Disabled people - Airbrushed out?

[Rena]

I would advise caution if they find that one of their ancestors was detained in an institution.

At one time the Irish would take children away from their fathers when  their mother died as it was thought a man couldn't look after children.

It's not unknown in earlier centuries for a husband to have a rich wife put away

One of  my mother's cousins will be recorded on census as being in the local mental asylum.  She was put there by her husband after the birth of a child. We now know this might have been caused by hormone imbalance.   Her family thought she had what was known at the time as "the baby blues" and asked her husband to sign her out - they tried to get her released but couldn't.  He refused because he had a girfriend who he eventually married.  As he was the only one legally entitled to sign the documentation she stayed interred until she died.   

[coombs]

In 1843 my ancestor had a child who was born blind and deaf. He died in 1863 in the smallpox hospital in Islington. The death certificate said he had spinal damage from birth. He grew up in a Clerkenwell tenement. I would add an person to my tree whether able bodied or disabled.

[Mart 'n' Al]

I think it is a sad indictment of society in recent years, caused by political correctness. Anything that we have any sort of problem with these days, we seem to give it a new more politically correct name. I won't list any here, to avoid causing any offence (that's ironic...), but compare the words that we used in bygone days with the euphemisms that we use now.

If we reran the 1911 census, it wouldn't have a column for disabilities, it would probably say "different abilities" .

Martin