Chris Paton
TRACING WOMEN’S LIVES
It is often the case that our female ancestors and relatives are not particularly well recorded in documentary records, but for me, this can make pursuing their life stories a far more interesting task than those of their male counterparts. Being described as wives and mothers in vital records certainly tells us a little about them, but how can we dig deeper to learn more about their lives?
Building up a picture
In the records of a society which was seemingly so male-dominated historically, it is still often possible to try to put together a picture of their circumstances. My grandmother Martha Graham (née Smyth), for example, was a ‘doffer’ at Edenderry linen mill in Belfast. As part of an industry in which thousands of Irish women earned a living, it is not difficult to find oral histories and written accounts describing the daily lives of those so engaged, such as an interview uploaded to the BBC’s Legacies archives site in 2004 at www.bbc.co.uk/legacies/work/northernfiireland/ni_8/audio_2.shtml
As a doffer, Martha was one of the many young girls whose job it was to clear the large loom of the empty bobbins, with a ‘doff’ being the term used for a bobbin that was full of yarn. In the song, You Might Easy Know a Doffer – you can hear a rendition at https://youtu.be/X0sbr1Vpe64 – the lyrics tell us that: