Assignment 2: The Archive

Produce a series of related images that use a readily available online archive (or archives) as their starting point or subject.

Make a small book for this project, using proprietary software, to be viewable online. In your book, you may use a selection of images from primary sources (your own images) and/or secondary sources (images found online and/or scanned from other sources). Think about a theme for your book and use the references provided throughout Part Two as inspiration. Your book should contain a minimum of 12 double pages and can contain text if you wish, or simply a collection of images. Provide a link to where your tutor can view your book and also provide a few double-page spreads as still images as part of your learning log.

If you have any queries on your subject, then discuss these in advance with your tutor. Use BLURB or other proprietary software that will allow you easily to construct your book and publish it to the web. Remember that it must be accessible to view via your learning log.

RE-WORKING ASSIGNMENT 2:

I have decided to completely re-work assignment 2 as I have been unable to progress my project on mining in Chile.(Link) I will take up this project at a later date as I believe it is a story that needs to be told.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

There are no photographs of my great grandmother, Letitia Millet so I am ‘creating’ an image of her using archive material of the time and the facts I can find.

Here is the Flip Book: Letitia Millet The Dressmaker

http://online.fliphtml5.com/zsdc/ujde/

LETITIA, THE DRESSMAKER’S STORY

This project is dedicated to my great grandmother Letitia Millet. My father had always maintained that she was French. He also told us he remembered his grandparents speaking French together. He said that our great grandfather was a Scots Presbyterian who had changed both his religion and the spelling of his name to marry our great grandmother. My research has shown that most of this was myth. Letitia was born in Dublin city in 1829. She signed this fact on the 1901 census.

I cannot establish where, in Dublin, her family lived at the time of her birth. The name Millet is very unusual in Ireland and its origin is probably French Huguenot.

Many of those who fled France returned when things became safer, but others stayed and they are the original bearers of other Hugenot names still found today in Ireland such as Guerin, Millet, Trench and Deverell. These names are mostly still found in the areas in which their ancestors settled hundreds of years ago.(1)

The first recorded act of Letitia’s life, after her birth, is her marriage, at the age of eighteen, to my great grandfather, John Stephenson. They married in St James Parish Church, James’Street, Dublin 8, on  21 August 1847 where my husband and I were married 121 years later, less two days, Sadly the future of this beautiful church is being threatened (2)

My great grandfather was born in Belfast in 1828.

They had at least six children. Only three of their children, Robert, Letitia and John, were born after 1864, the year when births had to be registered, by law, in the state register. I was able to locate birth information for three children born to them before this date, Julia, Katherine and my grandfather Matthew. They may have had more children but I was unable to locate information about them.

Before 1864 births were registered only in the parish church records. One needs to know the name of the parish to access the records. Some, but not all, of these records have been put on microfiche. Many are illegible due to the damp conditions in which the original records were kept. Since my great grandparents moved from one accommodation to another, within Dublin city, it was difficult to know in which parish, their children might have been registered.

The three children, for whom I found information, were born while they were living in a tenement at 36 Denzille Street in Dublin.  There were thirteen families living in the same tenement house. Denzille Streets’ name was changed, in 1924, to Fenian Street, the name it bears today. Most of the tenements on this street have been replaced with modern buildings.

My great grandfathers’ occupation was given as ‘servant’ on the birth certificate of their daughter Letitia and ‘butler’ on another child’s birth certificate and finally as ‘ship builder’ on my grandfather, Matthew’s marriage certificate in 1894.

At some point, before the death of my great grandfather, the family moved from Denzille Street to Great Brunswick Street. This would have been seen a step up in the world and it was here that my great grandmother, Letitia, was first registered as a dressmaker.

A dressmaker was described in the literature of the time as:

…. dressmaking constituted the higher end of female employment with the needle; they were “respectable” occupations for young women from middle-class or lower middle-class families.(3)

The death certificates and/or marriage certificates of some of the children, including my grandfather Matthew’s marriage certificate, indicated that the family had settled at 165 Great Brunswick Street and remained there for a great number of years. At least three of the children died there, of tuberculosis, in their twenties,

In the 1901 census, the first surviving census in Ireland, Letitia is registered as living at 165 Great Brunswick Street with her sister-in-law Mary Jane Stephenson.  The fate of the other Irish census is described as follows:

The original census returns for 1861 and 1871 were destroyed shortly after the censuses were taken. Those for 1881 and 1891 were pulped during the First World War, probably because of the paper shortage. The returns for 1821, 1831, 1841 and 1851 were, apart from a few survivals, notably for a few counties for 1821 and 1831, destroyed in 1922 in the fire at the Public Record Office at the beginning of the Civil War (4)

Both ladies marked their occupation as ‘dressmaker’ on the 1901 census form. My great grandmother also marked that she was “Head of Family’ despite the advice given, on the form, to widows that they should mark “widow”. My great grandfather died sometime between 1894 and 1901 but there is no record of either his death or his burial. I know this because he was the witness at my grandfather’s marriage in 1894 but was not on the 1901 census and my great grandmother described herself as ‘widow”.

I found an architectural drawing, in the Australian Melbourne Museum while visiting family there, of Great Brunswick Street which showed 165 as a single storey building. On the census form it was marked that my grandmother and family had three rooms, one of which must have served as her dressmaking room.

Great Brunswick Street, modern name Pearse street, was a city centre commercial street. I therefore assumed that if she was involved in any sort of commercial undertaking it would be registered in Thom’s Street Directory for Dublin. I found the entry in the 1894 Directory(5). My great grandmother and grand aunt shared the premises, at 165, with a tobacconist called Matthew Lalor.

It is likely that for their dressmaking, they made use of the technological advances of their time.

Technological advances, such as the invention of the sewing machine in the mid-19th century, also helped to democratise fashion, enabling both professional and home dressmakers to adapt and copy the latest fashions more easily.(6)

I remember, seeing when I was a child, a foot operated Singer sewing machine in my maiden aunts apartment. I believe they had inherited this from their grandmother. My aunts, Mary Leo and Letitia, were both seamstresses and worked in my fathers clothing factory. My father was a tailor.

The styles of the Victorian period were complicated (7). Dressmakers, in the Victorian period, often used magazines rather than patterns to make their garments. Clients would bring a magazine image or the dressmaker would have a selection of magazines from which the client could select a garment they wished the dressmaker to copy. I assume Letitia used this method as my father never used patterns other than the ones he created himself. He made copious measurements and then used tailors chalk to draw his pattern on the material.

If she used a pattern it would probably have been a Simplicity pattern. These patterns first appeared in the US in the mid 1800s. They arrived in Ireland in the late nineteenth century.

It is impossible to learn who were Letitia and Mary Jane’s clients, in Dublin, at the end of the 19th century. But one could make an assumption that they were both rich and poor people.

Many women – governesses, ladies’ maids, dressmakers and the wives of tradesmen, for example – were expected to dress respectably on a fraction of that sum (a shilling a day (or £18 5s a year)) and were equally anxious to “avoid the appearance of poverty”.(8)

My great grandmother, Letitia, was able to afford a marked grave, in Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin, in which to bury some of her children and grandchildren and in which she herself was buried. Many poor people were buried in unmarked, or paupers, graves and it is often difficult to locate these without precise dates of death.

My great grandmother died, in 1902, at the age of 74. In the 1901 Thoms Street Directory her sister-in-law, Mary Jane, has moved to no 172 Great Brunswick Street and continued to work as a dressmaker with one of Letitia’s children.

The Story Board:

RESEARCH MATERIAL

I used old pattern layouts for the pages and stuck the information to these pages. I interleaved these pages with the actual pattern tissue paper.

Handmade book before binding:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Book Binding day:

I spent half a day with the book binder Barbara Hubert in Cork city. She looked at my book preparation and cut some sheet the same size. She worked alongside me making her book and I followed her instructions.

My book worked out well despite being difficult with light tissue interleaving pages.

1. Dochara. 2019. Huguenot & Palatine Names in Ireland. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.dochara.com/the-irish/surnames/hueguenot-palatine-names-in-ireland/. [Accessed 20 May 2019].
2. 2019. €5m distillery planned for Dublin church · TheJournal.ie. [ONLINE] Available at:https://www.thejournal.ie/distillery-dublin-liberties-st-james-church-1379008-Mar2014/. [Accessed 06 June 2019].
3. Slaves of the Needle:” The Seamstress in the 1840s. 2019. “Slaves of the Needle:” The Seamstress in the 1840s. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/ugoretz1.html. [Accessed 20 May 2019].
4. National Archives – History of Irish census records. 2019. National Archives – History of Irish census records. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/help/history.html. [Accessed 30 May 2019].
5. Irish Family History Centre. 2019. Library – Thom’s Directory, 1894. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.irishfamilyhistorycentre.com/store/85. [Accessed 02 June 2019].
6. National Museum of Ireland. 2019. Way We Wore | Irish Fashion History | National Museum . [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.museum.ie/Decorative-Arts-History/Exhibitions/Current-Exhibitions/The-Way-We-Wore-(1)/Exhibition-Details. [Accessed 31 May 2019].
7. Victorian Era Gowns: dressing style and fashion. 2019. Victorian Era Gowns: dressing style and fashion. [ONLINE] Available at: http://victorian-era.org/victorian-era-gowns.html. [Accessed 19 May 2019].
8. History Extra. 2019. Stitching the fashions of the 19th century – History Extra. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/stitching-the-fashions-of-the-19th-century/. [Accessed 01 June 2019].