My Great Aunt Florrie died young. My mother thought that she had probably never married. That’s about all I knew about her before carrying out my research.

According to her baptism record (published on Ancestry.co.uk), she was born Florrie Read on 12th January 1886, and baptized at St. Oswald, Collyhurst on 9th March 1887, over a year later. Why such a late baptism I do not know, but we do know from the record that they were still living at 13 Forrest Street, so it was not an oversight due to a change of address.

I have been unable to find Florrie on the 1901 census with any variation of her first or second name. It may be that, like my grandmother, she was fostered out while her mother was in the workhouse infirmary and may be listed with a different surname.

I think I have found her in 1911, living in the household of the Fawkes family, her occupation given as a cloth stitcher in what looks like ‘Shiping House’. If anyone can tell me what this means, I would be very grateful.  My guess is that this was one of the shipping warehouses used for the cotton industry where fabric was prepared for overseas sales. The address is 57 Princess Street, Moston, which is in the Failsworth district, not far from where she was born.

From carrying out searches on Google, I have found that Princess Street is now known as Princedom Street, just below Moston Lane. The street seems like a fairly typical Victorian residential street, but No. 57 no longer seems to exist.

There was a mill at Moston – though it’s a few streets away, and it’s equally possible she could have been working at one of the cotton mills in Hapurhey.

Given that we thought that she had not married, I searched the death records, but found no death record with any variation of her name.

I therefore wondered whether we had been wrong about her being married, so I had a look at the marriage records and I found that a Florrie Read married a Richard T Marsh in 1913. To check this out I searched the death records for a Florrie Marsh, and sure enough, I found that she had died a year later. The burial record states that she was buried on 9th June 1914 at Christ Church in Harpurhey aged 27. This all fits, so I am very confident that this is my Great Aunt.

She died two months before the outbreak of World War I. But why did she die so young? Given that this was just over a year after her marriage I wondered whether she possibly died in childbirth. I decided to order her death certificate to find out.

The address of her residence on the burial record was 6 Lindum Street, Rusholme. This address can be clearly seen on StreetView, and is quite a pleasant looking street opposite a small green.

Did they have children? I checked out the birth registrations, and found a Lucy Marsh born in 1913 with the mother’s surname of Reed, but this turned out not to be their child.

The death certificate told me that she died at this address, of ‘mitral stenosis’. This is a narrowing of the mitral valve in the heart – often caused by rheumatic heart disease, which can occur after rheumatic fever. This is not too surprising, even in one so young. Rheumatic fever was once common in the UK in places of poor sanitation and over-crowding, but is now thankfully rare in this country. In the 19th century, Manchester had one of the highest death rates for diseases of the respiratory system (the sisters’ father had died of pneumonia at the age of 35), and while things had improved by the 20th century, it was still an unhealthy place to live, particularly in the poorer areas.

So what happened to Richard? I could not find a military record for him. He was born in Moston the son of John and Sarah, and was a labourer in a tin yard. He died in 1959 aged 76. He may have married again – there is a marriage in 1937 for a Richard T Marsh and a Bertha Barlow.

While my Great Aunt Florrie did not live through the Great War, she is an example of life in Manchester in the time that led up to it, and she serves to remind us that, 100 hundred years on, our urban centres are generally far healthier places to live now than they were then.

Oxford Road, Manchester 1910.  Valette

On a personal note, I now think of my grandmother, who would have been 20 when she lost her older sister. I remember that she was always worried about health and alarmed at each little cold or cough. It’s no wonder, when she lost her father and sister at such early ages to diseases that nowadays are so preventable.

This is the third in my series of Women during WWI – focusing on the lives of my grandmother and her sisters.  Before researching Agnes I knew very little about her, except that my mother thought that she had been an actress at one time.

According to her baptism record, she was born on 29th October 1884 and baptized at St. Oswald’s, Collyhurst as Agnes Annie READ.

After this my first search was the1901 census where I found the most likely entry for her as a domestic servant in Rixton with the Herden family. The Head of the household, James Herden was an architectural draughtsman.

It took me a long time to find her in the 1911 census. I did not know whether she was married at all, and no searches for her as Agnes Reid, or any Agnes born in Collyhurst came up with any results.

So I looked at marriages and found several possibilities. I then looked at the 1911 census entries for the respective husbands, and found that one with a spouse that was born in St. Oswald Parish. She had not come up on the census previously because the transcriber had written her name as James Annie. This is a common problem with online indexes – so it is always worth searching with different criteria until you find someone who looks right. Looking at the original record I could see that it was clearly Agnes Annie. The husband’s name was Whitfield Halstead, a paint brush maker. As is often the case for women, there is no occupation recorded for Agnes.

The marriage was in the April to June quarter of 1904 in the district of Prestwich.

Whitfield was born in Hulme in about 1882. By 1911 they had two children, Gladys May, born 13th December 1904, and Robert Whitfield, born 7th June 1906. They were living at 7 Springfield Avenue, Moston. This street still exists, but on Streetmap I found it full of modern houses, so it will look completely different now to how it did then.

A recent article in the Manchester Evening News describes what life was like in Manchester at the beginning of the war – and is worth a read.   It pictures a city still clouded in pollution, noisy, crowded, dirty and unhealthy. The outbreak of war made things even more grim, with the imminent food shortages and young men being shipped off to fight.

From his war service record on Ancestry.co.uk I found Whitfield and Agnes were still at the same address. Whitfield enlisted in 1915 and joined the Bedford Regiment. I also found records for him on FindMyPast showing that he was in the 1st Battalion, 363rd Reserve Employment Company at the Eastern Command Labour Centre. He was also a member of the Welsh Regiment, 12th Battalion in 1916. A service record for 1919 shows the Bedfordshire Regiment again. A further record showed him in the Cheshire Regiment, 21st (Labour) Battalion.

Luckily, he survived the war, but died quite young at the age of 56 in 1940 in Manchester. We don’t know whether he was wounded in the war – but we do know that life expectancy in Manchester was still fairly low, so he may have just been one of those who succumbed to its pollution. Of course, I would be able to find out the cause of death from ordering the death certificate.

I did not find any official war records for Agnes, and presumably she was busy enough looking after two young teenagers while Whitfield was away. With the children old enough to understand what was happening, it must have been a difficult and tense time for them, as well as the difficulties of food rationing. When her sister Alice was widowed in 1916, it must have brought it home to her even more, though I am sure the sisters all pulled together through this time.

Possibly Agnes took on domestic work during the war, or perhaps worked in a munitions factory, while her unmarried and widowed sisters helped to look after the children. Unfortunately, we have few records for women’s work during World War I apart from some nurses’ records, so much of the time we can only guess from what we know from history.

The other possibility was some kind of theatrical career, as my mother seemed to think she had done some acting. I have searched newspaper records, including those accessible online at the Manchester Library, but found no reference to her either with her maiden or married name. It could be that she was part of the recruitment drive for the war – the theatres in the First World War were used for encouraging young men to enlist before conscription and also for fund-raising and as a morale booster.

We do not know whether she was a professional or amateur actress, but if we are right in thinking that she was, she must have been a busy lady!

Agnes married again – to Arthur Perkin in 1942, and died in 1960 aged 76. Both her children married. Gladys May to Herbert Hallewell in 1930 and Robert to Rose Green in 1932. I found that a one-name study has been made of the Halstead family at halstedresearch.org.uk and this tells me that Robert and Rose had a child, Geoffrey R Halstead. A search on PeopleTracer tells me that Geoffrey is still living in Manchester. He is my second cousin.  If we are able to get in touch with him I will post updates!

With the centenary of World War I starting this year, I thought it would be a good idea to create a series of blogs about women during the World War I.  But I don’t want to do just a generalised history of women at this time.  Instead, I am going to use my grandmother and her six sisters to give a more personal viewpoint of what life was like for women before, during and after the war.

In future posts, I will take each of the seven sisters one by one, and I believe that each of them will have her own story to tell, and be an interesting example of life for women during this important period in women’s history.  I still have research to do on most of them – so you will be following me as I try to find out more about them and their experiences.  I will discuss sources used as I go so that anyone searching their own ancestors can follow suit and find out more about

This initial post will give an introduction to the family, and the historical background into which they were born.

The sisters were all born in Manchester in the 1880s and 90s, the daughters of an Irish immigrant, Michael Henry Reid, and his Yorkshire wife, Ann Jepson, the daughter of a Railway Inspector.

Manchester is of course one of the most significant cities in Britain during the Victorian period.  Not only was it a huge centre of industry, with its cotton and other textile mills, iron foundries and railways, but for women, it was the centre of the suffragette movement, as this was where the Pankhursts were born and lived.

Michael worked in a mill – but not a cotton mill.  He worked in Manchester’s paper mill as a paper ruler, as did his father and several of his brothers.  A paper ruler operated printing machinery, setting out the inking pens and drawing lines on paper.  He was also a cricketer, and it is rumoured in the family that he played with the great W G Grace.  Sadly Michael died very young at the age of 35 of pneumonia, leaving his wife so distraught that she turned to drink, and spent a year in Manchester’s workhouse, her youngest two children (including my grandmother) having to be fostered out to other families.

In the 1891 census the family are living at Monton Green in the Prestwich district of Manchester.  The first five daughters are all there: Maude, Alice, Agnes, Florrie and Lottie; my grandmother, Elizabeth, would be born in 1892, and the last, Dorothy, would be born in 1895.

A railway station had just been built at Monton Green, but no longer exists, being one of those axed under Beeching in 1969.  There was a big connection with my mother’s family and the railways.  Ann’s father was a railway inspector, and my grandmother was to marry a railway clerk – but more about that later.

Just two years after the birth of Dorothy, and when my grandmother was just five years old, Michael Henry was dead of pneumonia, one of the common respiratory diseases that plagued industrial Manchester.  For three years Ann Reid struggled to bring up her younger daughters, but on 28^th December 1900, on my grandmother’s eighth birthday, she was admitted to Manchester Workhouse.  I was able to obtain her admission record from FindMyPast.co.uk which shows she was of the established church (interesting – given that she married into a Roman Catholic family) and that she was discharged a year later in 1901.  She can be seen in the workhouse in 1901 census, her job being to weave blankets.

There is an excellent website containing information about workhouses across the country at www.workhouses.org.  It contains information about the history of each workhouse with many photographs and plans.  It’s a really useful site for background information.  For the workhouse at Crumpsall, I was pleased to see that a report in 1866 stated it to be ‘one of the best managed work-houses that I have ever inspected.  It is in thorough excellent order throughout, and generally in such a state as to reflect the highest credit on all concerned in its management and care.’  I was glad to know that my great-grandmother was in such a well managed place, as there are many workhouses that do not have such good reputations.  By the time she was there a new infirmary had been built in the 1890s, which I think is probably where she stayed.

I am not sure when Ann died.  Her name is a fairly common one, and it is difficult to be sure which death certificate in the indexes would be hers.  However, the photograph of her with all her daughters at the top of this page was obviously taken in happier days after she was released from the workhouse.

Ann’s daughters all survived Manchester’s polluted air and went on to marry, work or emigrate and most of them lived through the First World War and became eligible to vote by the time they were in their 30s or 40s.  From the stifling air of Manchester’s backstreets, most of them managed to forge a healthier, happier life than that of their parents.  They were, I think, an excellent example of the way women’s lives changed during those years from the 1910s to the 1920s.