Georgina Pocklington

Another old photograph: this from around 1893. It shows the wonderfully named Georgina Pocklington (born 1857) and her mother Elizabeth (born 1835). They lived nearly all their lives in the villages of Rawcliffe and Cowick, Yorkshire. They are my Great-Great and Great-Great-Great grandmas on my mother’s side. 

Elizabeth and Georgina Pocklington, c1893

When my uncle, the farmer who married into the family, said mischievously that if the Blue Line bus had not started running through Rawcliffe, they would all have been imbeciles because of inbreeding, Georgina and Elizabeth illustrate what he had in mind. Through them, I find myself related and doubly-related to no end of people in the villages. I hasten to add that I found no consanguinuity.  

I will say little more about Elizabeth because she complicates things enormously. Suffice to say her grandfather fathered 21 children. No one I knew remembered much from before her time, but there were second- and third-hand tales from after. For me, they give substance to the raw names and dates. 

Georgina had an unimaginably difficult and short life which illustrates how hard it could be in the nineteenth century. It can’t have been a very happy life. She had a difficult childhood, illegitimate children, a scoundrel of a husband who deserted her, and she died long before her time. 

Her mother was unmarried, and her brother - her only sibling - died aged 11. Her mother then married a widower named James Tasker. Although James was later supportive of Georgina and her children (he may have paid for the family photographs), she was left with her grandparents through childhood. 

James Tasker was my Great-Great Grandfather’s brother. When Georgina’s mother became Elizabeth Tasker, family members later came to think that Georgina was also a Tasker, whereas she was not related to them at all except through her mother’s marriage. It caused much confusion. 

Even more confusingly, one of Georgina’s descendants had children with one of James’ from his first marriage, which made their later children both half-siblings and 4th cousins. That may be a detail too far, but it begins to show the complexities involved.   

Georgina had eight children: two before marriage, four during, and two more after her husband deserted her. The first, Sabina, born when Georgina was 18, was said to have been by the son of a Leeds doctor with whom she went into service. I suppose that pregnant servants were commonplace in the 1870s. I find my mind racing to imagine the goings on in the house. The doctor’s son would not have carried any blame, of course. 

Georgina then married George Coulson in 1879, and had four children. I spoke to their grandson, then 89, in 2003. He said that George Coulson was a big fellow, a bit rough looking, who earned extra money through boxing, taking on all-comers in travelling fairground boxing booths. He accumulated enough to go to a world heavyweight championship fight in America around 1890. He stayed. It was thought he may have had another family in Texas. When Georgina’s last two children were born in 1894 and 1897, no father was named. I remember their descendants as having light hair and scary pale eyes. I was terrified of two boys just a little older than me. 

Georgina died from Erysipelas in 1902, aged 45. This was a common and very nasty streptococcal infection causing a swollen, bright-red skin lesion, most often spreading over the nose and cheeks. Infection was usually through a cut and could lead to septicaemia (or blood poisoning as it would then have been called). Penicillin now clears it up in a few days. The youngest children were brought up by their older sisters.  

It is not clear when George returned, but it was certainly before the 1920s. None of the family would have anything to do with him. I think they probably held him responsible for their mother’s early death, leaving her in poverty, with all the difficulties and illness it brings. They said he had gone off and left then when they were young children, so they were not going to help him now. Sabina would not have him in the house. He had to sleep on the steam room floor of his brother’s farm. He died aged 92 in 1947, in Selby workhouse. 

Most of Georgina’s children had many children of their own, yearly all in Rawcliffe. I previously wrote about walking along the High Street with my grandma, who described almost everyone we passed as her “cousin”, although they may have been second cousins, half cousins, or similar. She recited their names so often I can still do it too: “There was Aunty Bina, and she had Blanche, Tom, Gladys, Lena, Olga, Fred, Ena, Dolly, Albert, and Jack”.

Now consider this. Sabina’s husband was my great-grandfather’s cousin on my father’s side. That makes their children doubly-related to me through both my father’s family and my mother’s. This is what happens when five-eighths of your ancestry is from the same small area. 

If the Blue Line bus ...