Why I Adopted an Abandoned Ancestor

As most of you know, I work with my ancestors a lot. For me, in a spiritual context, an ancestor doesn’t have to be someone you’re directly descended from – it can be a person you’re related to by blood or marriage, by adoption or foster kinship, or even someone who is what we’d call family of the heart. But as a person who has a tendency to take in strays and the unwanted, I’ve recently found myself as the de facto keeper of a branch of my family that ended nearly a century and a half ago.

Let me tell you the tale of Stephen Atkins – the short version. Stephen was born around 1803, in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England, the seventh of his parents’ fifteen children. In May 1830, he married a woman named Sophia, and in December of that year, she gave birth to their first child, Elizabeth. Something else happened in Stephen’s life around then, which would change the course of his family’s history. During the Swing Riots of that winter, Stephen was one of hundreds of laborers who rose up against unfair conditions in factories,  poor wages, and the ever-increasing use of automation to replace the work of individual men. On November 29, just before his daughter was born, he and thousands of men across England rioted – and Stephen, a papermaker, was one of many who were arrested for disturbing the peace and destroying property.

In January 1831, Stephen went to trial, along with dozens of others, where they plead guilt to several indictments charging them with having destroyed machinery for the manufacture of paper. Specifically, they were charged with “riotously demolishing machinery,” or “machine breaking,” depending on which account you read, and all found guilty. This was a capital crime, and Stephen was sentenced to death by hanging. However, his sentence was commuted, and he was instead given seven years transportation to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), arriving on the ship Proteus that spring. A year later, in 1832, Sophia followed him to Australia on the ship Enchantress, and settled there. Stephen was pardoned and released in February 1836, and he and Sophia had two more children, John and Annie. Sophia died in 1877, in Ballarat, and Stephen passed away eighteen months later. When I found Sophia’s death record, I saw she had been predeceased by all three of her children – I knew Elizabeth had died in England in 1845, but have found no information on John or Annie, suggesting they died very young. And when it came time for Stephen’s death, he was buried in an unmarked plot under some trees in the Ballarat Cemetery in Victoria.

Stephen was the older brother of my fourth-great-grandmother, Lydia Atkins, who was born when Stephen was around eight years old. She would have been a young adult when he was arrested and sentenced to death. Once he was transported, she likely never saw him again, because Lydia never left her small village of High Wycombe, and died in 1884. And when I realized this, I felt so incredibly sad for them. For Stephen, who wanted fair wages and not to lose his job to a machine, for Lydia, who saw her brother locked up in a prison hulk in Plymouth and then shipped off across the sea, for Sophia, who buried her three children, and for Elizabeth, John, and Annie, who never reached adulthood or left any descendants. Stephen’s line ended with the deaths of his children, half a world away from his family’s home.

When I first started researching Stephen, I had hoped I’d encounter someone in Australia who might be a fifth or sixth cousin, and we could compare notes about the rest of the Atkins siblings, and marvel at how the internet and DNA testing had brought together two people on opposite sides of the planet. But instead, all I have is a collection of digital images – convict records, newspaper clippings, ship’s logs, a documentation of a pardon – and a photo of a quiet, shady grove in Ballarat cemetery with no headstones at all.

And so, on my ancestor altar, I have a small place for Stephen, Sophia, and their children. They have no descendants of their own to claim them, so I honor them in spirit, and gently let  them know regularly that they may be gone, but will not be forgotten.

Because what is remembered, lives.