When I first started looking for traces of my ancestors in newspaper reports, I wasn’t too optimistic that I would find anything useful or interesting, since, so far as I knew, none of them had been rich or famous or done anything that would be worth a mention in print. I couldn’t have been more wrong! News reports have turned out to be of immense value to my family history research, adding meat to the bare bones of births, marriages, deaths and census returns, while giving me a much better idea of the lives that my ancestors lived and (in several cases) the crimes they committed. From the details given in ‘personal announcement’ columns, I have been able to confirm relationships and break down some of my brick walls.

One newspaper report which gave me particular pleasure concerned one of my 4xGreat Grandmothers, Dorothy Tyson. It appeared in the Whitehaven Pacquet on Tuesday 30 July 1839 (original punctuation retained):

“It seldom happens that when either man or woman attains the great age of 76 years that they are able to endure the labour which in early life they would have looked upon with unconcern. The fact however we are about to mention not merely forms an exception to this nearly general position, but shows a degree of activity and hale old age not often to be met with. Mrs. Dorothy Tyson, of Wallend, near Broughton in Furness, mother of Mr. Tyson, of the King’s Head inn, in that town, who within the past week, although in the 76^th year of her age, kneaded, rolled, and baked sixteen stones of oatmeal in fourteen successive hours! and not, let us observe, after the fashion of the Scotch, in thick bannocks, but in the custom of the district, in cakes not much thicker than a wafer.”

Unfortunately the report doesn’t tell us why Dorothy was making so many oatmeal cakes – perhaps for use at her son’s inn?

Dorothy (née Bell) from St Bees, Cumberland, had married Richard Tyson on 16 May 1796 at St James’s Church, Whitehaven. Richard was originally from Millom but in 1813 he leased the Wallend farm, including fields, stock and sheep, at Broughton-in-Furness, for an initial term of seven years. The lease must have been renewed several times as the Tysons lived there until at least 1861, but by the time of the 1871 census, a different family was in residence.

Richard Tyson died on 10 November 1838 and Dorothy eight years later on 12 November 1846. The running of Wallend farm was taken over (until at least 1861) by their sixth son, Jonathan, as two of his five older brothers farmed elsewhere, while another two became innkeepers and one had died as an infant. Both Richard and Dorothy were buried at St Mary Magdalene’s Church, Broughton-in-Furness, where, unlike most of my ancestors, they are commemorated on a headstone.