Many of the houses on the East Finchley street where Amelia Sach ran a baby farm have their names proudly displayed. But after identifying Claymore House, where Sach lived, Penninah Asher discovered its name has been erased from the plaque
Digging into your family past has never been as easy or so popular. Thousands spend weekends trawling the internet and poring over ancestry sites and magazines. We are glued to TV programmes such as the RTE series, Who Do You Think You Are?
We all want to know where we come from. Could we, like Ryan Tubridy discovered on that series, be related to English royalty?
My interest in genealogy started 10 years ago, when I was inspired by my mother Judith's attempts to complete her family tree. She told me stories of a grandfather who fought in Sudan and an ancestor who ran away to sea, aged 14. I was intrigued.
So, pregnant with the first of my two children and home all day with very little to do, I did some research, starting with friends' families. Then I turned to my own father and his roots. I come from a fractured family on his side. In fact, I'm estranged from my dad, I haven't seen him since I was 16 and I didn't even know the names of his parents.
I've always enjoyed piecing a story together, so day after day I sat at my kitchen table in front of the computer, next to a growing box of certificates and other documents.
I found the website, freebmd.org.uk, my first and most valuable source. It gives free access to the index of births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales, and I managed to trace my grandparents through it. Then I joined rootschat.com, a free messaging forum where members give advice, and I started building a family tree.
But, while I suspected some members of my father's side of the family were pretty colourful, nothing prepared me for what I discovered when, out of the blue, I received an email from a man through ancestry.co.uk, who asked if I was aware that I was related to 'a notorious lady' called Amelia Sach.
Sach, explained my correspondent, was a murderess better known as the Finchley 'baby farmer'. In 1903, she was executed along with colleague Annie Walters.
This convicted baby killer was the sister of my great-grandmother, so she was my greatgreat-aunt. My first reaction was confusion, then shock and then disbelief. Did I really have a murderess in the family? And if I did, then why did I know nothing about it? I went back to my family tree and found Amelia Sach had been baptised Frances Amelia Thorne in Hampreston, Dorset, on May 5, 1867, the fourth child of 10. She had three sisters, the youngest being Eunice Thorne, my great-grandmother.
I tracked Amelia through the censuses, and discovered her marriage to Jeffrey Sach in 1896.
I'd heard the term 'baby farming' before but now I needed to find out more. I began reading everything I could, including a transcript of Amelia's trial and, as I did so, I started to uncover a story so astonishing and sad it is now the basis of a new novel, The Ghost Of Lily Painter, by Caitlin Davies.
Legitimate baby farmers provided a much-needed service for pregnant unmarried women in Victorian and Edwardian times. These women were often servant girls who were forced to 'farm' out their illegitimate child to avoid scandal or to keep their jobs.
Advertising their services in local newspapers, baby farmers charged a weekly sum - five shillings a week in 1890s London - or a one-off 'premium' ranging from [pounds sterling]5 to [pounds sterling]50 to have the baby adopted or foserly tered.
Most were caring. Some, though, starved, abandoned or even murdered the babies. Sach and Walters were two of seven baby farmers executed between 1871 and 1908.
Two weeks after Sach and Walters were arrested, nine starving children were found in a house not far away in Wood Green, including two babies lying in the lid of an old rush basket. The eldshocking woman in charge had received [pounds sterling]30 to care for each child.
Amelia Sach was a midwife who arrived in London where her father, an odd-job man, had found work. Shortly after her father died, she married Jeffrey, a builder, and they had a daughter, Lillian. In her early 30s, Amelia opened a 'lying-in' home, where unmarried pregnant women could stay before giving birth.
By 1902, she was working from Claymore House, a semi in East Finchley, north London. She put an advert in the local papers under the name Nurse Thorne: 'Accouchement, before and during.
Skilled nursing. Baby can remain.' The phrase 'baby can remain' meant that an unmarried pregnant woman could go to the lying in home, give birth, and leave without the child. Once the baby was born, Amelia would offer to arrange an adoption; assuring her clients that for [pounds sterling]25, their offspring would start a new life with a 'wellto-do lady'.
But according to newspaper reports and evidence at their subsequent trial, her colleague Annie Walters - a highly disturbed 54-year-old midwife - removed the babies from the home, drugged them with a lethal narcotic and then wandered the streets looking for somewhere to dump them.
In November 1902, Walters took lodgings in Islington, where she asked the landlady if she could bring a baby for one night before it was adopted.
On November 12, she received a telegram from Claymore House - 'To-night, at five o'clock' - and Walters brought a baby back to the lodgings. Two days later, the boy had gone. Walters told her landlady that the adoptive parent, a widowed lady in Piccadilly, was delighted and the baby was now finely dressed in 'muslin and lace'.
A few days later, she brought another baby, telling a fellow lodger: 'This one is going to a coastguard's wife at South Kensington.' er actions had already Haroused suspicion and this time the police placed a watch on the lodgings. On November 18, Walters was followed to Kensington Station, where she was discovered in the ladies' with a dead infant in her arms, his hands clenched, his tongue swollen and lips purple and black.
The victim was the four-day-old son of Ada Charlotte Galley, a servant who had recently given birth at Claymore House. The cause of death was said to be asphyxia and Sach and Walters were arrested for murder.
Walters admitted giving the child chlorodyne, a lethal but widely available mixture of chloroform, cannabis and opium, originally used as a treatment for cholera.
She was probably addicted to it herself, telling the arresting officer: 'I never killed the baby, I only gave it two little drops in its She gave the child a mixture of opium, cannabis and chloroform bottle, the same as I take myself.' Sach was charged as an accessory and, in the eyes of the police, the existence of the telegrams was enough to prove her role.
In January 1903, the women stood trial. Both pleaded innocent, although neither took the stand. An all-male jury convicted them.
When police searched Claymore House, they found 300 items of baby clothing in Amelia's bedroom.
She denied knowing Annie Walters, although there's no doubt she had sent the telegrams.
There was no absolute proof that she was a willing accomplice, although I suspect she was not entirely innocent.
For me, the story won't be over until I find out more about my great-grandmother, Eunice. It seems she never told a soul about her sister. When she married three years after the execution, she changed her first name to Mabel and changed her father's name on the marriage certificate, as well as his occupation.
When I told my family what I'd found, one relative, worried what people would think, advised me to keep things to myself. It is no wonder the story was so well hidden. How do I feel about having a murderess in the family? We might not like the truth when we find it but we can't ignore it.
In this story at least, there has been no happy ending, only a terrible family secret and more than a century of denial. But even that is better than nothing at all.
The Ghost Of Lily Painter by Caitlin Davies is published by Hutchinson, priced [euro]15.
CAPTION(S):
SHOCKING DISCOVERY: Amelia Sach's great-great-niece Penninah Asher D SHOCKING DISCOVERY: Amelia Sach's great-great-niece Penninah Asher D
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