Talk about rags to riches...

Just over 120 years ago a little girl, Elsie Pallister, was born to an unmarried mother in the York Union Workhouse.

Today, that little girl’s granddaughter is York’s first citizen, Lord Mayor Barbara Boyce.

Elsie’s mother, Emma, has always been regarded as the black sheep of the family, Cllr Boyce admits.

A domestic servant by trade, she had three children out of wedlock. The eldest, Fred, she left to be brought up by her own father. The second, Elsie, was given up for adoption. And the youngest, John - nobody really knows what happened to him. Emma herself, meanwhile, was in and out of the workhouse, in both York and Selby, for years.

For Cllr Boyce, Emma’s life illustrates the difficulties that women from poor backgrounds faced in Victorian times.

Working class women were often dependant on finding a man to support them, she says - if they couldn’t, they faced a life of struggle and poverty. And if there were children born out of wedlock, it was always the woman who was stigmatised. “All of Emma’s children would have had fathers. But they wouldn’t have experienced the same kind of suffering that she did.”

Cllr Boyce’s grandmother and great-grandmother are just two of countless people whose lives can be traced through the York poor law and workhouse records kept in the archives at Explore York’s central library.

For more than a year the records have been closed for cataloguing and conservation. But at an invitation-only event this evening, Cllr Boyce will be at Explore to talk about her family’s workhouse connection, and to officially declare the poor law records open again. From Saturday, members of the public will be able to request to see the records for themselves in the archives reading room at Explore.

“It is likely that many people in York might have had ancestors in the workhouse,” said Cllr Boyce. “It is worth finding out - it makes you realise what privileged lives we have today. I’m only two generations from the workhouse. Not that long ago there were people in York who were destitute, with no opportunities at all.”

* If you would like to study the poor law records you are to call and make an appointment first. To make an appointment, call 01904 552800.