Thanks to the creation of online family history databases, it has never been so easy to identify records of births, marriages and deaths, as well as censuses, which provide snapshots depicting an individual moment in our ancestors’ lives. However, each of our forebears will have experienced a lifetime of challenges, fortunes and adversity. As such, there may be more to be discovered concerning them than the records of such instances can reveal. In particular, one area that can be potentially fruitful for our research is that of the crisis scenarios endured by our relations, because more often than not there was somebody standing close by with a quill and ink, ready to preserve the details.
Our ancestors were no different to us in experiencing hardship at times, and
