Stuart Valentine charts the story of how one name in a workhouse register started him on a quest to find out more about a woman from an Anglo-Indian background whose changing circumstances saw her enter and leave the Bromley workhouse many times – trapped in poverty thousands of miles from her birth country
THE NAME THAT WOULDN’T DISAPPEAR
Every family historian, in the course of their research, has had the experience of finding themselves distracted by something totally irrelevant. This happened to me while I was indexing the Creed Registers for the Bromley workhouse and first came across the name Amelia Dolding.
I first ‘met’ Amelia Dolding, in a manner of speaking, on 25 October 1889. She was just another entry in the register: I recorded it before passing on to the next one. But then she began to appear again and again. She entered the workhouse no fewer than 24 times between 1888 and 1893. I subsequently found that this was a typical pattern of her life for at least 30 years from 1881 to 1911.
Her average stay was about four months but after each discharge, she remained out for only few weeks, sometimes indeed only for a day or two. On several occasions in the early years she was accompanied by one more of her children: Fanny, Matthew and/or Luke. Each of the children eventually go their own way, appearing only as her next of kin in later entries.
Intrigued by this unhappy woman’s plight, I wanted to know more. And what a story it turned out to be.
My first port of call was the 1881 Census and the first surprise: Amelia is listed as a pauper, with the occupation ‘millhand – paper’, but the major shock was her place of birth – Goa, the Portuguese enclave on India’s West Coast. What on earth is a woman born in Goa doing in the Bromley workhouse? Furthermore, she gives Goa as her birthplace on the three subsequent censuses.
Cue further research...
Born in ‘East India’?
Accessing the 1871 Census gave a different story. Then, she was living with her husband, Isaac (sometimes in the records called John) in London Road, Wrotham. He is listed as a pensioner-quartermaster sergeant and boot maker, born in Farnborough, Kent. Isaac is 48 and Amelia 32. But in this census, she is listed as being born in ‘East India’, not in Goa. Their eldest daughter, Harriet, who is 12 is also listed as having been
