When we research our family history what we are primarily
doing is discovering stories. Almost always these are stories that we are
discovering for the first time. They are unique and our own. We are explorers
trudging through the darkest jungles of dusty records until the moment of
recognition….. Dr Livingston I presume. Sometimes
though the story is found not by what is written on the page but by what is not
written. The blank page says more than words could ever say. There is an
emotional profundity, a silence, a space, as we find in the final page of a war
record or the death record for a child.
In the St Nicolas Church graveyard in Nuneaton,
Warwickshire there is a headstone for an Elizabeth Ball. It says, whose death was occasioned by her fall from
her horse. A few words. A tragedy
encapsulated in a sentence. Nothing else about her is said.
St Nicolas Church, Nuneaton parish burial record
It’s always harder to find information about female
ancestors than male ones. There were no photographs back then. Women would
appear on very few documents. They wouldn’t appear on tax records or voting
records or military records as their husbands did. Her story can only be
surmised through the lives of the people who lived around her. Her story is told
by the silent spaces.
She died on the 7th of July 1793 when she was 52
years old. She had 9 children five of which were under 18 years of age, the
youngest, William was aged 10. What happened to them?
She was Mrs Ball after marriage and she was Miss Ball
before it. Her husband Timothy Ball was most likely a cousin. He was two years
younger than her. They were baptised, married, worshipped and buried in St
Nicolas Church Nuneaton. Did they meet there too?
Parish record from St Nicolas Church, Nuneaton
Timothy Ball was variously described as a yeoman and a
grazier. He owned land in a place nearby called Hides Pasture. He was a
prominent citizen of his local community. His name appears on many documents but not
much is known about him either.
Timothy remarried a year after Elizabeth’s death but then
died himself shortly after in 1795. Was this from grief?
It’s not known if Timothy’s second wife, Hannah, became a
step mother to the orphaned children. In her will of 1830 she leaves Timothy’s
children 50 pounds each, referring to them as her ‘friends’. Were they more
than that?
For all of us who pursue genealogical research we are
always collecting fragments like these; a name, a birth date, a death date, an
occupation and so on. No matter how many fragments we find we are always just looking
at the tip and trying to piece together the iceberg of our ancestor’s lives. It
is an iceberg that is only conceived when we imagine the vastness of the ocean
that contains it. It is what’s not said that speaks the loudest here. The story
is told by the spaces that surround the fragments. It’s a story that comes from
the silences.
Twenty seven years after Elizabeth Ball’s death, in a
church 1 kilometre away from St Nicolas, Nuneaton a baby girl was christened.
Unlike most women of her age her thoughts feelings and life would be well-documented.
Thought to be too physically unattractive to have any serious prospects of
marriage but having a sharp intellect her father decided to invest in her
education. Something not typically afforded women at that time.
Mary Ann Evans, who was
christened on 29th November 1819 in All Saints Church in Chilvers
Coton, was educated and grew up in Nuneaton and the surrounding area. She was
an intelligent and voracious reader and when she wrote what was to become her
first novel, at age 37, it was her childhood and adolescent memories that she
drew from. Choosing the nom de plume George Eliot, the characters in her novels
were said to have been based on people that she knew from her early life. 
Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880) aka George Eliot
There is only one character from her novels which is
definitely thought to be someone from my family tree. The character of Rev
Archibald Duke from her book Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) was thought to have
been based on the real Rev Henry Hake, vicar of Chilvers Coton. He was the
husband of Elizabeth Ball’s great niece.
Her description says he was: a very dyspeptic and evangelical man… whose hair is brushed straight
up, evidently with the intention of giving him a height somewhat less
disproportionate to his sense of his own importance than the measure of five
feet three accorded him by an oversight of nature.
She doesn’t describe him as much of an iceberg. Mostly
‘tip’ I think.
As with any ‘person of note’ the events of Mary Ann Evans
life are incredibly well documented. Her novels have been described as
psychological portraits of the characters within them and as such, I think,
they are also psychological portraits of herself. This much genealogical information
for an ancestor would be an exceptional find for anyone let alone for a woman
of that era.
Elizabeth Ball’s grandson John Ball was, like Mary Ann
Evans’ father, a farmer. John farmed a small piece of land in a hamlet called
Griff not far from Nuneaton. He went to All Saints Church, Chilvers Coton, where
his son Benjamin , my grandfather’s grandfather, was christened.
Griff
It’s hard to believe that Mary Ann Evans who lived nearby
in Griff House wouldn’t have had some contact with the Ball family nearby. Did
she see them passing on the street? Did she ever say hello, have a conversation
or shake their hands? I’ll never see what filled the silent spaces of my
ancestor’s lives, but did she? Did they inspire a character, a sentence, a word
in one of her books? I can only imagine.
The spaces of our lives can never be known without
imagining the vastness of the ocean that contains us. The blank pages and
record fragments that are left from a life will never tell it all. It’s what is
unsaid that often speaks louder than what is said. Will our descendants find
our stories, will they understand them, or will they only be revealed through
the silent spaces?
