the female line

Some thoughts on

The female line: Researching your female ancestors
Margaret Ward
Countryside Books 2003

One of the many books I picked up from the clearout where I also boosted my Bloomsbury collection, this is one I read immediately as it chimed with my findings around the vicar of Eckweiler, namely that the women in the vicars' families helped to uphold the Lutheran traditions in matrilinear networks.

Ward's book is about the lives of women in Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the ways in which family history researchers may find out interesting details that may not show up in the official records. As such, a lot of the specific information on British sources and circumstances weren't particularly helpful for my research, but it was a fascinating and inspiring reminder of how much information about the lives of women in past times we may be missing.

World of Books

Some of the things I did not know were that

• in the first half of the 19th century premarital sex was widespread and almost the custom in some areas, in an effort to avoid any surprises regarding infertility (we have an example of that in the 1826 wedding which gave us the Krefeld Clan - the first child was born eight weeks and two days later);
• as recently as in the Napoleonic wars, some soldiers' wives were following the regiment although that was forbidden by law.
• In the early 19th century, there wasn't a law specifically banning women from the vote. If, for instance, a woman's name appeared on the voters register by mistake, she was actually entitled to vote.

Some employment stats were also quite impressive verging on scary, eg relating to the army of servants, and to the prevalence of prostitution.

I was a bit disappointed to find no reference to the issue that I'm currently researching, ie the matrilinear networks of vicars' wives, but otherwise I found it a quite inspiring read. It contributed to my decision to give the wives co-headlining status in the ancestors' biographies I am currently publishing in the Thursday series (starting with the vicar of Eckweiler). And I've also launched a systematic search for pregnant brides in the 19th century, watch this space!