Family-History Pilgrimage: Day 7

 Monday, June 12, 2023, evening

The People's Palace, a museum of Glasgow's social history. 

Today, we were fully tourists but with a social-history mindset, at least for the morning. We visited the People’s Palace, a small museum of the lives and experience of typical Glaswegians. In the 1800s, Glasgow was rivaling Manchester and Edinburgh to be considered Britain’s second city, with a population of 1 million … and all the associated costs of rapid population growth in the industrial age. As in Edinburgh, people lived on top of each other; and Glasgow became known as the city of tenements. If you’ve read much about immigrants on New York’s lower east side, you know something about tenement conditions; and the harsh realities of tenement life in Glasgow were longer-lasting, with displays in the museum depicting harsh conditions here just 30 or 40 years ago. One display described nine to 12 people living in a 3- by 5-foot space in the late 1800s. Picture that. It takes overcrowding to a whole new level.

Life in the Glasgow tenements.

In the category of family history, that image helps me appreciate what motivated the emigrants who made their ways from Scotland’s cities to the United States, Canada, or Australia. Alexander Gibson – my forebear who came to the U.S. with his wife, Ann, in 1851 – was a grocer in Glasgow, so they likely weren’t living at the bottom rungs of poverty. Still, being a grocer in that day probably meant having a pushcart and standing out in the Scottish rain, hoping you could eke out a living between what you had to pay the farmers and what the tenement-dwellers could afford to pay you. Even though the Church of England wasn’t shoving Anglicanism down Scottish throats in the mid-1850s, the economic pressures led the “huddled masses” of Scotland, and so many other places, to endure what must have been unbelievably hard journeys in those crowded ships – as well as whatever it took for people like Alexander and Ann to get from the East Coast to places like Perry County, Illinois. Of course, this immigrant story wasn’t horrifying and unjust, like the stories of people stolen from their homes, brought here in chains, and enslaved. And we who descend from European immigrants have to acknowledge the reality that the land where our forebears settled was stolen from the people who were there first. Still, at the level of individuals risking everything they had to build a better life, I have tremendous respect for my ancestors’ courage and hope – as well as grief for others enslaved and dispossessed.

Another emigrant narrative we learned at the People’s Palace was about “transportation” – people convicted of crimes and sentenced to removal to British colonies, especially Georgia and Australia. I’d known about that, but there was a twist on the practice in Glasgow. Apparently, as the immigrant population in Australia increased, the proportion of men was very high. So, many of the women in Glasgow prisons, typically serving time for crimes such as theft, indebtedness, and prostitution, were resentenced and shipped off to Australia to even out the gender balance.

Glasgow's outstanding Burrell Collection.

In the afternoon, we went to see the Burrell Collection, a world-class museum of art and antiquities in a lovely park setting just south of Glasgow. As it happened, among those visiting with us that day were judges from a national British museum competition; the Burrell is a finalist for this annual honor. The collection belonged to Sir William Burrell, a Victorian/Georgian shipbuilder, shipping magnate, and investor who competed with the likes of William Randolph Hearst to acquire other nations’ stolen treasurers at auction. It’s worth pausing to name the immorality of the acquisition process. But – or, and – it leaves the people of Glasgow today with an astonishing collection of medieval European stained glass, sculpture, painting, and textiles, as well as treasures from Asia and the ancient Near East. When you think of cities that house the world’s great museums, Glasgow probably isn’t the first to come to mind. But this city of tenements has a true gem in its backyard.