“Families are fascinating,” TV and radio presenter Zoe Ball says at the start of her episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, “because there are stories that families tell and stories that get hushed up.” She’s particularly keen to investigate a rumour that her maternal grandmother Peg was in a lunatic asylum.
Zoe starts by visiting her father, legendary children’s TV presenter Johnny Ball. They discover that Zoe’s paternal great grandmother Catherine McMenemy was born in Glasgow in 1870. Catherine’s parents were called Daniel McMenemy and Euphemia Letham.
Zoe goes to Glasgow, where Catherine grew up in the city’s impoverished tenements. Disease was widespread. Two of Catherine’s siblings died in infancy, and her mother Euphemia died in 1875. In the 1881 census, Catherine is living with her new stepmother, Helen McMahon, and her half-brother Daniel. However, more tragedy followed when Helen and Daniel died. Helen’s father Daniel died in 1889, aged 40. However, by the time of the 1911 census, Catherine is married to her husband William Ball and living in Bolton, Lancashire with their seven children, including Zoe’s grandfather Daniel.
“I like to think that Catherine’s strength and resilience is something that passed down through her kids and has then passed on generation to generation,” Zoe says. “We think sometimes that our lives can be quite tough – you look back and think, we’re so lucky.”
Next, Zoe wants to find out about her grandmother Margaret Anderson, known as Peg or Peggy. She travels to the north-east, where Peg grew up, and meets Dr Vicky Long, a historian at the University of Newcastle.
Peg was born in 1913. She grew up in poverty as the daughter of a miner and worked in service at a country house. Her medical records show that she was admitted to St Nicholas Hospital in 1963. She was described as “being excessively extravagant with money”. She was arrested for shoplifting and swung between being depressed and expressing “grandiose ideas”.
The records also include a letter by Peg to relatives, where she said she could take them on a trip to Norway because she’d won a lawsuit against Woolworths, suggesting she was suffering from delusions. Zoe is particularly concerned about her late mother Julia, who would have visited her mother in the psychiatric hospital as a young girl.
It’s hard to tell, but Peg may have been suffering from bipolar disorder. Her records show that she was prescribed sedatives and electroconvulsive therapy.
In another letter from Peg, written later, she sounds more mentally well and says she’s visiting her daughter and granddaughters. She continued to spend time in hospital on and off until she died in 1979.
Zoe is moved to tears: “I’m so relieved that she had time with her family.”
Zoe also wants to find out about the family of Peg’s husband, Bill Anderson. She traces the Anderson family line back to her 3x great grandfather James Temby. To Zoe’s surprise, the 1851 census shows James as a two-year-old living in Camborne, Cornwall.
In Cornwall, Zoe finds out more about James. He was born to an unmarried mother, Julia Temby, who lived with her sisters, Johanna and Mary Anne. In 1851, however, Julia was sentenced to imprisonment at Bodmin Gaol for assault.
Zoe learns that James would have stayed with his mother and they were initially kept in a cell in complete darkness, before Julia would have been allowed light as a reward for good behaviour.
“Stone all around you, very, very dark, very draughty,” Zoe says. “It’s pretty devastating to think of a two-year-old living in these conditions. It must have been terrifying for both of them.”
Other family history records show that in 1867, James married a woman called Mary Ann Rogers. The couple moved to Guernsey, escaping a downturn in the Cornish copper mining industry. But in 1869, the family were sent from Guernsey to Plymouth because they were destitute. They later moved to Durham, where Zoe’s mother’s family is from.
At Hunwick in County Durham, Zoe meets another relative of hers – her third cousin once removed Karen, who is also descended from James and Mary Ann. She learns that James became a fruiterer. An old newspaper article about his death in 1920 describes him as a “standard” of the Hunwick community.
Zoe says she’s proud of all her ancestors: “The strength and resilience that they’ve shown. Family was really important to them.”
