Selina Hirst

Selina Hirst was baptised on the 17th of July 1825 in the chapelry of Wentworth — entry No. 1257, daughter of Charles and Mary Hirst of Elsecar, her father a collier. Elsecar was Earl Fitzwilliam's colliery village, and its coal left by water: the Elsecar branch of the Dearne & Dove Canal ran from the pit-heads down to the navigation, into the same connected waterways the Thorne keels worked. Selina was born to the digging end of the coal trade and married into the carrying end of it. (Her recorded ages tug two years earlier than the baptism — thirty-eight in 1861, fifty-eight in 1881, "seventy-five" at her death — a consistent pattern that reads like a child born about 1823 and baptised late, as colliery families at a distance from the chapel often were; the baptism is the anchor date, and the pattern is noted.)

In the June quarter of 1842, in Rotherham registration district — Wentworth's own — she married Henry Richmond, a Thorne waterman twenty years her senior and nine months a widower, with five living children under nine. Selina raised them, and bore eleven of her own across the next twenty-three years: Charles, the twins Tom Charles and Frances, Mary Ann, Susannah, Samuel, Henry Christopher, Miles, William Henry, John, and a second Charles. Sixteen children under her hand, and not always under a roof: the 1851 census found her at Thorne entered as "Head" — Henry away on the water — and on census night 1861 the whole household was afloat on Henry's keel, the Ann, where the schedule gives Selina her working title: "Waterman's Wife", born Elsecar.

Henry died in 1879, and her widowhood shows her still working. The 1881 census places her sixty miles from Thorne, in her son Samuel's crowded house off Spyvee Street in Hull, her occupation given as "nurse" — with her daughter-in-law six weeks from giving birth to Minnie. Whether resident or come for the lying-in, the register caught a nurse in a house that was about to need one. By 1891 she was back at Thorne, a widow alone in the parish she had served since 1842, and she died there in the spring of 1898.