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    1. [YORKSGEN] Online admissions registers for South Yorkshire Lunatic Asylum - my article in Family Tree
    2. roy.stockdill via
    3. The November issue of Family Tree magazine, from ABM Publishing of Huntingdon, is just out and it is a bumper 30th Anniversary souvenir issue. See:http://family-tree.co.uk/2014/10/family-tree-magazine-november-2014-30th-bir thday-issue/ for details. I am especially pleased to report that I am in it with a five-page article entitled "Labelled a lunatic", which focuses on some of the bizarre reasons why people were incarcerated and locked away in Victorian times, often because they were a source of shame and embarrassment to their family. The asylum in question, whose records and admissions registers I found online, was the South Yorkshire Lunatic Asylum in Sheffield, which opened in 1872 and went through various name changes, eventually becoming the Middlewood Hospital. I relate in the article (pages 65-69) how I discovered that the great great great grandfather of Sheffield's Hollywood film star Sean Bean, one Joseph Bean, had been admitted to the asylum in 1879 following bankruptcy and the death of his wife. Joseph died in the asylum in 1882. Discovering this event prompted me to investigate and research further and I discovered the admission registers from 1872-1910 are online at the Sheffield Archives as a series of PDFs. Details of how to access them, in case anyone believes they might have had an ancestor in the asylum, are given in the article. -- Roy Stockdill Genealogical researcher, writer & lecturer Famous family trees blog: http://blog.findmypast.co.uk/tag/roy-stockdill/ Reach For The Stars blog: roystockdillgenealogy.com "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." OSCAR WILDE

    10/01/2014 06:32:27