Just thinking ............
 

Having a large number of London ancestors ........ I was just thinking - I wonder if I (or any other of us with London ancestors) have Jack the Ripper in our family trees.

Ok, I'm in a funny mood today ;)

Well, Jack the Ripper must be in someone's tree, Terri! But as we don't know who he was...

I do have an ex-candidate in my tree, though a tenuous connection. Jacob Isenschmidt was suspected of being Jack the Ripper, mainly because he was a bit bonkers and went around threatening people with a knife! He was taken into custody and was in an asylum when the double murders took place. He was in an out of asylums till he died.

My connection is that his daughter Katharine was the second wife of my great-grandfather Charles Williams. I hasten to point out that I am descended from Charles and his first wife Ellen. BUT Charles' mother Ann had a brother, William Mealing who ended up in Broadmoor having cut his fiancee's throat and killed her and their unborn child. I have often wondered if this is why Charles & Katherine decided not to have children of their own. Of course she might have been infertile and in any case Charles already had 8 children by Ellen.

My murderous claim to fame is one Mary Holden, who was the last woman to be hanged at Lancaster Castle in 1824(?). She poisoned her husband by putting arsenic in the teapot, but in a defence more nitpicky than even I could formulate, she pointed out that she only put the arsenic in the pot, she didn't make him drink it.

OC

oh OC you made me laugh. Clearly that defence did not work.

With all my convicts I don't have a murderer, to my knowledge. My 3g grandfather was charged with killing his second wife and acquitted although there was some suggestion that the witnesses were all too afraid to testify against him.

This incident has made me wonder about the death of his mother, my 4g grandmother. It was ruled a "visitation of God" but I've always wondered if she received a blow to the head from her husband or maybe had a brain aneurysm based on the article I read.

I do have some Londoners. They were working class. Are they likely candidates or should I be looking at OH's more posh family as the suspects? I can't decide if having Jack as a relative is a good thing or not.

Two of the many suspects Charles Cross/Charles Lechmere and George Chapman are on a few Ancestry trees. Druitt might be too but I have never looked for him because I don't think he is Jack the Ripper.

Nothing found so far in my lines of any real note - unfortunately.

Not in my tree, but my gran b 1860, Dalston, used to tell me her memories of being a

young woman in the East End when Jack the Ripper was about.

I have no murders, but one of my ancestors, Henry Woolgar, was the unfortunate man who discovered this in Esher in 1854:

“…. I saw her throat was cut, and her hands and face were covered with blood and her hair hung about her face. She was making a whistling noise, apparently from the wound…. the blood was spurting from her throat.”

With this horrific description, Henry Woolgar testified in one of the most sensational murder trials of Victorian England ............

“But the crowning horror was in the further room. As you approached the half-open door, you could see a bedstead foot; that was in no way startling……You put your head in at the door and you saw a sight that was almost enough to make you scream “Police!” There was a bed…exposing six children, each one with its throat cut …Gore on the little waxen faces, gore on the sheets, and on the hands that had been thrown up to protect their tender lives; and there was the murderess – she had left the razor in the windpipe of her last victim – with her throat cut as well, standing upright in her sprinkled nightdress, to welcome you with a label round her neck that provided the edifying information that this woman was nurse to his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales….”

Am I reading this right? The nurse to the Prince of Wales was the murderer?

She had been a nurse to Prince of Wales, but had been dismissed before the murders.

Mary Ann Brough's trial was very long, but ultimately she was acquitted of murder and consigned to an asylum, where she died 7 years later.

"Given her history of a stroke following childbirth, nasal hemorrhages and ongoing headaches, Winslow argued that Brough had committed her crime while temporarily insane. Her mental stability, never strong, had collapsed under the onslaught of several stressful incidents. In the weeks leading up to the murders, the Brough children had taken it in turns to succumb to measles. Several neighbors testified that Mary Ann had spent sleepless nights caring for her sick children."

The whole, rather long story, is here: http://ultimatehistoryproject.com/ma...UFbRgH0HQiewW4