Page 18 - Just another English family (Sep 2019)

figure more prominently and help to provide the continuity that an account of this kind needs?
The main focus at the start will be on heads of households. Focusing on heads of households largely ensures that one practical problem is overcome – in the 1861 census this shrinks the number from 115 persons to 21, for there are 21 households which have a Soothill as the Head of Household. These households, both in theory and practice, can cover a range of social classes, but focusing on heads of households certainly distorts the gender issue. Of the 21 Soothills who are heads of households in the 1861 census, only two female Soothills are so identified. In a patriarchal system which persists to the present day, family histories easily become a history of the male line. Females who tend to lose the family name on marriage or gain the family name by dint of marriage to a male can easily be overlooked and certainly neglected. Sadly, although efforts are made to keep the female Soothills fully in view, this family history is really no exception. In other words, the male Soothills – especially by this focus on the heads of households – are better served by this approach than females. In fact, the two female heads of household in the 1861 census illustrate the problem.
One of these is 79-year-old Elizabeth Soothill who is either unmarried or a widow. Elizabeth was formerly a nurse, still living in Bramham, Yorkshire, where she was born - Bramham is in the registration district of Tadcaster. Being born around 1783, Elizabeth had a childhood in one of the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Born and dying in Bramham, the town where she was living at the time of the 1861 census, she would seem to have had an uneventful life based on her place of birth, her present location, and her place of death, but we really have no clues as to how she actually conducted her life or even who her parents were.
The other female Head of Household in the 1861 census is another Elizabeth, a 43- year-old, presumably a widow rather than a spinster, living in a house in Bradford with her two children, William H (aged 18) and Alise (aged 13). Again, this is a
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