UK Disability History Month (UKDHM) is an annual event creating a platform to focus on the history of the disabled struggle for equality and human rights. Disability History Month began in 2010 and runs from 22 November to 22 December every year. This covers HIV/AIDS Day (1 December), International Day of People with Disabilities (3 December) and International Human Rights Day (10 December). UKDHM meets a need identified by a number of disabled-led organizations to have a specific time in the year during which the history of disabled people’s struggle for equality and human rights can be focused.
UKDHM examines the history of disabled people and the attempts that have been made at destroying their well-being, arising from deeply held perceptions of their unworthiness, rooted in the past history of their oppression. The campaign aims to provide examples of how this denial of human rights can and will be reversed. The theme for 2022 is Disability, Health and Well Being. This year the need for Disability History Month is as great as it has ever been, with the crises of war and the COVID-19 pandemic.
As genealogists, we can support UKDHM by researching members of our own families who have or had disabilities, by examining how they were represented and when their rights were denied. However, this can be challenging. Even if we have surviving family photographs, for example, many disabilities are not visible. Nevertheless, there is one resource commonly used by family historians that can be particularly useful for this research: the census.
It was through the census that I discovered that my 3rd great-grandaunt Mary Jane Ashley (1836-1911) was disabled. Mary Jane was born in Devizes, Wiltshire in 1836 to my 4x great grandparents, Joseph and Pamela Ashley. Joseph worked as a steward at Fiddington House Asylum for the Insane in nearby West Lavington. Fiddington House was established in 1834 as a private asylum promoted to gentlefolk of “a nervous disposition”, while also accepting pauper inmates.
Mary Jane’s father Joseph died in 1849. A specific disability column was introduced with the 1851 census, but little space was given for details to be provided. Mary Jane’s disability was thus not identified on her 1851 census entry. By the date of the next census on 7 April 1861, the column’s purpose was broadened but still only “blind” and “deaf and dumb” individuals were recorded there.
After her surviving parent Pamela passed away in 1866, at 30 years of age, Mary Jane was seemingly unable to live independently. Although she had ten siblings, most had either left Wiltshire or died by this date.
The 1871 census reveals that Mary Jane (here “Jane Ashley”) went to live in Brighton with milkman Peter Parsons (c1829-1899) and his wife, Ann, who was Mary Jane’s fourth eldest sibling. For this year, the disability questions on the census were extended to include “imbeciles”, “idiots”, and “lunatics”. This census entry identifies Mary Jane as an “Idiot”. The language used in this period is regarded as offensive today. Idiocy was used at this time to describe someone with an intellectual disability who was seen as having a mental age of fewer than three years old.
The following passage from the 1871 Census Report entitled “Causes of idiocy”, gives some insight into how 36-year-old Mary Jane would have been viewed at the time:
The principal causes of idiocy and imbecility are spoken of by those who have studied the subject as distinctly recognised; they are connected with physical or mental weakness, or with abnormal conditions, either the fault or the misfortune of parents. Residence in deep valleys, damp and unwholesome climate, crowded dwellings or other unhealthy conditions, intermarriages among a limited number of families, and more especially where weakness of brain already exists,—these, are allowed to be predisposing causes, and as they are obviously within human control, the hope may be entertained that the extent of this affliction may be limited in the future.
The report also explains that the number of “idiots” may be higher than recorded as a result of, “the natural sensitiveness of persons who would desire to conceal the fact of idiocy in their families, we have no means of knowing; but such a feeling is no doubt likely to exist among those who look upon mental infirmity as humiliating rather than as one of the many physical evils which afflict humanity.”
It appears that Mary Jane continued to live with her sister Ann; they were recorded together on the subsequent censuses of 1881 and 1891. Some time after this, following decades of living within her family, Mary Jane was moved to Wiltshire County Lunatic Asylum in her birthplace of Devizes. She was recorded there on the census of 1901. Her sister Ann died three years later in Brighton in 1904. Mary Jane died four years after that on 2 October 1911 in the asylum in Devizes.
Sadly, the beliefs around Mary Jane’s condition, such as describing a mental disability as “physical evil”, as evinced by the 1871 census report, were pervasive throughout 19th and 20th-century Britain. Thanks to the work of UDHM, we are better placed to challenge these harmful and inaccurate representations and explore the lives of our disabled ancestors with informed compassion and understanding.
Sources
- UK Disability Month official website https://ukdhm.org/
- 1871 Census Report, Vision of Britain https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/census/EW1871GEN/6
- 1911 entry for Mary Jane Ashley; The National Archives of the Uk; Kew, Surrey, England; Commissioners in Lunacy, 1845–1913. Lunacy Patients Admission Registers, Series MH 94; Piece: 44
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