The times, they are a'changin'

When reading through the records one can easily start to think that they all look and sound alike. Born, died, place of residence, next of kin....insert needle on vinyl record screech here. Next of kin can be interesting sometimes.

Often you will see a person listed with his or her parents being the next of kin. Does this mean an infant? A child? A grown man or woman who has never married? There are records of people dying in their 30s, 40s, and considerably older than that with their parents as next of kin. Sometimes the record will say 'spinster' or 'an unmarried man' but usually there is no helpful adjective applied. Now where we lived for a number of years, also largely Irish though not necessarily protestant, the youngest child in a family might often stay behind to take care of the aging parents, and it was this child that would inherit the family farm (in appreciation of their care perhaps). Not always, but often this was the case. Seeing people in their 40s and 50s with their parents as next of kin made me wonder if this process was going on in the Gatineaus as well. I'm no historian, but it is an interesting thought, no?

In another, very different case, we have discrimination, full stop. A gentleman, well into his 60s when he died had his parents listed as was common, but the mother was not just listed as Jane Doe (maiden name) but Miss Jane Doe. Was this man a bastard? He does not appear to have been married and there is no occupation listed so the only truly important thing we learn about him from his burial record is that his parents weren't married. Maybe it was me, but I thought the tone of the record was judgmental, but how can one say that of the written word?

Then there's the case of the little boy, just 8 months old, we'll call him Jimmy Doe. He was the son of Miss Jane Doe and an unnamed father. The burial record took up the whole page, in fairly cramped handwriting and chronicled how the mother had the baby at X Home for Wayward Girls and then came to work for Mrs X Y as a housemaid and that the child had died and was buried next to the house but the mother was going to come back to retrieve the child's body at a later date... so I'm thinking to myself here but in that judgmental world, where having a bastard child was the ruin of a girl, would she have come back? I'm laying odds she didn't. What was interesting about this record was the level of detail the minister added that was not directly relevant to the poor child. It's like the child got lost in the story, but his bastardy did not.

In this way at least we are a kinder, gentler society today, in my honest opinion.