Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from July, 2023

In The News

  In The News: 2023 Week 30 of #52Ancestors   I recently got a subscription to Findmypast, and began searching the newspapers in Surrey and Kent for traces of my UK great-grandparents and associated relatives. As they say, don't ask the question if you don't want the answer. Since my great-grandfather has a fairly distinctive name, Montague Augustus Bailey, it wasn't hard to find him. Unfortunately, much of it is not what you would call flattering. He was a contractor, and his business included picking up supplies and making deliveries via horse-drawn carts. I found four articles between 1898 and 1903 where he was summoned to petty sessions in Bromley, Kent on charges of causing a horse to be worked while in an unfit state. The driver in each case faced charges of "cruelly ill treating a horse", albeit at the direction of my great-grandfather.  In the first case, he admitted he knew the horse was lame, but had told the driver to keep using it until he was stopped