Genealogy Chat

hi all
I am a Kiwi where one family per house is the norm.

i was wondering how my relitives lived in a house with 2 families, which seems to be a common practice in sunderland in the census that i have read.
This sounds thick i know, but as many of the houses appear to be 2 storey was one family up and one down?
did they have their own kitchen facilities?
i imagine they shared the wc out the back.

does anyone know of a web site where there is information of housing in the 1800's so i can educate my self!

thanks heaps
jeannie

You might like to look at this website - though it focuses on London the way of life described for the working classes could be applied to all cities:

http://www.hiddenlives.org.uk/articles/poverty.html

And a brief mention here:

http://www.localhistories.org/sunderland.html

Jan

my mother, born 1916 was one of nine children, seven being born in the same cottage which had only one bedroom!!!!

This was very common in large towns and cities. They were tenements rather than houses. There could sometimes be several families living at the same address, often with only one or two rooms each.

It is probably wishful thinking to believe that each family had there own kitchen or toilet facilities.Conditions were unsanitary to say the least.

There was 12 of us in 2 rooms when i was a kid.

Loo was a bucket and no bath.

Hazelx

we had a tin bath, no electricity and a loo outside which my Dad had to empty in the garden periodically!!! happy days!!!

One famly per house is the norm here too!!! These days, anyway!!

Years ago, looking at the census returns we see that many families shared a house, particularly in the cities.
There wasn't the luxury of having one famly living upstairs, and one family living downstairs. A whole family would share one room in many cases, and ALL the occupants of the household shared the loo out the back.

My g. grandfather was born and brought up on in the Marylebone area of London - a poor, working class area where it as quite the norm for several families to share one house. By 1903, however, g.grandad was doing quite well in the building trade and he managed to purchase a house. He was the talk of the area for years - not only had he actually purchased a house, but only HIS family (of 11) lived in it!!
Very unusual for those times, in that area!

K

Do you know whether it was the norm in NZ 100 or so years ago to have one house per family? then again it may have been easy just to build something somewhere out of wood perhaps

jax

On the 1901 census my great grandparents were boarders in a Victorian terraced house (which is still there today - nothing too large) along with 33 other boarders. Apart from my grandparents the others were all single men.

Goodness only knows where they all slept!!

Kath. x

as far as i am aware in nz it was always one family per house.
back in the 1840's when the fencibles were sent out for defence, they were given land ,1acre, in return for armed service.
Many on arrival would live in tents or in mud houses. later they would build something more perminent. Timber was plentifull but the settlers would often bring with them builing parts,(windows, with glass, nails corrugated roofing etc) They had to build their own house which if you look at the surviving examples of colonial housing in museums today would have been small,made of timber, it may have had 2 rooms down, living, and parents bedroom, with an attic bedroom over for the children. toilet would be a longdrop in the back yard. some of these houses would be attached to another identical house.
Those who could afford it would have bigger homes.
i can see that although heading to the colonies would have been the great unknown, it may have offered more sanitary living conditions with more space and less overcrowding.

The familys in question lived at 10 Robinson Terr, in suderland, co durham in 1891. the Brewertons (brickmaker) were a family of 7 living in 2 rooms and the Smiles family (gas stoker)of 8 were living in 3 rooms.
The parents of these 2 families were my gggrandparents (easier to find this way) their children martha brewerton and john joseph Smiles were my ggrandparents.

thanks for all your feed back. this adds more flesh to the families living conditions

jeannie

Bit different in the UK I dont know what the poulation of NZ was in the mid 1800s but you only have 4.5mil now where as there were over 17 mil in the UK back then and about 62mil now.
Building wooden houses would not have worked here because of the weather, although there were probably some scattered about.

jax

My mother, born in 1930, lived in a '2 up 2 down' terraced house, with a scullery attached to the back.

My grandparents, mum, aunt and uncle lived in the 2 downstairs rooms.
A family of 7 lived in the 2 upstairs rooms, and the scullery (and loo in the back yard) were shared.

My grandfather owned this house, it had been bought by my gg grandfather in 1850 - so they weren't being 'squeezed in' by any unscrupulous landlord.