The Two Families of John Cunningham Bellshaw (1)

John Cunningham Bellshaw, second son of John Bellshaw and Elizabeth Cunningham, married Jane Moodie on 31st December 1879 when he was twenty three and she was seventeen. They were neighbours, living at 10 and 12 Norfolk Lane, Glasgow and went on to have five children.

John Bellshaw junior was born in November 1880, Andrew Moodie Bellshaw (named for his maternal grandfather) three years later. Annie Hislop Bellshaw (named for her maternal grandmother) was born in December 1885, Jane Hislop Bellshaw in February 1888 and Agnes Moodie Bellshaw in June 1891.

Although all the children were born in Glasgow their births were registered at different addresses. Their father is listed as a journeyman baker on his marriage certificates, and on the birth certificates of all his children There is no evidence of unemployment, but other records give the impression of an impoverished family, often on the move.

John Bellshaw junior died of bronchitis in 1885. He was just under five years old. In the 1891 census his siblings Andrew, Annie and Jane were boarding with Margaret Simpson, a laundress, and her two teenage children. Their father, John Bellshaw, was boarding with the family of Alexander Workman, also a baker. Their mother Jane, then pregnant with Agnes, was an inmate at the City Poorhouse on Parliamentary Road.

Glasgow had three poorhouses; Barnhill Poorhouse in Barony, The City Poorhouse, and Govan Poorhouse on Dale Street. All must have been deeply unpleasant but the City Poorhouse seems to have been the most terrible. According to The Workhouse;

The Glasgow City Poorhouse stood on the north side of Parliamentary Road, to the west of its junction with St James Road. The building was originally erected in 1809 as a lunatic asylum. With 1,500 beds, the poorhouse was one of the largest institutions in Britain.

The poor conditions in the City Poorhouse were a recurring subject of concern with both the City Council and the Parochial Board. In 1882, separate reports by the Board's Secretary and Medical Officer condemned the building. In 1887, after press reports of overcrowding, Dr Littlejohn and the Council's Medical Officer Dr Russell were appointed to conduct an enquiry. Their report highlighted a long list of deficiencies including:

Inadequate separation of sick and able-bodied.

Very poor sanitary arrangements such as badly sited and separated water closets.

The use of water closets as sculleries and pantries.

Poor bathing facilities — in one instance, 290 male inmates took their weekly bath in two baths, a process which took from 7am to 7pm.

Inadequate open-air exercise facilities.

Badly lit and ventilated day rooms.

Many of the buildings problems were aggravated by its location on a very busy main road near to the North British Goods Station.

It was in these conditions that Agnes was born on the 23rd of June.

Annie Hislop Bellshaw, then aged seven, died in September 1893, after suffering pulmonary congestion for a week. John Bellshaw had been present at his daughter’s death as he had his son John’s. She died at 10 Norfolk Road, the address of her aunts Jane and Helen.

On the 5th June 1900 Jane Moodie Bellshaw, John Cunningham Bellshaw’s first wife, died. Her cause of death was Phthisis Pulmonalis and Abdominalis, which is an archaic medical term for tuberculosis, a condition characterized by emaciation, debility, cough, hectic fever, and purulent expectoration. Her death certificate indicates that she had been suffering from TB for at least two years. She died at Gartloch Asylum, having been moved there from the City Poorhouse. Gartloch was built as a lunatic asylum in 1896, but operated as a 50 bed Tuberculosis sanatorium from 1902. Jane Moodie Bellshaw’s death certificate specifically gives Gartloch ‘Asylum’ as her place of death in 1900, so it is probable that TB patients were treated there informally before this date.
There would be sense to this. TB is highly infectious and lunatic asylums were traditionally located in isolated locations.

John married Mary Jane Handley, a confectionary worker, at 36 Kelvingrove Street 'under the form' of the United Free Church on December 11th 1900. This was only six months after his first wife, had died and she was over twenty years younger than he was. They appear together on the 1901 census with Jane and Agnes, John’s daughters from his marriage with Jane Moodie.

Next: The Second Family of John Cunningham Bellshaw.

10 Norfolk Court

John and Elizabeth Cunningham moved into 10 Norfolk Court sometime during the short life of their son Johnstone. The family was to live at that address for the next sixty years until the death of Johnstone’s elder sister Jane, aged 77 in 1927. Because the family lived there so long the address turns up on birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates and census returns. So what do we know about it?

Well we know it must have been a fairly grim place, even by the low standards of the time. All three children born to John and Christine born after the move died within the first year of life, without medical attendance of respiratory infection. we also know that four of John’s surviving children married spouses who lived within Norfolk Court. In 1879 Mary Ann Bellshaw married Thomas Reid of 8 Norfolk Court and John Cunningham Bellshaw married Jane Moodie of 12 Norfolk Court. William Bellshaw, their elder brother, married Catherine Osborn, of 2 Norfolk Court in 1885 and Elizabeth Bellshaw married James Crandles, also of 8 Norfolk Court, in 1890.

Some of the most interesting information on Norfolk Court comes from census returns, which were collected every ten years. These reveal that in 1881 John and Elizabeth, aged 61 and 50 respectively, were living with three adult daughters and two adult sons in the dwelling, which only only two rooms with windows. By 1891 the parents had passed away, and three of their children had married and moved away. However three of the children were still living there; Jane and Helen who were both to remain unmarried and would live there for many years, and also their sister Mary Ann, now widowed and her son Archie, aged 10. By the time of the next census in 1901 Jane and Helen were living there alone. Jane was still living at 10 Norfolk Court when she died in 1927, sixty years after her parents moved there. Her death certificate was witnessed by her nephew Archie who had lived there as a child.

John Bellshaw 1820-1890

John Bellshaw is my wife's great great grandfather, and currently the earliest traceable member of her family.

John Bellshaw was born between 1820 and 1823 and married Elizabeth Cunningham on the 5th October 1849. At the time John was a police constable. Together they had ten children; Jane, William, John, Helen, Samuel, Elizabeth, Johnstone, Christina, Joseph and Mary.

There is a strange asymmetry to the survival of John Bellshaw’s children. His first six children survived into old age; his three youngest died before their first birthdays. Is there anything in the available evidence which might account for this?

Birth, death and census records show occupation and residence. From 1857, when John Cunningham Bellshaw was born, to 1864 when Elizabeth Bellshaw was born, John’s occupation was listed variously as lamplighter, police lamplighter, Clyde police lamplighter, or quay lamplighter.

This can't have been skilled work, but it would have been regular. Glasgow had been very forward thinking in its provision of policing. There had been a Glasgow police force since the 18th century and as Glasgow grew it incorporated the police forces of the burghs it absorbed. In 1858, the Clyde Police was formed to police the growing dock areas of the Clyde, and this was merged into the Glasgow Police in 1866.

At some point between 1864 and 1867 however, John’s employment, changed to 'day labourer'. Labourers had nothing to sell but their physical strength, and day labourers were the least fortunate of all. They worked for a day’s wage at a time and no work meant no wage.

Quite what caused this change in employment isn’t clear, but by now John was in his forties and that must have made the job of bringing in a family income harder still. It must surely have reflected a significant downturn in the family's fortune. By 1872 John was recorded as being a shipping company porter on his son Joseph's death certificate. This may have provided a little more security but probably not much.

Another change in the Bellshaw's fortunes around this time was their residence. Before the birth of Johnstone Sanderson Bellshaw in 1867, John and his family had moved house frequently within Glasgow. Shortly after Johnstone’s birth the family moved to 10 Norfolk Court. John and Elizabeth never moved house again. John was to live there twenty four years until his death in 1890 from chronic bronchitis.

It would be nice to think this provided some stability to the Bellshaws, and to some extent this may have been true, but it must have been a bleak kind of stability. All John and Elizabeth's children born after the move died of chest complaints within months. The dwelling, presumably a tenement, would have been tiny. We know it only had two rooms with windows because that information is recorded on the censuses, and at times it must have been packed. In 1881 John and Elizabeth were living there with two adult sons and three adult daughters. I suspect they did not move because they couldn’t afford to move up, and they were at the bottom of the housing ladder.

However, two points stand out. The first is the longevity of the Bellshaw's residence at 10 Norfolk Court; they never descended, at any point, into homelessness. The second is that none of the birth, death or marriage certificates, or census records, on which John Bellshaw's name appears, is John ever recorded as being unemployed. Even on Elizabeth’s death certificate, recorded when he was sixty three, John is employed as a bonded store labourer. The Bellshaws may have been at the bottom of the ladder, but John Bellshaw seems to have ensured that his family did not drop off that ladder altogether.

Next: 10 Norfolk Court

Why the Bellshaws?

The original plan was to do a bit of family history research into Bill and Lettie's families. (Bill and Lettie are my parents-in-law.) Both have had interesting lives and had interesting tales to tell their children; tales that Kathryn is now sharing with our children. Quite apart from the fact that I'm very fond of Bill and Lettie, I thought it would give me some good practice at tracing a family history from scratch and developing my skills as an historian and genealogist.

As it turned out I quickly got into the Bellshaw side of the family. It's a lot easier to find people on ScotlandsPeople than any of the English sites. It's partly because Scotland has a lot smaller population than England, but I think it's mainly because ScotlandsPeople is simply a better, more user friendly, site. The main reason that I got stuck into the Bellshaws, however, was because I struck genealogical gold.

The Bellshaws are a very small Scottish family. Between 1855 and 1890 only seventeen Bellshaws were born in Scotland. (In the same period over seventeen thousand Hamiltons were born.) As a result,it quickly became apparent that the Bellshaws were all related; they were all descended from one man, John Bellshaw, who had moved to Scotland at some point in the first twenty years of his life.

His timing was fantastic. He arrived in time for Britain's first national census in 1841. This recorded where he was living, who he was living there with, and what his relationship with them was. It also recorded his place of birth (which is how we know he wasn't born in Scotland). He appears, every ten years, on every subsequent census until his death, along with his growing family.

Although his eldest two children were born before the existence of birth certificates, his subsequent children were born after their introduction in 1855. Their birth certificates give their names, their parents names and occupations, their place and date of birth and even the signature or mark of the parent registering them.

So it was extraordinarily good timing on John's part. If he'd moved to Scotland twenty years earlier, or censuses and BDM certificates had been introduced twenty years later, it would have been a much harder task to find the links between the different Bellshaw families. As it is a very interesting family saga was revealed.

Tomorrow: So what did I find out?

The Bellshaws

The idea was I'd keep a blog of the family history research I was doing, as I was doing it. I'd then have a contemporaneous record of my research. Good methodology, eh.

In practice of course it didn't work out. I've spent six months researching the Bellshaws and I've made precisely no entries during that time. My back up plan is now a series of retrospective records.

Let's see if I have more success this time.