An unremarkable coincidence
Summary
One fragment of jigsaw was a census return from 1851 showing one of her 3–greats-grandfathers, then age 16, living with his parents at 13 Cambridge Street in Soho. Skip forward to last week, and I finally got around to reading Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. The coincidence is that a direct ancestor of my wife lived in a house which, three years after evidence of their residence, was in the centre of a particularly virulent and well-documented outbreak of cholera. We have no way of knowing if they were still in residence three years after the census, and thus survivors of the outbreak, but even if they had moved on, the descriptions of the Broad Street area provide a fascinating insight into the circumstances in which they lived. More interesting, to me at least, are the aspects of my curiosity which set up this piece of serendipitous discovery – family history, networks of connections, a lifelong fascination with maps and the story they tell, and the ever-fascinating mental game of “What if… ?”
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