Not boring! I did like the section on "Wages of Domestic Servants in the Household of a Country Gentleman". It's the number and the kind of servants that's so interesting, and the fact that people still had "scullions" in the 18th century (I thought they were confined to the Middle Ages and Gormenghast).

Dot

Interesting that, Dot! Purely by reputation, as it were, my gt grandmother was v hot on education. Something which has persisted down the generations.

The more I get into this, the more I feel that we are all permanently 'socially upward mobile'. Where does that leave the rest of the population?

Andy

I think this could be a class thing, in a different way. One side of my family were poor working class with aspirations (or pretensions, depending on how you look at it) to be middle class. They saw education as the key to getting into the ranks of the professionals, and their children became teachers and chemists. They would have hushed up anything that they thought might have cast doubt on their respectability.

Dot 

I have discovered numerous 'skeletons'! With one exception, however, they are all pre-1914, and whilst they appear to have been kept quiet (within the family, that is) once revealed to relatives there has been more a reaction of malicious humour than anything else .

My impression is that the Victorians, in particular, were not quite so staid about these matters - at least, not in the middle-lower classes. My 3xgt grandfather appears, despite being a 'pillar of the community', to have cheerfully welcomed two straying daughters and their offspring back into the family home. Mind you, one of them, his first daughter, was born only 3 months after he was married, so perhaps he didn't feel in a position to complain .

Andy

 ... or interesting?  Take yer pick.  Enjoy  or sleep well

Wage rates for many trades for the past several hundred years and lots more.

http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~alan/family/N-Money.html

Geoff, exactly the same thing happened in the case of my mother. She would never have admitted it, but it must have been very common.

 Marriages of first cousins are still scandalous as far as some people are concerned. I dropped a massive brick by mentioning to one relative that his stepfather was his mother's first cousin. He didn't know, and he was horrified, although this is not one of the prohibited relationships. He hasn't spoken to me since!

Dot

It's a problem I've never had to face.

My mother had been dead for some years before I discovered that her parents married almost a year after the date she gave me. 

Looking in the opposite direction, I wonder what she and my dad would have thought about their grandchildren "living in sin".

Since I began my research I've discovered several skeletons in the ancestral cupboard, by which I mean events that were kept secret from the children because they were regarded as scandalous by my ancestors.
As a result, nearly all my close relatives today are unaware of the illegitimate births and the fairly recent suicide which I've discovered in our family history.

Other people on this list must have found similar skeletons and had to decide whether to tell their aunts and uncles and cousins about them.

Relatives who have done no family history probably believe their ancestors to have been respectable, if not rich and famous, and they might prefer not to be disillusioned. Faced with the truth, some of them are upset and some are not, and I've had to be very careful what I tell to whom!

Have other people had this problem, and how have they handled it?

Dot

I have said this more than once. ^^^

I would send an e-mail to the Records Office at Whitehaven and ask if they will do a lookup - at the worst, they can only say no.

http://www.cumbria.gov.uk/archives/recordoffices/whrec.asp

Hi again Razzy,

Was Eleanor Rogan's Father called George?

Best wishes, Signal.