Irish-Welsh Ancestry

Florence Lock was 9 years old when she entered the workhouse. She would spend the next 10 years inside the walls of Victorian institutions. Discover the hidden life of a Victorian orphan, documented in her own correspondence.

Just before Beatrice Vaughan’s death in 1985, she confided in her son a secret she had kept her entire life

While researching my ancestral parish of Much Marcle, Herefordshire, I uncovered a court record that told a story far more desperate than my own family's hardships. It was the story of Milborough Trilloe, a widowed agricultural labourer, whose life reveals the struggle of survival faced by the rural poor in the 1840s. My Evans family line moved to Wales from this same parish. My ancestor Richard Evans, a one-handed farm labourer, knew relentless toil and tragedy, losing three children in a...