Taking Heed of the Headless

The question sounds so much better in French: "Avez-vous eu un ancêtre décapité pendant la Révolution?"

Les Guillotinés offers the most complete online list yet established of the French Revolution’s victims and invites users to discover the answer to a terrible question: “Do you have an ancestor who was decapitated?” Hundreds of thousands of people have consulted the death base, created by Raymond Combes, a computer programmer and amateur genealogist.

Many more are likely to follow suit. According to one estimate, up to five million French people are descended from victims of La Révolution. [Link]

He Lost a Son, But He Gained a Rope

Jim Garner was hanged by the townsfolk of Corpus Christi, Texas, shortly after shooting down shopkeeper Emanuel Scheuer.

On May 15, 1866, Garner tried on a pair of boots at Scheuer's and was about to leave without paying for them when Scheuer said he couldn't give him credit.

Garner was drunk and took offense. He shot the storekeeper through the heart, killing him instantly, then left with his boots.

Eli Merriman, longtime editor of the Caller, later wrote about Garner's hanging. Merriman wrote that the morning after the hanging, old man Garner, the hanged man's father, came to take away the body. He didn't seem to be upset, saying that he had gotten a good long stake rope by the operation. [Link]

Justice Was Not Always Swift

The good folks at NEHGS sent along some additions to the list of Princess Di's Decapitated Kin:

The following were also executed, presumably by decapitation:

Charles I
William, Lord Russell
Mary Queen of Scots
1st Baron Capell
1st Earl of Holland
1st Duke of Hamilton
2nd Marquess of Huntly
7th Earl of Derby: Lord Derby's last words were “I die for God, the King, and the Laws, and this makes me not be ashamed of my life, nor afraid of my death.”

Lord Russell was dispatched by Jack Ketch—the notoriously inept executioner who later botched the beheading of James, Duke of Monmouth.

On climbing the scaffold, Monmouth picked up the axe and ran his fingers along the blade, asking Ketch if he thought it was sharp enough for the job. He handed Ketch six guineas, promising him six more if he did a clean job: "Pray do not serve me as you did my Lord Russell. I have heard you struck him four or five times; If you strike me twice, I cannot promise you not to stir."

Ketch had an attack of nerves and his first blow only grazed the back of the duke's head. Monmouth, who had refused the blindfold, turned his head around and gazed directly at Ketch, further unnerving him. When two more blows failed to sever the head, Ketch threw the axe down and offered 40 guineas to anyone in the crowd who could do better. At this the Sheriff of Middlesex, who was in charge of the execution, threatened to have him killed if he did not finish his job. When two more blows failed, Ketch had to use his knife, butchering the Duke like a pig. [Link]

Order a copy of The Ancestry of Diana, Princess of Wales for Twelve Generations to learn more about her hapless, headless relatives. I haven't read it yet, but it has already inspired me to add more decapitation stories to my own family history.

Princess Di's Decapitated Kin

NEHGS is now taking pre-orders for Richard K. Evans' new book, The Ancestry of Diana, Princess of Wales for Twelve Generations, due out in August. I'm impressed by the number of headless ancestors mentioned in the press release alone:

• A significant twelfth-generation ancestor was Queen Elizabeth I’s favorite, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, whose excessive ambition displeased his sovereign and ultimately led him to the chopping block.

• Another Scots forebear was Archibald Campbell, 9th Earl of Argyll, general of the forces that invaded Scotland in support of Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685. As a result, Argyll lost his head at the same place where his father, the 1st Marquess of Argyll, was decapitated for changing sides one time too many during the English Civil War.

It took three strokes of the ax to detach Robert Devereux's head—probably two more than he had hoped.

A Great Day to Hang in the Park

On Saturday, descendants of Alse Young, historians and onlookers gathered in a Hartford, Connecticut, park to mark the 360th anniversary of Young's hanging for witchcraft, and to remember Colonial Connecticut's ten other executed witches.

As each of the names of the nine women and two men was read, a bell was rung, and a white rose laid at the base of a tree, over which a hangman's noose dangled. A 12th rose was laid to remember the children of the executed.

"When's the hanging, yo?" asked one passer-by, a man astride a bicycle, prompting several of the assembled to walk over and explain why they were in the park. [Link]

He Was at the End of His Rope

The Toronto Star has an interesting profile of John Radclive—Canada's first professional hangman.

Quite apart from his profession, Radclive was a hard man to warm to. In 1892 he started a brawl in Hull after he announced in a bar that he had "come to hang a Frenchman, and hoped it would not be the last." He was badly beaten and had to be rescued by a wagonload of police.

A few years later in Vancouver, the Star reported, he proposed to cut off the queue (pigtail) of a condemned Chinese man "and divide it up as souvenirs of the occasion, and altogether expressed himself in ways that show him to be a person of coarse temperament."

He was also notorious for selling rope to the curious after hangings – that might or might not have actually been used.

Interviewed in the 1930s, [Arthur] English said a British Columbia sheriff once actually caught Radclive in a hardware store buying lengths of rope to sell. [Link]

Arsenic and Old Face

Robert Muscutt's great-great-grandmother Mary Ball was the last woman executed in Coventry. Whenever he wants to see her face, he has only to visit the Little Park Street Police Station's "Black Museum."

As he signed copies of his book, A Life for a Life: The Real Story of Mary Ball, in the Coventry police museum, he looked up at the death mask of his relative and said: "My feeling is that she should be more pitied that pilloried.

Mary's only crime was to buy a "penny-worth" of arsenic three months before her husband's death to "kill bugs."

Instead, she put the poison on a shelf at her home in Back Lane, Nuneaton.

When Thomas returned from a fishing trip complaining of feeling ill, Mary casually suggested he took the "salts" on the shelf as they would do him good. [Link]

Used Noose Makes News

A granddaughter of Illinois sheriff James Pritchard wants custody of a hangman's noose held by the Franklin County Historic Preservation Society. The noose was used in the 1928 hanging of gangster Charlie Birger, and was lent to the Society by one of Pritchard's daughters. Society president Robert S. Rea wants to make sure that, if the relic leaves his museum, it goes to the right party.

While the woman signed the agreement, her siblings through their descendants could stake a claim to the hangman's noose. The county could also have a valid claim, since the sheriff was on the county payroll and the county undertook the hanging of the Prohibition era bootlegger, arguably the most notorious criminal in Southern Illinois history.

"After the hanging, hangman Phil Hanna, presented the noose and a few feet of rope to Sheriff Pritchard. If he gave it to him in his role as sheriff, the county could have a claim since Pritchard was a county employee," Rea said. [Link]

Woman Hanged for Having Clean Shoes

Longtime friends Philip Reyer and Steve Latham of Limestone County, Alabama, have a bond that goes back more than three hundred years. Both are descended from women convicted of witchcraft in Salem.

“Our grandmothers rode the same wagon to be executed, up to Gallows Hill, and now how many hundreds of years later we meet," said Latham.

Reyer, who has worked at Limestone County Archives for more than 20 years, was a descendent of Susannah North Martin, as well as Edward Bishop and Sarah Wildes Bishop. The Bishops escaped hanging. Martin was not as fortunate. She was known for being a strong and independent woman, Reyer said. She was also a stickler for cleanliness.

“Susannah was a very liberated woman. Very clean,” said Reyer. "On a rainy day, she visited her neighbor and had no mud on her shoes when she arrived. Then they thought she had to be a witch." [Link]

Modern-Day Braveheart: Death March Not So Bad

From Telegraph.co.uk:

700 years on, a funeral is held for William Wallace

By Sally Pook
(Filed: 24/08/2005)

There was little of William Wallace to bury after he was strangled by hanging, released near death, drawn, quartered and beheaded.

His head was placed on a pike on London Bridge and his limbs displayed across Scotland to serve as a terrible warning.

Seven hundred years later, a symbolic funeral service was conducted for the Scottish rebel leader in London yesterday, close to his place of execution.

[snip]

Tied to horses and stripped naked, he was dragged for six miles through the city in 1305 to a site next to St Bartholomew's church in Smithfield, where he is commemorated by a plaque dedicated to his "immortal memory".

[snip]

Colin Hay, 32, a youth worker from Perth, who walked the death route from Westminster to Smithfield, said: "It was the easiest six miles of my life. I didn't feel it. We were walking for a purpose, in honour of Wallace."

[snip]

[Read the whole story]