RootsChat.Com

I've always taken the view that as historians we are impartial observers. The past is what it is. We cannot change it and we must not judge it. We must accept whatever we find with equanimity.

And yet ...

... I've started finding a bit about what happened to the family of Edgar Spooner (alias King) after he fell from the railway bridge and drowned ... and my powers of detachment have wholly deserted me.

I find one of my great x3 aunts becoming a teenage drunkard and prostitute, sharing a squalid room with several other women and their children. No furniture except for packing cases and (incongruously) a solitary four-poster bed ... insufficient bedclothes for all ... no food in the place and the children huddled in a corner. She is condemned to the lock hospital ... escapes ... is returned.

I am emotionally drained just reading about it. I cannot comprehend it. I am autistic, and empathy is supposed to be beyond my abilities. Usually it is. But I cannot escape that squalid room ... it is hanuting my every thought, try as I may to turn away from it. And those children ... what became of them? What sort of lives did they lead?

I am bleeding, aching, crying bitterly for the plight of children I never knew, no relations of mine and long since dead; affronted at the hand life dealt them.

I never knew family history research could be like this ...

now that IS interesting ... because it implies that the Sarsaparilla business (I keep wanting to say "Sarsaparilla racket", thinking of Fat Sam in Bugsy Malone .... ) was started in London before Edgar emigrated.

Time to go searching for references in English newspapers, methinks ...

I will be in that part of London on Wednesday and Thurday.

If I can find time, would you like me to drop into Dr Johnson's House and make a few enquiries for you?

(It's my old stamping ground ... when I first worked in London, I was in the next square over and could look out of my office window and SEE Dr Johnson's house ... )

The thing that confuses me is that Edgar was a Tailor and this information was given when he died....

New Zealand Herald 7 May 1884 Page 4

Mr. Francis King supplies the following information respecting Mr. Edgar King, who was recently drowned at Dunedin :— "Mr. Edgar King arrived in Auckland by the ship "Wellington oh the 2nd of January, 1882, and shortly afterwards opened a sarsparilla store in Grey-street, but finding it did not pay, he made arrangements with, the manager of the ew Zealand Clothing Factory in Auckland to proceed to the Dunedin factory as a cutter. But he had to leave the factory a few weeks ago, being too old for the work. He was in his 72nd year. His married daughter (Mrs. Streat) and family of five arrived in Dunedin last February by the ship Wellington, the same ship her father came to Auckland by. Mrs. Streat was to come on to New Zealand and get settled down with her father and family while her husband finished his term of thirty years at Reid and Co.'s brewery, London, for which he will receive a pension. His time was up last January.

What business would Francis have been taking over after his father's death?

Debra 

I had noted that as an oddity too. However, it seems pretty clear that the newspaper report and the newspaper advert relate to the same two men and the same sarsaparilla business.

Perhaps what Francis has actually said was "HE [my emphasis] couldn't make it pay" ... i.e. it wasn't that the business itself was inevitably unremunerative, but that Edgar was not a natural enterpreneur / businessman whereas his son was.

Something similar happened shortly after the second world war when my grandfather boght a failing clothing company in the east end of London and turned it around, making a considerable amount of money out of it whereas the previous owners had been unable to do so.

Alternatively, the statement about it not paying may just have been the journalist reading between the lines and getting it wrong. They got other things wrong in reporting this story, including saying that Mary Streat was Edgar's wife when she was actually his daughter, and that she was waiting for Edgar and John aboard the Camille with seven children (she had five of her own, and Edgar's daughter Therea, making six; John was the seventh and he was wit Edgar, so I am assuming that the information about "seven children" came from the fact that they had bought seven children's tickets).