The Berwick Workhouse

Thanks to my Find My Past subscription, I've spent the past several days perusing yet again 19th and early 20th century back copies Berwick-upon-Tweed newspapers, and have found lots more information there about my ancestors. Berwick was home to my ancestors for a just a couple of hundred years.

What strikes me -- and with great sadness -- are the number of reported deaths in the local workhouse in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Berwick was, and is still today in the 21st century, a small town. There were many families with large families. Many of those families were inter-connected through marriage.

As I've done my reading, many questions came to mind. If someone had to go to the workhouse, why was this the last resort? Why couldn't that person's debts be repaid and that person taken into one of his or many relatives' homes to live out there remaining days? In some cases, those relatives were workhouse inhabitants' own children or siblings.

Turning to Google, I learned lots about the Berwick Workhouse here and also about why people ended up in workhouses here. Reviewing the censuses of inmates also found on those pages, I found that many "inmates" were elderly, some were "feeble minded", "imbecile", blind. Other younger people were classified as vagrants or paupers rather than inmates. Regardless of those classifications, each person had an occupation included with their information.

The never ending story continues.....



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