Mummies: In praise of women

Genealogy seems a man's game, dominated by the men who see the family name carried from one generation to the next.  The women wind up sidelined, maiden names lost to time, their family undiscovered.  I can understand the desire to trace one's own surname as far back as possible -- it's how I began my own research -- but it tells only half the story.

It was with great delight that I learned that women contribute something more permanent than a surname: buried in our cells is the mitochondrial DNA inherited from our mothers.  A mother passes this to all her children, male and female.  It is ancient, mutating slowly over millennia, allowing our matrilineage to be traced by science to ages far beyond where written records reach.

What it can't do, unfortunately, is tell us much about our ancestresses.  My sister bought us DNA tests one Christmas.  Our mtDNA HVR-1 (HyperVariable Region 1, the region of the DNA tested) results placed us in Haplogroup H, with one difference from the Cambridge Reference Sequence (CRS) at HyperVariable Region 16519: the CRS is T (thymine) and mine shows C (cytosine). 

That's very exciting news, right?  This means that my maternal ancestors, whose mtDNA runs through me at a cellular level, first showed up around the eastern edge of the Black Sea about 30,000 years ago, just before the last Ice Age, with some of their descendants heading west across southern Europe and then up into what is now Austria and Germany.

Meanwhile, I have traced my maternal family tree to Germany in the mid-18th century.

...
...
...

Admittedly there's a bit of a gap.  That's why mtDNA is interesting generally, but not too useful on the specifics.

The farthest back I can get is my mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother, Maria Goudsmit, of Issum in Jülich-Kleve-Berg in the Holy Roman Empire (now part of the district of Kleve in the state of North-Rhine-Westphalia in modern Germany).  Although born in Issum, Maria lived in Amsterdam where she married firstly to Christiaan Christiaansz and secondly to Hendrik Gartman.  There were plenty of Goudsmits in Amsterdam with the majority members of the Jewish community.  Since Orthodox and Conservative Judaism recognises that the children of Jewish mothers are themselves Jewish, am I Jewish?  What about my sister, mother, mother's sisters and their daughters?

It's hard to say, particularly because I don't know about Maria's own faith. Her first son was christened at a Roman Catholic church, but it doesn't appear that she and her first husband were Catholics for very long, as their next two children were christened at an evangelical Lutheran church.  In 1780 Maria and her first husband re-married according to the Lutheran ceremony, but what they were before then isn't stated.

In 1802, Maria's daughter, Maria Sophia Kristiaanse, married bookseller Johannes Josephus Schmidt (oh great, a John Smith...).  Johannes was a widower probably before civil registration began in 1811, but Maria Sophia left three small daughters.  The youngest, Maria Johanna, married Johannes Josephus Reijneke at the Town Hall on 24 December 1840.  Johannes was first-generation Dutch on his father's side: his father, Philippus Josephus Reijncke, had been born in Silberhausen, near Dingelstädt, Prussia.  Maria's new husband was a ship captain, travelling back and forth between Holland and the Dutch East Indies.  He was last seen in 1849 leaving Norway aboard the ship Eersteling, which sank off the coast of Formosa (Taiwan) on 26 November that year.  The surviving crew were attacked by pirates, but many were rescued by a British ship and taken to China, then left to make their own way home.

Maria Johanna never remarried and died aged only 46 in early 1855.  Although their father's family was able to provide some support, her four small children were placed in the Mennonite Fellowship orphanage, De Oranje Appel, in Amsterdam.

The eldest daughter, Maria (are you noticing a trend with names?), born in 1844 at No. 41 Geldersche Kade in Amsterdam, applied to marry Jan Bootes in 1867.  She was a minor and needed either the permission of her parents to marry or their death certificates to prove that she was an orphan, only no one knew for certain what had happened to her father.  Several of her uncles, all employed in shipping, confirmed under oath when her father had last been seen alive, that his ship was believed lost, and that Maria had been under the protection of the orphanage's governor since her mother's death.  Permission to marry was granted and she wed Jan Bootes, a cabinet maker, on 8 August 1867.

Maria Reineke around the time of her wedding.

By 1871 Maria and Jan were living in London under assumed names, having adopted the alias of Johannes and Maria Schmidt (or John and Mary Smith -- thanks guys: I wouldn't have wanted this to be too easy!) after fleeing a bankruptcy charge in Amsterdam sometime in 1868 or 1869.  Jan's business partner had scarpered with all the money while Jan was in hospital after a particularly bad asthma attack, and Jan was held responsible for the missing money.  Bankruptcy could result in a gaol sentence, so Maria's uncles again came to her rescue and found the young couple and their infant daughter passage to London on a goods ship.  In those days, goods ships from The Netherlands had their own dock in London, and the passport control was non-existent.  Maria and Jan slipped into England unnoticed.  They eventually settled in Romford, Essex and joined the Salvation Army.  Johannes Schmidt taught carpentry and cabinet-making at a school run by the Salvation Army; Maria found employment as a translator in the London courts.  Maria would travel back and forth to Amsterdam several times, sometimes with her eldest daughter; Jan -- or Johannes, as he was now known -- never risked being recognised and remained in England.

Their youngest daughter, Louisa Henrietta, or Louie, was born on 12 February 1883 at the family home at 36 George Street, Romford.  Her father had died suddenly on Christmas Even 1904 after collapsing at Liverpool Street Station, and Louie's mother expected that Louie would stay home to look after her in her later years.  Louie obeyed, witnessing the marriages of her siblings, but remaining at George Street and working as a domestic servant to support her mother.

Then she met William Clark, a blacksmith originally from Pebmarsh in rural Essex, now living in London's East End where the railyards offered steady work.  (It is from William much of Maria's and Louie's stories have come, as he kept their secrets until the end of his life, then telling them to his daughter Dorothy, with whom he was then living, and she shared them with me several years ago.)  Maria refused permission for them to marry: Louie was to stay at home.  William offered to have Maria live in their house, but she refused, and told Louie that she would be cut out of the family altogether if she went ahead with the marriage.

Love won out.  William and Louie married at the Register Office in Romford in 1914.  She said she was 28, but was actually 31.  His family signed the register as witnesses; her family did not attend.

Louie in autumn 1915.

Louie passed on her mtDNA to five daughters.  The fourth was my grandmother, Joan Clark.  She never knew her own grandmother: Maria died eight months before Joan was born.  Louie was suffering from a difficult early pregnancy when news came that her mother was dying -- despite their mother's edict, Louie's two sisters had remained in touch, passing notes to one another through one of their sons, who worked as a grocer in Ilford where Louie would take her daughters shopping and to hear news of her family.  Louie's brother, Jack, however, had taken Maria's wishes to heart and had had no further contact with her, and made clear to his sisters that he would cut them off as well if he found that they had been in touch with Louie, hence the need for discretion.  William felt that he ought to pay his respects to his late mother-in-law; Louie was too unwell to go.  He took his eldest daughters Win and Betty, carrying the younger on his shoulders, to George Street.  Jack met them at the door and turned them away.

A family legend developed that Maria had a black box of gold sovereigns hidden under her bed, some legacy brought to England from the Netherlands.  Some elements of this are reflected in Maria's brief will:

I HEREBY declare the contents and box I have given to my daughter Mary and not to be opened till after my death by her self I declare that on the 10th day of March 1923 - M SCHMIDT -Witnessed by


10 March 1923.Affidavit of due execution filed.Mrs S GILLMR S T GILL

The probate record, however, shows that the contents were worth £267 5s 8d, which has the same spending power as approximately £6-8,000 today.  If the box were full of gold, it wasn't a very big box.  Mary's granddaughter had not heard this legend and certainly couldn't recall her grandmother having large amounts of gold lying around, but she had evidence of Maria and Mary travelling together to Amsterdam, apparently to do something with banking.  Three branches of Maria's family tree have been traced to the present day and none know for certain what the box contained: all that remains is to find Jack's descendants past the first generation and see if they have any idea.

My grandmother and her sisters grew up in Ilford, Essex, very close to the aunts, uncles and cousins they were not allowed to meet.  My great-aunt Dorothy and my grandmother both told a story of being in London with their mother when a car pulled up and an elegant woman emerged from the back seat.  The woman and their mother both paused, looked startled, then hurried away.  That was their aunt Emily, wife of uncle Jack.  Until that afternoon, they weren't even aware that they had an uncle Jack or aunt Emily.

The East End's devastation in the Second World War is well known.  My grandmother, then in her late teens, was a telegraphist at Berkeley Square, and also a motorcycle courier, delivering the telegrams to various military and government offices.  One night she returned to Newbury Park, Ilford, to find that her house was the only one left standing.  She would recall tales of hiding in the bomb shelter, with the door open so her parents could argue about her father's insistence on staying outside with the dog because the dog didn't like the shelter.

Joan Clark aged 17, 16 March 1941

She married Stan in 1944, a year to the day after his plane had been shot down over Germany and he had been declared missing in action, presumed dead.  Joan had been the telegraphist on duty when the message came through that he'd been found alive.  After the war ended, the RAF transferred him to the RCAF in Ontario, Canada.  He went ahead to start work and she followed, a three-day trans-Atlantic journey by airplane with a two-year-old and another child on the way.  I find modern journeys exhausting: I hardly dare to imagine what this would have been like, especially with the added emotion of knowing that she was leaving her home and family at a time when any return visit would be a hugely expensive and complicated affair.

Louie died suddenly of a heart attack a few months later.  The news took longer than expected to reach my grandparents, as missing paperwork had prevented them from taking up residence on the RCAF base as anticipated, and they'd had to find temporary accommodation and employment elsewhere until the official documents could be sorted.  When the telegram arrived from England, bearing news of Louie's sudden death, the RCAF didn't know where my grandparents were.  By the time they had been located and the telegram delivered, several weeks had passed, the funeral was over.  My grandmother fainted at the news, the fall bringing on premature labour.  My grandfather, who didn't then have a car, hopped on his bike to go find the doctor, who, when located, simply assured him that the baby wasn't coming early and that he should head back home.  He did just that, arriving in time to deliver my mother.

With her birth, our mtDNA had made a 30,000 year journey from the Caucasus to Canada.  Her story is hers to tell and I don't want my blog to go about revealing too much about living people, so I'll just skip ahead some years.

When I was born, it was at Grace General Hospital in Winnipeg, where my grandmother worked: she would have been one of the first family members to meet me, and unlike so many of our female ancestresses, we knew and loved each other.  Although she died long before they were born, my daughters wear the clothing she made for me, play with the toys she bought me, and carry not only her mtDNA but her blue eyes.  And when they are older, I will share her stories with them, for these are their stories and our stories.