Family Ancestors That Were Institutionalized

In the most recent GenWise newsletter, Gena Philibert Ortega wrote a column about the challenges confronting researchers whose subjects were institutionalized in asylums. This is more common than many people think, particularly the further back in time one goes. My gr. gr. gr. great grandfather, John Winterbourne (1776-1843), for example, was institutionalized and died at the Lainston House Asylum, Sparsholt, Hampshire, England.

From 1825 until 1846, the large estate and grounds of Lainston House were rented by Dr. John Twynham for a "lunatic asylum." Through county and government agencies, the asylum was paid for housing inmates during this period. The conditions at Lainston were such as to be considered "barbaric" even in this time period. The inmates were were housed in outlying buildings where sanitation was hardly a consideration. Many of the inmates were diseased and afflicted (John Winterbourne suffered from epilepsy) or simply paupers whose family could not care for them and the local parish could no longer keep them at workhouses. A government commission was sent to various asylum houses in the mid-1840s to ascertain conditions and it is their report which revealed a great deal of information about Lainston House and the conditions in which my ancestor lived and died there.

Inmates were shackled to the walls inside the outlying buildings continuously. They were fed starvation rations and were provided only with a single old well-worn blanket in winter. They were clothed in ragged clothes with no new issue of anything however long they remained "in care." Many inmates were, essentially, simply left to die (as was my ancestor) in their own filth. The commission's report proved that Dr. Twynham was just operating the asylum as a means to scam the government of the small stipend paid for housing inmates and it advised the govertnment to revoke his license and close down Lainston House Asylum, which was done at last in 1846. It is noted, too, that Twynham refused to correct any of the abuses cited in the commission's report. For many of the asylums and workhouses in England at this time, records are available for researchers, as well as the reports of various commissions studying conditions at them. Some of these records are available online and can be accessed through search engines.

Genealogists and researchers should understand that if ancestors lived past the age of effective work or were afflicted even with minor medical problems, they frequently wound up in asylums. It is not necessarily an indication that they were mentally unstable. While not all asylum keepers were as unscrupulous as Dr. Twynham, several were, as demonstrated by the commission's reports.