Searching For The Secret River. Kate Grenville

and Elizabeth, twins, son & daughter of Solomon Wiseman by Dorothy.

      1760, Catherine, daughter of Solomon Wiseman and Dorothy.

      1762, September 5, Robert, son of Solomon Wiseman by Dorothy.

      1774, May 15, Dorothy, daughter of Richard & Jane Wiseman.

      1783, April 6, Robert, son of Richard & Jane Wiseman.

      1788, June 6, Elizabeth, daughter of Robert & Elizabeth Wiseman.

      1789, November 8, Sarah, daughter of Robert & Elizabeth Wiseman.

      1791, February 6, Elizabeth, daughter of Robert & Elizabeth Wiseman.

      Thinking how hard poor Dorothy Wiseman worked at producing a child every two years for so long, I looked at the burials. Elizabeth, Sarah and Anthony all died within a short time of Dorothy having children of those names.

      Then I noticed something else. Unlike the baptisms, the burials were arranged alphabetically. In looking for Wiseman I noticed other, similar names such as Wistham and Wiseham. A Solomon Wistman of Long Lane, Bermondsey, was buried on April 9, 1769. This was a year after the birth of a Solomon Wiseman in 1768. Was it possible that this was the same person?

      With horror I realised that Solomon Wisemans were starting to proliferate like weeds in every parish, recorded under any variant of his name that semi-literate clerks might dream up. My Solomon Wiseman might be any of them, or none.

      I replaced the blue artificial leather books on their shelves, put my coat on and thanked the tweed volunteers. As I left, one of them gave me a pamphlet: Searching for your Convict Ancestor. I stuffed it into my bag.

      It was still raining. Out on the street, where the buses were roaring up and down Clerkenwell Road, I seemed to hear Solomon Wiseman laughing.

      Later I sat on the bed in my hotel room and assembled everything. I ignored all the quasi-Wisemans—those Wistmans and Wisehams—hovering around the object of my search. With the new data (or perhaps-data) from the Society of Genealogists, I was going to arrange all the Wisemans into some kind of coherence.

      It was infuriating. The same names and dates and places recurred with small variations. I had the maddening feeling that all these interlocking pieces of information could join up—but I didn’t know how. There had to be a pattern, because Solomon Wiseman really had existed.

      It took a while, but I came up with a scenario. I counted six Wiseman households in London. Four of them lived north of the river, in the parish of St Mary Somerset. Of these four couples, three had sons named Solomon. So, by 1790, there were four Solomon Wisemans living in a small area a stone’s throw north of the Thames: a man of sixty-seven; his thirty-seven-year-old son; a fourteen-year-old; and a newborn.

      Meanwhile, south of the river, more were multiplying. There were two Wiseman couples within a mile of each other. These couples produced three Solomons between them. In 1790, as well as those four Solomon Wisemans north of the river, there were two more in the south: a boy of thirteen and a newborn. Another Solomon Wiseman, from the same address as the thirteen-year-old, was born in 1768 but died a year later.

      To get even to this degree of coherence, I had to kill off wives and make their husbands re-marry. I sent families backwards and forwards across the river. Fathers and uncles gave their own names to sons and nephews, infants died and their names were given to the next child born. I cursed the eighteenth century’s niggardly way with the same few names: Sarah, Catherine, Richard.

      I drew up my scenario on a fresh piece of paper and propped it up at the end of the bed. I made a cup of hotel tea and sat there sipping and admiring. It had been enjoyable, like solving a crossword puzzle.

      By the time I’d finished my tea, the exhilaration had faded. My intricate scenario made sense of the information, but that was all. The information might not be correct, and it was almost certainly not complete.

      Let’s face it, I told myself. All I can be sure of now is exactly what I knew before: Solomon Wiseman was born, in some house or other, of some mother and father or other, in some year or other. All I’ve done is tell a story.

      I realised, though, that I’d learned one very useful thing: not about Solomon Wiseman, but about searching for the past. I’d learned the difficulty of establishing even the simplest fact. Solomon Wiseman was born in London…that had always seemed so solid. Now it felt like the opening line of a fairytale.

      My education had taught me to look for a bedrock of verifiable data on which to build. This process was teaching me to be more humble. So far I’d found nothing that was absolutely certain. The transcript of the trial was a fact. But it recorded only what was said in court—who knew what really happened on that dark night in 1804, or why?

      Constructing a story to accommodate all those Solomon Wisemans, I’d learned something else, too: how strong the urge was to make sense of things. The desire to find a pattern could overwhelm the reality that there might not be one.

      Now, sitting on my bed in the hotel room, I remembered the pamphlet from the Society of Genealogists. ‘Finding out more about the convict,’ I read. ‘If you really want good quality personal information about a convict, then you would be better advised to look for an application for clemency.’

      Solomon Wiseman had been sentenced to death, but was reprieved. Perhaps he had applied for clemency.

      ‘Applications for clemency often included just the kind of details about personal circumstances and family background that family historians want to know. They can be found in the collections of the Public Record Office at Kew.’

      Family historian? I still rejected that idea of myself, but I wasn’t too proud to go to Kew.

       6

       The Public Record Office

      I took the train the following day. Kew was a quiet and tidy suburb of small semi-detached villas. Pairs of squat milk bottles on every front step. Shiny brass letterslits in the front doors. Neatly clipped hedges and gauze curtains, with grand pianos and blond children visible beyond them. And a great suburban silence hanging over everything.

      Suddenly the streets fell away, a void opened up and the Public Record Office sat in front of me like a mother ship come to earth. In the blankness of its gaze, the bareness of its surrounds—square ponds with toy-like ducks gliding on them—it resembled nothing so much as a prison.

      Or was it that prisons and hangings were on my mind?

      The Public Record Office, like the Society of Genealogists, was one long intelligence test.

      Within the echoing polished limestone of the vast entrance hall, dwarfed by space, I stood at a counter that was just a bit too high—I was actually on tiptoes—and filled out a form. Down on the other side was a man whose eyes never met mine and whose pale face showed no expression during our whole interaction.

      In exchange for my form I eventually got a small laminated card and moved on to the next part of the test. A sign told me that in the Reading Room I could use only pencils, so, feeling rather clever, I bought some from the woman at the shop. Another sign told me that I couldn’t take my bag in. Fair enough, and there were the lockers. The lockers needed a coin and I didn’t have the right change, so I went back to buy another pencil. The woman was waiting for me, pencil in one hand, locker-coin in the other.

      Upstairs, kindly women with glasses dangling on large bosoms explained how to register myself on the computer and order my documents. First, though, I had to find my documents. Guided by the women I looked up big green folders of ‘class lists’. This meant documents of different classes: the class I was after was called ‘Home Office, Series 17-19, 48, 54 and 56: Petitions’. I entered my request through