Genealogy Chat

see below

Having done most of the easy stuff on my tree I agreed to look into my cousin’s mother’s tree for him. No connection to me but I quite enjoy a good search through the censuses and BMDs and can give him lots of hints for when he is ready to do the leg work on it. Anyway, whilst I did check that he wanted to know good and bad things before we started and set out the usual ground rules for when I do look ups for others … BUT what wasn’t expecting was to find 3 successive generations classified as idiots or imbeciles on the census returns and 2 in asylums! One you could perhaps cope with but 3xgreat grandfather, 2xgreat grandfather and great grandfather? I’ve managed to get 900+ people in my tree and not yet found an imbecile – much to mine and everyone else’s amazement(!) – so I’m not sure what this means. Has anyone else got imbeciles in their trees? Is there any advice on what it means? Is it definitely mental illness or could it mean something else. I feel obliged to give a bit more explanation before I pass on this info to my cousin. My guess is that he will be amused but you never know. Any advice on where to look would be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance. Louise

Either you tell him the truth or you tell him nothing. Don't play fast and loose with the facts. Think of yourself as an election night reporter, impartial and informative.

Wow Paul! That's a bit of a brutal reply. I would never lie to anyone. I was looking for a bit of context so that we can both understand what it means a bit more clearly. Louise

Hi Louise I have one rellie as an imbecile in 1881. He is in the workhouse at the time. Up until then he had been an bricklayer supporting his family.. From what I have been able to ascertain people classed this way were usually ill, i.e had a stroke or something similar. Simone x

Sorry Louise - I didn't men to offend my favourite pundit! Having read your thread again I see what you mean. I think I would present it in a lighthearted vein - hopefully he too will see the funny side immediately.

There are definitions of the three ''bad'' words when used on the census, but there's not a great deal of point in knowing which way round they were supposed to be applied as census enumerators only guessed anyway! Idiot - could well be a person with mental retardation.....maybe through a difficult birth or through some sort of accident such as a head injury. Imbecile - sometimes used for the above, but sometimes used for other sorts of mental illness. Lunatic - usually applied to people suffereng with some sort of mental instability, which which would probably be given some sort of name such as mania etc On my tree I have literally dozens of them!! Really, unless they were in an institution and you can access the records, you have to make an educated guess. remember, mental illness was not well understood and sometimes so-called treatments only made things worse. Some of my rellies get the dreaded entry in the last column in old age, which I take to be some form of dementia. Some have it from the childhood, which I take to meen some sort of birth trauma or other disability from birth Some fall in between.....those are probably the more worrying ones when telling someone about their tree. In Edwardian England women were sometimes locked up for life for ''immorality'' (maybe having got pregnant out of wedlock), and probably had nothing wrong with them in our eyes :o(( Merry

Louise My great great Aunt entered theAsylum part of the Workhouse in 1864, shortly after her younger brother was born. She was about 16 months old and was classed as an imbecile. She appears on 1871, as an imbecile, again in 1881, but on 1891, although still in the same Asylum, she has now been reclassified as Deaf and Dumb. She was released in 1899, into the care of her 'kinsman', a reverend gentleman. Maybe this happened in your family? It is difficult to imagine how 3 successive generations of 'imbeciles' managed to breed AND hold together a family unit. OC

louise A lot of people who were deaf and dumb were classed as imbeciles and it could well be what was happening here (because they could not hear and speak to communicate and therefore people could not understand them). As was suggested further up the board a stroke, rendering the person incapable of a proper response to questioning could also have been interpreted as imbecilic. There is also what we would class today as learning disabilities as being imbecile - my oldest daughter has moderate to severe learning difficulties (or slow as some peple would say) and whilst she is by no means stupid she has great difficulties communicating in either the written or spoken word. Imbecile was a cover all description because they didn't have the language to differentiate people who were 'different' to the norm. Hope you are able to express this to your cousin and they are not hurt by it - as indeed they should not be. Snowdrops PS You were great on Friday night - thanks x K

Louise, In my opnion the word 'imbecile' was used to describe anything which they did not understand. I suppose in todays terms that could be anything from depression to parkinsons. Many of those people today would be medically treated & be a normal part of soceity but then they did not have the money to get treatment & even if they did medicine was not so advanced in diagonosing or recognising the illness. I remember reading my Grandmothers 'Doctors' book from early 1900's where is was suggested that menopausal women by locked in Asylums for their own safety? Thank goodness medicine has progressed.

Thanks all for the advice. Sounds as ever! And Paul - no offence taken! I think it's probably a mixture of things and as ever will be a nightmare to unravel. What's interesting me is that 2 of them were classsed as imbeciles and then seem to be perfectly OK and back in the community with families 10 years later. Very odd. The good news for my cousin is that I am now intruigued enough to do a bit more research on this! Louise

Sometimes these definitions seem very harsh but in reality they often were used to describe someone with a disabilty. My own great grandmother was banished to an asylum in 1919, aged 71, where she died. She was often talked about in hushed voices when I was small. Reality was she was suffering from kidney failiure (it said Chronic Nephritis on her death certificate, but no one had explained what this actually menat) and as she had no one to look after her, this was the only place they could put her to end her days.