Genealogy Chat

My 3xGGF died in the workhouse. This came as a shock as he had married children and a wife. I wondered why none of them looked after him. He died of chronic bronchitis. I wondered if the workhouse had some sort of hospital where poor people could go if their families could not afford a doctor? Other than that I just wondered why he ended up in the workhouse?

Thanks for any suggestions Carole xx

A relative of mine died in a workhouse, in the early 1900s. However, it was in an infirmary in the workhouse. There was no NHS in those days.

I had a shock recently when I got the death certificate of my 2x great grandmother. She died in the Middlesex Lunatic Asylum (and yeah, it probably does run in the family!!) but was late of the Kensington Workhouse Infirmary. Like your family she had married children and a husband but as she had total paralysis (according to the death certificate) I'm assuming she'd had a stroke and the family couldn't care for her so was 'hospitalised'.

We do take so much for granted these days, don't we and its not until we take a look back that we realise how privileged we really are. The NHS may not be perfect but its a darn sight better than the workhouse!

Workhouses had their own Infirmary's and the sick that needed more medical treatment than they could get a t home would go into the hospital for medical care. In those days it cost to have the local doctor visit and the ordinary folk just couldn't afford what was private medical care. So you needn't have been a Workhouse inmate to be in the Hospital and indeed people did eventually object to the Workhouse Infirmary being on certs for Births and deaths because of the stigma it gave that implied they had been in the Workhouse,So ,it was agreed that the postal address would be given as the place of birth or death to overcome that. When the National Health Service started in the 1940,s lots of these Hospital became the local General Hospital

My great great grandmother had problems with her pregnancies between 1884 and 1890 and because of her situation had to enter the Workhouse books to be transferred to the workhouse infirmary.
I have seen the actual workhouse records and very interesting reading they are.
Not everyone as you say was a workhouse inmate and most of the inmates could discharge themselves at any time.
The workouse infirmary was subsidised by the church of all denominations and if you ask to see the CREED records if workouse records are not available or missing for particular years you will find the basic same record of dates entered and discharge of inmates. This enabled the said church to pay
Another surprise was the record of my great grandfathers birth, if I had known I wouldnt have bothered with his birth cert! There was everything except the time of birth.

Thankyou all for your views on the subject.
I feel a bit better about it now! Having said that he died just before the census in 1881 and his wife (my 3xGGM) was then lodging with another widow in London. This still makes me wonder why none of her family took her in. They seem to have been close, always living near to each other.

Best Wishes Carole x

Why didn't they take her in?

I've often wondered that with my lot. I can only assume that it was down to finances and space - they were probably on very poor wages and only had enough (barely) to support themselves let alone another adult that couldn't bring in a wage. Its possible they were all out at work and so there would have been no-one home to look after the invalid anyway.

Plus they were probably living in very cramped conditions so couldn't squeeze another person into the living space.

It took me a while to get my head around all this and to stop thinking of my ancestors as 'heartless' for not taking in sick parents and orphaned siblings.

Even now the "workhouse" stigma has not entirely disappeared. My own mother died a few years ago. She was born in 1916. My father had a good job and when he died, my mother was left well provided for. Nevertheless, she worried constantly about money, joking (or so we thought) that if she spent too much she would end up in the workhouse.

In her last few years she suffered from senile dementia, and constantly begged us not to put her into the workhouse.

Since her death, I have researched the family history. My mother grew up in her grandparents' house (her father having been killed at the end of WW1 when she was 2). Now I find that her grandmother went into the workhouse as a child on the death of her own parents, and indeed her grandmother's own mother had spent time in the workhouse (with her mother and siblings) as a child. My mother grew up listening to her grandmother (who also suffered from senile dementia in old age). No wonder my mother worried so much about the workhouse.

I wish I had known when she was alive what I know now. I would not have shrugged her worries off as "rambling" quite so lightly.

Tina

It was quite common for people to be admitted to the infimary part of the workhouse when they were seriously ill. My Gt grandfathers death certificate shows his as dying in the workhouse,but when I checked the records he had only been admitted that morning
The 2 wards that had been the workhouse were used for many years after 1947 mainly for elderly patients. My aunt was admited to one of them when she had a broken leg and there was no-one to look after her 24/7 I didn't live in the same area
She realised what the ward had been ,told me off for having her admitted to the workhouse and never spoke to me again