Finding Catherine

 Really this post should be titled 'Finding Katherine'.

As is my wont, I thought I would delve a little into the life of Catherine Scragg, the young woman assaulted on a train near Shrewsbury, close to the border between England and Wales, in August 1887.

I do this, in part, to humanise them and make them more than simply a name on a page.

At first Catherine seemed incredibly elusive, she seemed not to exist in the 1881 census.

Well that just shows that you shouldn't believe everything you read in the newspapers. Catherine was in fact Katherine, and was in fact born in 1866, making her 21 or 22 at the time of the attack not 25 as in some of the reports of the time.

As newspapers of the time tended to copy from each other with wild abandon, and fact checking was an unknown construct, the mistakes were reproduced over and over again.

However, the Shropshire Assizes for October 1887 correctly list her as Katherine Scragg. As there's only one Katherine Scragg in the 1881 census for the Stoke on Trent area (her parents lived in 41 Talbot Street in Hanley - checking on Google StreetView suggests that the house is long gone - and she was returning from a visit home when she was attacked) we can be reasonably certain that she was the same Katherine Scragg listed in the 1881 census as a pupil teacher.

But what of her life after the assault?

Well, there is a Katherine Scragg listed in both the 1891 and 1901 census listed as working as a school teacher in Cheslyn Hay in the English midlands between Wolverhampton and Lichfield, and not really that far from Stoke on Trent.

I'm not able to find when she died, but there's a hint that she may have married later in life, but to run that down is going to require a trip to the library to use their copy of  ancestry ...