I imagined that this family history business would be tidy: a matter of stepping from one fact to another. I had an idea of myself as an orderly researcher, with index cards and colour-coded folders. The past could be put together like a jigsaw puzzle, I thought: take enough time, have enough patience, collect enough facts, and it would all make a picture.
The logical place to start was at the beginning. Where was Wiseman born, and when?
Like so many London addresses, the Society of Genealogists was a kind of intelligence test. When next day I finally found the street called Charterhouse Buildings—a cul-de-sac full of rubbish bins somewhere up beyond St Paul’s—I felt pretty cocky. I was an old London hand, after all.
It was a tall thin building and, being so tall and thin, inside it seemed to be mostly narrow, lino-covered stairs that strained and popped as people went up and down, pressing themselves into the corner of the landing to let each other pass. The Births, Deaths and Marriages Room on the second floor was busy. Behind the counter, elderly gentlemen in tweed—volunteer genealogists, I discovered—were helping the customers.
Someone had unfolded a long scroll of sticky-taped paper with an endless family tree tracking down page after page and was poring over it with one of the tweedy gentlemen. A woman like me, with too many coats and bags over her arm, kept saying, ‘No, it’s the distaff line I want, d’you see? The distaff line.’ A tremulous old man was trying to use the equally ancient photocopier in the corner. A volunteer was explaining, ‘It costs 20p, but you put 10p in and give me 10p, cos it doesn’t take 20p.’ The old man turned over the coins in his palm, first one way, then the other.
When it was my turn, I thought it would be plain sailing. I had brought my seven Solomon Wisemans with me to London. The most likely seemed to be the one born in 1776 and baptised at St Mary Mounthaw. My plan was to ask for the registers of the church.
But my gentleman—a scholarly fellow with leather elbow-patches—frowned as if at news of a death. ‘St Mary Who?’
I repeated the name.
‘Never heard of it,’ he announced, and that was going to be that, but I was able to bring forth from my shabby bag the printout from the Mormon website.
He frowned over it for some time, even turning it over to see the back, which wasn’t much help as I’d been recycling my paper and the back announced Ms Ford’s Year Six Farewell Please Bring A Plate. Finally he consulted another, sterner man.
In front of me across the counter they compared abstruse names. ‘Have you looked in so-and-so?’ ‘Yes, and I tried the Register of such-and-such too.’ At last in a small shabby book, they found it.
No one had ever heard of St Mary Mounthaw because the church was destroyed in the Great Fire of London. Its parish was later joined with St Mary Somerset—another name from the Mormon records. Where were the parish records for St Mary Somerset? More consulting obscure books, more riffling through indices and cross-references.
St Mary Somerset, it turned out, was also destroyed in the Great Fire. It was rebuilt by Wren soon after, but was demolished in 1872 and the parish united with St Nicholas Cole Abbey.
I seemed to be getting a long way from Solomon Wiseman.
St Nicholas Cole Abbey was gutted by a firebomb in May 1941. Uh oh, I thought, there go the parish registers.
The search was no longer mine, however. There were now no fewer than four gentlemen activated by my enquiry. Between them all, they performed some little bit of genealogical legerdemain and directed me to the proceedings of the Harleian Society, Volume 58, Shelf MX/R58.
I sat down at one of the big brown lino-covered tables, along with the other searchers burdened with raincoats and bags, and took a deep breath.
Volume 58 of the Proceedings of the Harleian Society consisted of lists of baptisms, births and deaths for St Mary Mounthaw. Feeling on the edge of some momentous discovery, I turned the pages.
Suddenly there he was, in the christenings for 1776: May 26, Solomon, s. of Richard and Jane Wiseman, Rector James Jones.
I stared at the words, straining after feeling. None came. This wasn’t Solomon Wiseman. These were marks on a page, nothing more. I copied them into my notebook, just the same, and stared, wanting them to split open and reveal the person behind the name: a red-faced baby, crying at the cold touch of water from the baptismal font, the mother ready to spring forward in case James Jones dropped her son, the father shifting from foot to foot, impatient to get back to his afternoon with…no, I was making it all up.
I flipped backwards and forwards, looking for other Wisemans, and found plenty.
1772, May 15, Mary, daughter of Richard and Jane Wiseman.
1767, April 26, Elizabeth, daughter of Richard and Jane Wiseman.
Were these the sisters of Solomon? Elizabeth, eleven years old, suddenly popped into the picture around the font, wearing…what did they wear? Beside her, Mary, aged four, held the edge of her sister’s dress with one hand and picked her nose with the other. Did the sisters make a pet of the new baby, carrying him on their hips, arguing about whose turn it was to push him in the pram? Did they have prams? Or were they the other kind of big sister, the secretive hair-pulling and ear-pinching kind?
Outside the window, the low grey sky had decided to let out some rain. The building site next door speckled and darkened and I could see people on the street two floors below pointlessly turning up their coat collars. I was in no hurry to go out into the rain, so I opened more of the proceedings of the Harleian Society.
I tried the baptismal registers of St Mary Somerset, which swallowed up the parish of St Mary Mounthaw. It had a whole string of Wisemans.
1749, February 4, Robert, son of Solomon Wiseman by Dorothy.
1751, December 8, Sarah, daughter of Solomon Wiseman by Dorothy.
1753, December 23, Solomon, son of Solomon Wiseman by Dorothy.
1756, March 7, John, son of Solomon Wiseman by Dorothy.
1758, January 4, Anthony and Elizabeth, twins, son & daughter of Solomon Wiseman by Dorothy.
1760, Catherine, daughter of Solomon Wiseman and Dorothy.
1762, September 5, Robert, son of Solomon Wiseman by Dorothy.
1774, May 15, Dorothy, daughter of Richard & Jane Wiseman.
1783, April 6, Robert, son of Richard & Jane Wiseman.
1788, June 6, Elizabeth, daughter of Robert & Elizabeth Wiseman.
1789, November 8, Sarah, daughter of Robert & Elizabeth Wiseman.
1791, February 6, Elizabeth, daughter of Robert & Elizabeth Wiseman.
Thinking how hard poor Dorothy Wiseman worked at producing a child every two years for so long, I looked at the burials. Elizabeth, Sarah and Anthony all died within a short time of Dorothy having children of those names.
Then I noticed something else. Unlike the baptisms, the burials were arranged alphabetically. In looking for Wiseman I noticed other, similar names such as Wistham and Wiseham. A Solomon Wistman of Long Lane, Bermondsey, was buried on April 9, 1769. This was a year after the birth of a Solomon Wiseman in 1768. Was it possible that this was the same person?
With horror I realised that Solomon Wisemans were starting to proliferate like weeds in every parish, recorded under any variant of his name that semi-literate clerks might dream up. My Solomon Wiseman might be any of them, or none.
I replaced the blue artificial leather books on their shelves, put my coat on and thanked the tweed volunteers. As I left, one of them gave me a pamphlet: Searching for your Convict Ancestor. I stuffed it into my bag.
It was still raining. Out on the street, where the buses were roaring up and down Clerkenwell Road, I seemed to hear Solomon Wiseman laughing.
Later I sat on the bed in my hotel room and assembled everything. I ignored all the quasi-Wisemans—those Wistmans and Wisehams—hovering around the object of my search. With the new data (or perhaps-data) from the Society of Genealogists, I was going to arrange all the Wisemans into some kind of coherence.
It was infuriating. The same names and dates and places recurred with small variations. I had the maddening feeling that all these interlocking pieces of information could join up—but I didn’t know how. There had to be a pattern, because Solomon Wiseman really had existed.
It took a while, but I came up with a scenario. I counted six Wiseman households in London. Four of them lived north of the river, in the parish of St Mary Somerset. Of these four couples, three had sons named Solomon. So, by 1790, there were four Solomon Wisemans living in a small area a stone’s throw north of the Thames: a man of sixty-seven; his thirty-seven-year-old son; a fourteen-year-old; and a newborn.
Meanwhile, south of the river, more were multiplying. There were two Wiseman couples within a mile of each other. These couples produced three Solomons between them. In 1790, as well as those four Solomon Wisemans north of the river, there were two more in the south: a boy of thirteen and a newborn. Another Solomon Wiseman, from the same address as the thirteen-year-old, was born in 1768 but died a year later.
To get even to this degree of coherence, I had to kill off wives and make their husbands re-marry. I sent families backwards and forwards across the river. Fathers and uncles gave their own names to sons and nephews, infants died and their names were given to the next child born. I cursed the eighteenth century’s niggardly way with the same few names: Sarah, Catherine, Richard.
I drew up my scenario on a fresh piece of paper and propped it up at the end of the bed. I made a cup of hotel tea and sat there sipping and admiring. It had been enjoyable, like solving a crossword puzzle.
By the time I’d finished my tea, the exhilaration had faded. My intricate scenario made sense of the information, but that was all. The information might not be correct, and it was almost certainly not complete.
Let’s face it, I told myself. All I can be sure of now is exactly what I knew before: Solomon Wiseman was born, in some house or other, of some mother and father or other, in some year or other. All I’ve done is tell a story.
I realised, though, that I’d learned one very useful thing: not about Solomon Wiseman, but about searching for the past. I’d learned the difficulty of establishing even the simplest fact. Solomon Wiseman was born in London…that had always seemed so solid. Now it felt like the opening line of a fairytale.
My education had taught me to look for a bedrock of verifiable data on which to build. This process was teaching me to be more humble. So far I’d found nothing that was absolutely certain. The transcript of the trial was a fact. But it recorded only what was said in court—who knew what really happened on that dark night in 1804, or why?
Constructing a story to accommodate all those Solomon Wisemans, I’d learned something else, too: how strong the urge was to make sense of things. The desire to find a pattern could overwhelm the reality that there might not be one.
Now, sitting on my bed in the hotel room, I remembered the pamphlet from the Society of Genealogists. ‘Finding out more about the convict,’ I read. ‘If you really want good quality personal information about a convict, then you would be better advised to look for an application for clemency.’
Solomon Wiseman had been sentenced to death, but was reprieved. Perhaps he had applied for clemency.
‘Applications for clemency often included just the kind of details about personal circumstances and family background that family historians want to know. They can be found in the collections of the Public Record Office at Kew.’
Family historian? I still rejected that idea of myself, but I wasn’t too proud to go to Kew.