The first house I ever researched (no murders here, that I know of)

My journey to becoming a House Historian or Historian of Home had many starting points, many roots (see my last post). But the first house I ever did any research on/into has been inspirational in a number of ways, and left a permanent mark on me.

After I left school (where I didn't study History at GCSE or A-Level) I began researching my family tree including my grandfather's father Wilfred Gurney Balls Neale (fantastic name, eh?) who was born in a house that his parents, his father's parents, and his father's mother's parents (William and Sarah Balls) had lived in, and possibly further generations before them. The Neales and Balls were all rural tenant farmers, "ag-labs", sheep-dippers and well-sinkers. According to various censuses, trade directories, voter registers, tithe and OS maps, the building was called "Peewit", sometimes "Peewit Farm" or "Peewit Hall", and it was near Balls' Lane (named for the family) between the villages of Thursford and Great Snoring in Norfolk. But modern maps and aerial images showed no building or access road, and my Granddad (born in the 1930s) didn't know what had happened to it.

A couple of trips to Norfolk Record Office and a few excursions into the countryside and I found what remained of Peewit. It had been a vernacular flint (or bungaroosh) and brick building, the materials of which had largely been removed and likely recycled when it was demolished around the middle to second half of the twentieth century. I found a small piece of flint and mortar and took it to my Granddad, and he was very pleased to have a piece of the building his father was born in and where generations of Neales had lived.

Masonry at site of 'Peewit', photo by Alexa H.L. Neale, 2010.

The building was likely called Peewit after the birds that inhabit the area, so called colloquially because of their call (which sounds like "pee-wit"), they are more properly called Lapwings. I heard some of them when I visited there, they're really beautiful birds. In honour of my ancestor's house, I had a peewit tattoo made in 2010 by Ollie Jerrold at Hope and Glory Tattoo in Swaffham (since moved to Bury St Edmunds), less than 20 miles from the site of the house called Peewit.

Peewit tattoo by Oliver Jerrold, Hope & Glory Tattoo, 2010. Photo by Alexa H.L. Neale.

When the building existed, it was right up against the river Stiffkey (locally pronounced "stookey"), which at this point resembles less of a river and more of a brook of barely a few feet deep. Having read and researched some nineteenth and twentieth century domestic archaeology, I believe that it was common practice for householders to throw broken domestic objects (plates, cups, glass etc.) onto the garden, or into the privy in the garden/yard. A chat with Alastair Owens, and an article he wrote with Nigel Jeffries, Karen Wehner and Rupert Featherby confirmed this for me. The article offers an academic perspective on what discarded household objects might be able to tell us about the everyday lives of owners/inhabitants.

The place that residents discarded broken household crockery at Peewit would have likely bordered the river, and pieces of household detritus drifted down onto the banks. I believe that in the years since the building was dismantled, the landowners have dredged or deepened the river, dug out the loose mud at the bottom and sides, probably in order to deepen the water and prevent the field on the other side to the former house from flooding (it's very marshy, down-slope from a crop-field, and almost certainly a floodplain). The material from the river has then been thrown up the banks, some of it into the floor of the former building, what remains of the walls and foundations providing a useful stop to the re-drifting of the material back down the banks. This explains why the floor and foundations are still there, but are covered by a thick layer of china- and glass- flecked mud, in which now grows a huge tangled bush of nettles, brambles, wild shrubs and small trees. It no longer resembles a house or farm but a really massive, seemingly-impenetrable bush. On one visit I crawled around in here and found little broken pieces of painted and glazed porcelain - fragments of cups, saucers and plates that my ancestors owned and used in the past.

It's my intention to eventually set some of these little pieces of history in metal to make some jewellery. I'm learning to make jewellery in metal at evening classes in Brighton, taught by local jewellery designer and maker Jo McDonald. She makes porcelain into beautiful and unique jewellery for her own collections.

I now collect things with Peewits/Lapwings on (brooches, prints, bags). By coincidence, my favourite yarn-manufacturer, Rowan, have a range of fine sock yarns named for different birds. My favourite colour, green, is named 'Lapwing' so of course I had to buy it for my collection of Peewit things. I'm teaching myself to knit socks at the moment, and planning a pair for myself for the winter in 'Lapwing'.

As you can see, I find Histories of Home inspiring in lots of different ways - academically, intellectually, creatively - jewellery, tattoos, knitting, all sorts! I'm sure there's something to be written here about senses of place and the past, about material culture, identity, historians with tattoos, and remembering my family's past... But for now, watch this space for my historical jewellery and Peewit socks...

From my notebook #1: Crime scenes and case files (April 2012)

'Crime Scenes and Case Files - Sources for studying Domestic Interiors' study day at The Geffrye Museum of the Home, London, Monday 2nd April 2012.

This is where it all began. Sort of. I was finishing the taught element of my AHRC-funded Masters in Contemporary History at Sussex and had applied for AHRC funding to do my PhD there. My proposed PhD research project was about the 'place, space, and materiality of home', in much the same way as my research outline currently describes (see my Sussex or academia.edu profiles). Only I planned to use a variety of sources including the Mass Observation Archive, where I had also been volunteering and working behind the scenes, as well as researching there for postgraduate essays (in fact, I was only a few weeks away from presenting a paper at their Anniversaries Conference). My MA dissertation, at this time, was going to be a sort of micro-version of my proposed thesis, focussing on the kitchen, using various sources including Mass Observation.

This study day at the Geffrye Museum changed all that. I'm so grateful to them and to the Histories of Home SSN for organising it. I will, of course, still be using the fantastic Mass Observation materials in my research, but in a way that supports my main sources, which were inspired by two of the presentations at the study day:

Bernard Jacque, Curator of the Musee du Papier Peint, described his research using Paris Crime Scene photographs. These were 'metrique' system Bertillon photos (Alphonse Bertillon was mostly known for developing a system of recording Anthropometric measurements and mugshots of suspects in order to aid identification but he also pioneered this method of photographing crime scenes using scales to measure the distance between items in the pictures). I've looked for Jacque's research since, he was calling it 'Blood and Wallpaper' but have not been able to find anything. His presentation explained how he was using the photographs to examine which wallpapers in his archives at the Musee had made it on to walls, how and where, and how long after they were published.

Then Chris Heather, Modern Domestic Records Specialist at the National Archives gave a presentation. He explained that he was more used to giving presentations about crime sources for family history researchers, and regretted that he was not able to be more helpful - but he was very helpful to me! He indicated a few collections at the National Archives where photographs of (or relevant to) domestic interiors could be found, including crime scene photos, and showed a couple of examples.

I was hooked. How fantastic, I thought, to see photographs of actual interiors rather than aspirational ones from advertising/catalogues/exhibitions etc. This was a problem I encountered in my secondary reading in preparation for my masters dissertation: histories of home and of interiors seemed to be dominated by the kind of sources that showed what people might want their homes to look like if they bought everything brand new when they moved home, which I was pretty convinced wasn't the reality for most people throughout the twentieth century.

I visited TNA a few weeks later and was delighted to find that the depositions and other papers in the files (which varied depending on the collection) were often rich in details and descriptions about the homes and who and how people lived in them as well as photographs of interiors and exteriors. When I found out a little later that my application for funding for my PhD had been successful, my supervisors agreed that I would be able to change my main source to the ones I had identified from the National Archives.

More on the process and where my research is currently taking me later...

Why "Domestic Murder..."?

I've named my blog '"Domestic Murder," She Wrote' because I write about murders that occurred in domestic settings (in homes or dwellings) in the past for my PhD thesis. My research in this area makes me feel a bit like an amateur detective sometimes, not because I'm trying to find out 'whodunnit', but because I'm trying to piece together clues to answer questions about the case files for murder trials that I use in my research. (More about them later.) I hope I don't bear too many similarities to the character of Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote, other than, perhaps, the fact that I ask a lot of questions in the process of researching for my PhD.

If you have the answers to any of my questions, please feel free to comment on my posts or send me your contact details. Right now, in Summer 2014, I'm trying to find out as much as I can about how the files I use, and the individual documents in them, were made and by whom. I'm eager to make contact with other researchers working with similar files, so please get in touch if you are. I see my research as constantly evolving and I love to share it and talk about it, so please do get in touch if you've anything to say about any of my posts, academic or otherwise.

As well as using this blog to ask questions about the files I use in my research, I also intend to write about interesting things I've read or found and written about in my notebooks over the last few years since I started researching using these files. Feel free to comment on these posts too, I hope you find them interesting.

You can find out more about me and my PhD research via my academic profile on the University of Sussex website, or my Academia.edu profile. I'm also on Twitter as @HistoryGirrl . If you'd like to cite or refer to my blog, please use my full name: Alexa H.L. Neale.