'Old Age and Dry Rot' : Investigating Elderly Ancestors
For more on books by Ruth A. Symes
Often seated whilst others stand, the oldest family
members in some photographs might be people who were actually only middle-aged.
Without the benefit of modern cosmetics, twentieth-century dental expertise and
even hair dye, people in the past tended to look much older than they actually
were and it is quite easy to mistake a 45 year old for someone twenty years
older.
Early photographers enjoyed working with
old people whom they found were capable of sitting still for longer, and who
were less vain than their younger counterparts. If your elderly ancestor is
portrayed alone in a photograph in his/her best clothing, it’s worth
considering whether the photograph might have been taken to mark a significant senior
birthday such as a 60th, 70th or 80th.
Photographs featuring grandparents and
great-grandparents as couples might have been taken to celebrate significant
wedding anniversaries. 25th and 50th wedding anniversaries
were celebrated from the late nineteenth century onwards. On
birthdays, anniversaries, at wedding and after funerals, three-generation or four-generation photographs were a
popular Victorian convention which often featured the eldest family member
cradling the youngest.
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An elderly woman (portrayed probably in the 1860s).
She may have been born as far back as the 1780s.
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How
old was old in the Victorian and Edwardian periods?
Don’t be too surprised to find ancestors on death
certificates and censuses who lived to a good old age. Although average life expectancy was much lower
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than it is now (47 (for men)
and 51 (for women) in 1900 as opposed to 76 (for men) and 81 (for women) in
1991, this doesn’t mean that most people died in middle age. Calculations of life
expectancy were influenced by very high infant death rates which inevitably
brought down the ‘mean’ age of death. In fact, those of our ancestors who
managed to survive infancy had a pretty good chance of living to 60 and beyond.
From 1870 onwards with improvements both in the medical sciences and in public
health, life expectancy started to increase. Middle-aged people were less
likely to die from infectious diseases such as cholera or smallpox, for
example, and thus might more frequently sally on into old age.
Nevertheless, you should
be wary of some of the given ages of your oldest ancestors on official records.
A Government Report into the 1881 census (www.visionofbritain.org.uk/) suggested
that some very elderly persons were tending to overestimate their age, perhaps
because extreme old age conferred some degree of respect and social status at
the time, perhaps because they had genuinely forgotten how old they were and
did not have the documentation to back up their claims. The report advised
future enumerators to put little trust in ‘anyone stating their age as a
multiple of 5 or 10 over 85’. Although 150 people claimed to have reached the
age of a hundred or more in Britain that year, the report advised that they be
treated with scepticism. Extreme old age was still very rare in the Victorian
period. In 1901, only 74 people claimed to have reached a century and this
figure is, of course, vastly below that of the 3,000 people who made the same
claim in the year 2000.
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The mid-twentieth century brought increasing
longevity. At 96, Thomas Tattum was
the oldest member of the community in Ashton-in-Makerfield on the day of the
Queen’s Coronation in 1953.
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Support
in Later Life
Work
The chances are that your elderly ancestor will have
had to carry on working way past what we now consider to be ‘retirement age’.
According to an audit by Ancestry.co.uk
(based on 1007 records from the 1891 census) over 88% of men and
33% of women carried on working after
the age of 65 in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Some men were still
working in highly physical jobs as farmers and miners well into their 80s and
even, in some cases, their 90s. Women too might have carried on working as servants,
laundresses, cooks and cleaners.
Family
Support
Censuses might reveal that
older members of your family moved to live with their children, or that a
single daughter had stayed at home – perhaps forfeiting her own marriage
prospects in the process – to look after her elderly parents. However,
it is worth remembering that multi-generational households in the Victorian
period were much less common in Britain than in any other country in Europe and
the older people in your family might have had to rely on a variety of other
forms of support.
Religious
and Private Charities, and Friendly Societies
Some of our elderly ancestors would have benefitted
from the generosity of religious or private charities. It is worth checking in
local and county archives, trade directories and local history books to find
out what sorts of charities might have been in operation in the areas in which
your ancestors lived. Additionally, some kinds of employment had charities
attached to them. The Governesses’ Benevolent Society (founded in 1841) for
example, aimed to help some of those women who had made a living teaching in
the homes of others and who, in their old age, had no other means of support.
Whilst they were still of working age, other people (male and female) joined so-called
‘Friendly Societies’ to which they paid a weekly or monthly ‘sub’. This money
could then be called upon in times of sickness, hardship, or less frequently
old age.
Public
Relief
After the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, some elderly
people in England and Wales qualified for a Poor Law Pension (which covered
meals and a small allowance, but no accommodation costs) and were able to stay
within their own homes or be looked after by relatives (The Scottish Poor Law
Act came into operation in 1845). The names of the recipients of this so-called
‘outdoor relief’ can be found in Poor Law records kept in local, county or
national record offices and searched via the National Archives website
(www.nationalarchives.org).
In the worst cases of poverty, an elderly ancestor
will have been admitted to a workhouse. You
should check for the location of the relevant workhouse records at the National
Archives. Conditions in the
workhouse were frequently crowded and unsanitary, work heavy and repetitive,
nursing provision poor and the food uninspiring to say the least. Some
workhouses had adjoining ‘workhouse infirmaries’ which housed the incapacitated
poor, very many of whom were elderly.
Old Age
Pensions
In 1908, the Liberal government under
Prime Minister Lloyd George passed the Old Age Pensions Act which was quickly
followed by the institution of the State Pension Scheme (enacted from the 1st
August 1908). Don’t assume, however, that your elderly ancestor would
definitely have benefitted from a pension at this point. To have been
considered eligible for a pension, he or she would have had to be over
the age of 70, and earning less than £31 and 10 shillings a year (that is 12
shillings weekly). He or she would also have had to undergo a character test to
ensure that he or she had a history of employment, had been a British citizen
for at least ten years, was of sound mind, was not receiving poor relief, had
not been in prison during the previous decade, and had not been convicted of
drunkenness. The pension was 5 shillings a week for individuals and 7s and 6d
for married couples.
Health
The general health of elderly people was very far down
the pecking order in terms of the State’s priorities in the Victorian period. Hospitals
concentrated on health services targeted at the young and more productive
workforce such as vaccination and the treatment of infectious diseases. The
Admissions Regulations for some hospitals, indeed, expressly forbad the
admittance of elderly people.
It was not until the inauguration of the National
Health Service in 1948 that our elderly ancestors who were suffering from
mundane but disabling conditions (impaired hearing, failing eyesight, dental
and podiatric problems, for example) could, for the first time be treated for
free. The health and well-being of Britain’s elderly population was finally
being taken seriously.
On the 1911 census, 86 year old William Sheader is described as the ‘great-grandfather’
in this Scarborough fishing family (See above). The terminology is potentially confusing to
the family historian. Family members were supposed to be described on the
census in terms of their relationship to the heads of households but old William
is unlikely to have been the great-grandfather of the 44 year old George
William Sheader mentioned here. With high mortality in the nineteenth century
it is possible that the intermediate generation had died, leaving old William
to be cared for by his grandson and his young family.
Useful
books and websites
Bothelo L., and Thane, P., Women and Ageing in British Society Since 1500, (Routledge, 2001).
Chase, K., The
Victorians and Old Age, (OUP, 2009).
Johnson, M. L. et al., The Cambridge Handbook of Age and Ageing, (CUP, 2005).
Thane, P., Old
Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues, (OUP, 2002).
www.cottontimes.co.uk/poorlawo.htm For more on the nineteenth century workhouse.
www.victoriandotage.wordpress.om
On ageing and mental illness during the Victorian period.
This article first appeared in Discover Your Ancestors online periodical in 2015. http://www.discoveryourancestors.co.uk
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