelite hair dryer that weighed about a ton, and had an element which used to get red-hot and blew out heat like a blast furnace, incinerating my hair into foul-smelling shreds if she held it too close. And when I had a cold, she’d rub Vicks Vap-o-Rub on my little chest with her hands, the palms of which were like leather and the fingers like sandpaper, and she’d lovingly wrap me in warm flannel and put me to bed.
Maudie was a tiny person, not quite five feet tall, an ageless, agile, bundle of energy who never complained at what must have been a dull and hard life. Perhaps things were easier when my great grandfather was alive, but by the time I knew Maudie, he’d been dead for decades, and Maudie was living in the family home with only Great Granny for company.
Maudie was magic. She compensated for Great Granny’s indifference by lavishing attention (and sometimes chocolate) on us. And one day, with infinite patience, and in spite of the repeated mistakes made by my fumbling five-year old fingers, Maudie taught me to knit. And another day, she taught me how to use Great Granny’s treadle sewing machine to make clothes and blankets for my dollies.
My great grandmother was a hard taskmaster, and Maudie wasn’t allowed friends or (heaven forfend and even in a metaphorical sense) a “young man.” Her rare half-days off were spent in church.** She wasn’t supposed to read the lurid tabloid newspapers that she loved, or to play the weekly game of “spot the ball” she always hoped she’d win a fortune on. When she went grocery shopping, she’d hide the newspaper under her coat when she returned home, so that Great Granny wouldn’t see as Maudie took it up to her attic room.
The last time I saw Maudie was in 1969, on a summer visit to the UK. She was a few months short of her 80th birthday, but was as I’d always remembered her. Strong, wiry, and cheerful. Still in her black woolen dress, black lace-up shoes, starched white pinafore, and maid’s cap. Still running errands for my grandmother, and getting down on her hands and knees to shine the front stoop with “Mansion Polish.”
I wish I’d told her then how much I’d always loved her and how often I thought about her.
She died some years later.
I’ve attempted, on a few occasions, to find out more about Maudie, as more and more resources have come online and become easier to access over the years, but both her first and last names are incurably English and very common, and I’d largely given up.
Enter my research for “Auntie Girlie.”
And–boom! There was twenty-one year old Maudie, in the 1911 British Census, listed as a household member (“Domestic Servant”) along with Auntie Girlie’s parents, the one-year old Girlie herself, and Girlie’s three young siblings.
She was still in the same household at the time of the 1921 Census, the most recent currently available to search. At some point after, she must have moved to Great Granny’s household, keeping things in the family because, apparently, Maudie spent a lifetime “in service” with my mother’s family. A fate I’m not sure I’d wish on anyone, but which she handled with grace, grit, and good humor. (Think, in a smaller way, Anna from Downton Abbey, or Rose from Upstairs Downstairs).
What I now know about Maudie, that I didn’t before, is that her father was a widower, one who worked as a boilermaker; that her older brother worked (at the age of 17) as a “tank riveter,” perhaps at the same place as his father; and that she had an older sister, Sarah.
And that may very well have to do, in terms of what’s available to find out, as families like Maudie’s, in whatever part of the world they lived, weren’t deemed all that worthy in the way of attention and permanent recording at the time. I discovered a bit of her story by accident. And that may have to be enough.
I’m glad I found her, though. And that my first thought, when I saw that as far back as 1911 she’d been in service in a family with four very young children was, “Wow. I thought there were only two generations of kids (my mother’s and my own) who’d felt the joy of having Maudie in their lives. Here’s a third generation which–I’m pretty sure–must have remembered her just as fondly as we did.”
I’m here, 125 years after she was born–probably the last to do so–to witness and say “thank you” to Maudie for her generations of hard work and care for my family’s children.
May she, a “good and faithful servant” rest in eternal peace.
**I often contrast my mother’s family’s treatment of Maudie with my father’s family’s treatment of their own retainers. Dad’s family encouraged its servants to have lives beyond their work, and when the (mostly female) members of the staff had married themselves off to suitable suitors, they stayed in touch and became much-loved friends and families with whom the Muffett children holidayed over the summers.
