If you look hard enough, your bound to find a black sheep or two in every family tree. In my case they were hiding in the places I least expected to find them. My grandmother was one of the most proper and well mannered women I have ever met. I'm pretty sure she is the closest thing I will ever meet to a saint, however not all of her ancestors shared these traits. One woman in particular was foul mouthed and not shy of throwing a fist (or two). To be honest, after reading of her fights, I think she could have held her own against one of London's prized fighters. This woman's name was Mary Ann Daniels (nee Taplin) - I spoke of briefly in a previous article here.
When I began performing FAN club research on her children I discovered that she had given birth to a son named Alfred during 1880 in the HM Westminster Prison! (Yikes! That is NOT a birth certificate I would ever want to have!) Of course this raised a number of questions for me: why was she in the prison? Why was she imprisoned in Westminster instead of somewhere closer to her home in Hornsey/Wood Green/ Edmonton area of North London? After searching through every collection on Ancestry, Find My Past, My Heritage, and just about every other source of criminal records online and not finding anything, I turned to the newspapers!
Using Newspapers for Genealogy
Newspapers are amazing (and often overlooked) genealogical resources because they hold nothing back when it comes to telling a story. Sometimes they can be difficult to search because many of the databases search engines are powered by optical character recognition (OCR). I have been performing my searches on the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) because unlike other newspaper databases you can view part of the article for free. By manipulating the keywords I am searching with, I am able to copy the text from the entire OCR powered transcription and eventually produce the entire article.
I start by searching for one or more of the following terms:
- Their full name
- A street they lived on
- Surname and street
- Full house address
- For women - Mrs. [Husband's full name]
- For older newspapers - Surname and town
- Surname with occupation
For BNA, searches can be modified using the same commands as the ones used in
Google. For example, placing quotes around a word or phrase means that it will only return exact results. I caution against doing this with newspapers because OCR often results in misspelled words or additional characters being inserted between words. For example if a word is split across two lines by using a dash, it would not be returned by an exact search. Additionally, exact searching prevents other variations of the surname from being returned. Depending on the year that you are searching in, there may be significant variation in the spelling of a person's name. For example the surname
Daniels was found as
Daniel,
Daniell, and
Daniells in the newspaper articles I talk about below. All newspapers were referring to the same woman yet her name was spelled slightly differently in each.
Once you have found a transcription that is a potential match, copy and paste the text into a word document. I also copy down the newspaper name, publication date, page number, and article title as this can help identify if you have the correct newspaper for the subsequent searches. Then to get the rest of the transcribed article, copy and paste a snippet from the beginning OR end of the transcription you just copied. Place the transcription in quotes and check off the exact box. This will ensure you only see results that are an exact match. Occasionally the subsequent transcription will show as [...] instead of actual text. In this case select a different snippet from the transcription and try again. The snippet doesnt have to be long. Sometimes only one or two misspelled words is enough. If there are a large number of results narrow it down using the newspaper name and/or publication date. Keep repeating this process until you have transcribed the entire article. You will know when you have reached the end because the title of the next article will be in all capital letters and appear in the transcription box.
The Tale of a Victorian Criminal
So what exactly did Mary Ann do to deserve the title of "Victorian Criminal"? She made the paper seven times (that I know of), five of which claimed she was responsible for committing a serious assault. She received a sentence for three of the assault cases - the remaining two instances she was either found innocent of, or the charges were dismissed before trial.
The first encounter was on July 5th 1879. While selling fish with her husband they got into a verbal dispute and "upset the stall". Her husband (George) walked off leaving her with the messy stall. A man named Blackaby got involved in the affair. He offered to help Mary Ann straighten up the stall and while doing so asked her where her husband was then allegedly proceeded to hit her in the face. Mary Ann retaliated both physically and verbally. She threatened to "lock him up" then went about biting and striking him. At one point she got hold of a poker and struck him with it. Blackaby cried out "murder" which caught the attention of bystanders. The altercation was broken up and Mary Ann escaped with few wounds while Blackaby was so severely injured he claimed that he could not work for three days. Despite Blackaby initiating the attack, Mary Ann was the one who received the fine and jail sentence. The judge defended his decision by saying that he had to issue more than just a fine because Mary Ann had behaved "more like a fiend than a human being". She went on to serve one month hard labour in prison for the assault.
Upon her release Mary Ann had not learned her lesson. On January 16th 1880 Mary Ann assaulted her own sister Emma Day. The reason being that Emma did not keep her promise to look after Mary Ann's children while she was in prison. The assault was so brutal that its hard to believe she could have preformed it while being almost 9 months pregnant! Mary Ann along with a friend Elizabeth Goodbody arrived at Emma's residence that evening and began the assault. Mary Ann struck first then Elizabeth joined in. Mary Ann then began biting her sister's thumb so violently that she nearly bit it off. She dragged her downstairs by her hair then escalated the assault. Emma claims that she feared so much for her life that she screamed out "murder" which caught the attention of her landlady. The landlady forced Mary Ann and Elizabeth out in an attempt to end the assault, however they regained entrance by breaking a window. When the police arrived they could tell which path the assault took by where the clumps of Emma's hair were. Even two weeks later during the trial Emma's wounds were still considered to be severe. Her head was nearly bald from the hair that had been pulled out in handfuls, and she could hardly move her hands from the unhealed bite marks. For that viscous assault Mary Ann was bound over for 6 months, had to pay a fine and was to complete one month of hard labour in prison. It was during this sentence that she had her son Alfred.
She was involved in a third assault for which she was found innocent - her actions justified as "defensive". On January 1st 1881 Mary Ann was assaulted by her landlord John Grogan after he claims she refused to pay her rent. George arrived home to see his wife being beaten by Grogan and his wife. A policeman arrived and persuaded the Daniels to go upstairs and lock their door. Grogan didn't want the fight to end there. He broke down the door to the Daniels room and entered with a soldering iron in hand. In fear Mary Ann threw open the front window and called out "he's going to murder us! He's got a poker!". The policeman heard her cry and raced back to the house he had just left. Upstairs he found Grogan kneeling on Mary Ann's back ready to strike her with the iron. As Grogan swung the iron, George caught the blow on his hand to protect her. With George's help the policeman disarmed Grogan. Although unclear when it happened, Grogan alleges that Mary Ann struck him in the head with a frying pan! (I'm not sure if this is true or not but with her track record I wouldn't put it past her!). Sometime during the assault Mary Ann did manage to bite Grogan's wife numerous times on the arms - the wounds were still visible during the trial a week later.
There is a fourth assault on a neighbour in 1909, however I am yet to find an article describing it in detail. All I know is that the judge dismissed the case.
In 1913, Mary Ann accuses the same neighbours (the Osborne's) that were mentioned in the 1909 case of assaulting her and her daughter. Although it is slightly unclear how the altercation started, Mary Ann alleged that the Osborne's showed up in her yard, and struck her twice in the face because of a child that she had taken in. Once again, Mary Ann got the best of her attacker. She threw them to the ground and tore their clothes with her teeth. Somewhere during the altercation, an umbrella was used as a weapon and eventually was used by Mary Ann to break two window panes of the Osborne's house. For this assault she was fined 3 shillings or could serve 14 days imprisonment.
As is the case with most criminals, Mary Ann was not the only family member to end up on the wrong side of the law - more or less half of the family was charged with something at one point or another (the most common being assault or public intoxication).
Related Posts
Case Study: Researching Extinct Addresses Using Newspapers
Googling your Ancestors
Originally Posted: November 29 2020
Revision Date: May 21 2023
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