Being married to a soldier has never been easy, especially when the soldier is deployed overseas and the spouse stays home with children. In an era when long-distance communication was rare and tenuous at best, a wife whose soldier-husband was abroad could be all but abandoned. This was Catherine Whitney's situation when she gave a deposition in early 1778.
She was born in Abbey Holme, a parish in Cumbria not far from the Scottish border. When she was born is not known, nor is the overall timeline of her life, but the pieces that we have show that she moved around a lot. By 1758 she was old enough to have gone to London and taken a job at a coffee house in the parish of St. George the Martyr just outside the city (the parish church, pictured here, still stands). She left after only eight months.
In the 1760s she was in Limerick, Ireland. There she married a soldier, Walter Whitney of the 10th Regiment of Foot. He had traveled farther to get there; the child of a soldier, he was born in Gibraltar while the 10th Regiment was posted there between 1730 and 1749.
The regiment moved north to Galway. There Walter and Catherine had a daughter, Ann. The military profession was not always conducive to a stable family life, and in 1767 the 10th Regiment sailed from Ireland for Quebec. Walter Whitney did not take his wife and child with him, either by choice or due to the limitations in shipping capacity afforded space on transports for, typically, only about 60 wives in each regiment (this limitation in shipping is often misconstrued as indicating that only six wives for each company were allowed to be present with a regiment, which was not the case).
What Catherine Whitney and her daughter did in her husband's absence is not known, nor where they lived. She heard from him in 1771, that he was in Quebec. But that was the last time. In 1774 the 10th Regiment was finally due to come home, but rising tensions in the American colonies caused it to be diverted to Boston. Perhaps she knew that.
By 1778 she was in Worcester, England, where she was brought to court at the Easter quarter-sessions. The court heard her story, at least the parts of it related above, and ordered her and her daughter to be taken by a constable to St. George the Martyr. Why this judgment was made is not stated; perhaps it was thought that she still had some obligation to her former employer there. What actually became of her is not known.
She mentioned to the court that "her husband was posted to America & she has not heard of him for 7 years when he was at Quebec." She certainly wouldn't hear from him again. The 10th Regiment had departed Boston in March 1776 and gone to Halifax, Nova Scotia. There Walter Whitney died on 20 May, as close to his wife and daughter as he had been in the last nine years.
In 1700's England people who had fallen on hard times were often forced to return to their parish of origin. This saved the parish where they were living the cost of supporting them financially.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this interesting site.
Norm.