The Cowkeeper's Wish: A Genealogical Journey

by Tracy Kasaboski, Kristen den Hartog

Overview

In the 1840s, a young cowkeeper and his wife arrive in London, England, having walked from coastal Wales with their cattle. They hope to escape poverty, but instead they plunge deeper into it, and the family, ensconced in one of London’s “black holes,” remains mired there for generations. The Cowkeeper’s Wish follows the couple’s descendants in and out of slum housing, bleak workhouses and insane asylums, through tragic deaths, marital strife and war. Nearly a hundred years later, their great-granddaughter finds herself in an altogether different London, in southern Ontario.

In The Cowkeeper’s Wish, Kristen den Hartog and Tracy Kasaboski trace their ancestors’ path to Canada, using a single family’s saga to give meaningful context to a fascinating period in history—Victorian and then Edwardian England, the First World War and the Depression. Beginning with little more than enthusiasm, a collection of yellowed photographs and a family tree, the sisters scoured archives and old newspapers, tracked down streets, pubs and factories that no longer exist, and searched out secrets buried in crumbling ledgers, building on the fragments that remained of family tales.

While this family story is distinct, it is also typical, and so all the more worth telling. As a working-class chronicle stitched into history, The Cowkeeper’s Wish offers a vibrant, absorbing look at the past that will captivate genealogy enthusiasts and readers of history alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771622035
Publisher:	Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
Publication date:	09/15/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Tracy Kasaboski and her sister, Kristen den Hartog, co-authored The Occupied Garden: A Family Memoir of War-Torn Holland (McClelland and Stewart, 2008), which was selected as one of The Globe and Mail’s best books of the year. She lives in Deep River, ON.

Kristen den Hartog is the author of several books including The Perpetual Ending (Knopf, 2003), as well as And Me Among Them (Freehand Books, 2011), which won the Alberta Book Publishing Award for Trade Fiction. She lives in Toronto.

Table of Contents

Prologue 13

Part 1 In Darkest London-1840s-1913

Chapter 1 Bits of Ragged Laundry and Wide-Eyed Dossers 21

Chapter 2 When the Horse Is Down 43

Chapter 3 Potter's Rot 67

Chapter 4 Tell Me When Your Mother Drops 95

Chapter 5 Cracked Eggs 117

Chapter 6 We Are Shadows 137

Chapter 7 The Blaze of Day 163

Chapter 8 Ready for the Call 189

Part 2 The Noise ofWar-1913-1919

Chapter 9 Bang, Crash, Tinkle 213

Chapter 10 You Made Life Cheery When You Called Me Dearie 253

Chapter 11 A Person of Unsound Mind 279

Chapter 12 Down-Hearted and Shivery 301

Chapter 13 Make Your Motto "Forward!" and Stick to It Like Glue 319

Part 3 The Forest City-1907-1934

Chapter 14 My Own Darling Wiffie 343

Chapter 15 Don't Forget to Remember 367

Chapter 16 In the Sweet By and By 387

Chapter 17 A Cosy Nest 407

Epilogue 421

From the Authors 429

Acknowledgements and Notes on Sources 433

Notes 435

Editorial Reviews

The Cowkeeper’s Wish is like a camera panning across decades of change, the rise and fall of families and the way fate and fortune conspire to create the present and the future . . . these fascinating family stories inspire us to ponder the many upstream tributaries that have transformed the rivers of our own lives.”

author of Island of the Blue Foxes Stephen R. Bown

...This book is not only the story of the Jones families, but also the story of London in transition from its gritty and murderous underside (the authors’ family lived in Jack the Ripper’s neighborhood), to social reform that improved the lives of insane asylum inmates (a few of the authors’ ancestors were committed), the strikes demanding labor reform, women’s suffrage, improvement in education, to the alarm of the Spanish flu years and England’s suffering during the First World War.” - Bobbi King, Eastmen Online Genealogy Newsletter , March 2019 https://blog.eogn.com/2019/03/26/book-review-the-cowkeepers-wish-a-genealogical-journey/

Eastmen Online Genealogy Newsletter - Bobbi King

The Cowkeeper’s Wish is the story of a family but it is so much more. It is also the history of the times they lived through, a complex revelation of politics, music, food, fashion, and profound social changes. The lives of women are especially vividly described, their tastes, their pursuits (both at work and at home) and their struggles. With lively prose and keen eyes for details, the authors take us to cramped slums where women raised families and did piecework, to the workhouses and asylums where some of them languished, through war factory work, across the Atlantic on steamships, and finally to a more open society where the cowkeeper’s great-granddaughters could dare to dream of better lives.”

author of Dazzle Patterns Alison Watt

Cowkeeper's Wish offers a vibrant, absorbing look at the past that will captivate genealogy enthusiasts and readers of history alike... true-life family biography that grips the reader with the passion of an engrossing novel...The Cowkeeper's Wish is riveting from cover to cover and highly recommended. - Mary Cowper, Midwest Book Review.com, April 2019 http://www.midwestbookreview.com/mbw/apr_19.htm#cowper

From the Publisher