Byline: Penninah Asher
Digging into your family past has never been as easy or so popular. Millions of us spend weekends trawling the internet and poring over ancestry sites and magazines. We are glued to television programmes such as the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?.
We all want to know where we come from, to build up a picture of our family's past and to discover how our forebears used to live.
My interest in genealogy started ten 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, a subject of great curiosity to me. 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 knew nothing about my father's family, other than what my mother had told me.
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 www.freebmd.org.uk, my first and most valuable source. It gives free access to the index of birth, marriage and deaths in England and Wales, and I managed to trace my grandparents through it. Then I joined the website www.rootschat.com, a free messaging forum where members give helpful advice and I started building a family tree on www.ancestry.co.uk.
It is a well-trodden path. 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 the website ancestry.co.uk, who asked if I was aware I was related to 'a notorious lady' called Amelia Sach.
Sach, explained my correspondent, was a murderess better known as the Finchley 'baby farmer'. On a bitter winter's morning in 1903, she became one of the first two women to be executed at Holloway Prison - along with her colleague Annie Walters.
And Amelia Sach, convicted as an infamous killer of babies, 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? The answers were not hard to find. 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 ten. She had three sisters, the youngest being Eunice Priscilla May Thorne, my great-grandmother.
I tracked Amelia through the censuses, and discovered her marriage to Jeffrey Sach in 1896. I checked and double-checked, and the emailer - who I understand was a lawyer researching the fate of children born to murderesses - was right.
I'd heard the term 'baby farming' before (it was first used by the British Medical Journal as long ago as 1867) but now I needed to find out more.
I began reading everything I could, including a transcript of Amelia's Old Bailey 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 who were forced to 'farm' out their illegitimate child to avoid scandal or to keep their jobs. Such women had few choices at a time when even orphanages might refuse to take a child born out of wedlock.
Advertising their services in the local Press, baby farmers charged a weekly sum - five shillings a week in 1890s London - or a oneoff 'premium' ranging from [pounds sterling]5 to [pounds sterling]50 to have the baby adopted or fostered.
Most were honest and caring. Some, though, starved, abandoned or even murdered the babies to maximise their profits. Sach and Walters were two of seven baby farmers executed between 1871 and 1908, often following sensational trials.
Some figures suggest that half of all babies born in Edwardian London died before they were one. Burials were expensive and barely a week went by without police finding a little dead body abandoned in a railway carriage, or left on the banks of a canal.
Two weeks after Sach and Walters were arrested, nine starving children were found in a house not far away in Wood Green, includgirls ing two babies lying in the lid of an old rush basket.
The elderly 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. Perhaps he provided the money she needed to get her business off the ground because, in her early 30s, Amelia decided to open a 'lying in' home, where unmarried pregnant women could stay before giving birth.
By 1902 she was working from Claymore House, a semi-detached, red-brick villa in East Finchley, North London. She put an advertisement in the local papers under the name Nurse Thorne: 'Accouchement, before and during. Skilled nursing. Home comforts. 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 child 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 'well-to-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 lying-in home, drugged them with a lethal narcotic and then wandered the streets looking for somewhere to dump them.
In the winter of 1902, Walters took lodgings at Danbury Street, Islington, where she asked the landlady if she could bring a baby back 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 set off for the lying-in home. She brought a baby back to Danbury Street. 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'.
On November 15 she received another telegram, and brought home another baby, telling a fellow lodger: 'This one is going to a coastguard's wife at South Kensington.'
Her actions had already aroused suspicion and this time the police placed a watch on Danbury Street. On November 18, Walters was followed to Kensington Station where she was discovered in the ladies' lavatory 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 having given the child chlorodyne, a lethal but widely available mixture of chloroform, cannabis and opium, originally used as a treatment for cholera.
Walters was probably addicted to it herself, telling the arresting officer: 'I never killed the baby, I only gave it two little drops in its 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 the crime.
In January 1903 the women stood trial at the Old Bailey. Both pleaded innocent, although neither took the stand. An all-male jury quickly convicted them and the Press denounced the 'horrible and extensive traffic in babies' and their 'unwomanly callousness'.
The case was reported as far away as Australia. When police searched Claymore House they found 300 items of baby clothing in Amelia Sach's bedroom.
When the police arrested her, she denied knowing any Annie Walters, although there's no doubt she had sent the telegrams.
It is far from absolute proof that she was a willing accomplice, although I suspect she was not entirely innocent. It was enough, certainly, to convince the jury, and on February 3, 1903, Sach and Walters were executed together on a newly built scaffold in the yard of Holloway Prison.
It was the last double hanging in Britain and with them - or at least soon after - went the trade in babies. Five years later the Children And Young Persons Act required all foster parents to be registered, and the industry dwindled.
For me the story won't be over until I find out more about my greatgrandmother 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. Only in 1930, 14 years after the death of her husband, did she revert to her real name.
The crime has lost none of its power to inspire revulsion, by the way. 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. It's human nature to want to know our roots. I come from a poor family, so there have been no documents or photographs to help me during my search; their lives were not chronicled.
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 [pounds sterling]12.. To order your copy at the special price of [pounds sterling]10. with free p&p, please call The Review Bookstore on 0843 382 1111 or visit www.MailLife.co.uk/Books.
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.
CAPTION(S):
DEADLY STARE: Amelia Sach, who plied her trade as a baby farmer at Claymore House, above, in East Finchley, London
SHOCKING DISCOVERY: Amelia Sach's great-great-niece Penninah Asher
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