Institutional History were lucky enough to interview the incredibly talented author Michelle Higgs, who recently released her latest book Tracing Your Ancestors in Lunatic Asylums
Category: genealogy
The melancholy life of the Winchester Pickpocket
William Privett, was born into an average, working class family in 1835[1]. His father, another William, was an agricultural labourer[2] and his mother had no listed profession, but it’s likely, as so many other women did, that she took in laundry for her neighbours.
Finding Snow in the footprints…
When I started researching William Strahan, prisoner number 1 at Woking Convict Invalid Prison, I hadn’t quite anticipated the wild romp through history such a course would take me: a journey which would range from crimes in London, deaths in Italy and archaeological digs in Ashtead. What started as an impersonal quest to render correctly…