Is Resilience Hereditary?

A family discovery, and the story I could not ignore

I have spent my writing life with strong women: ancestors who lived centuries ago, whose courage I could admire from a safe historical distance. It’s been an extraordinary journey, combining my love of history with a passion for writing.

These were women whose lives I could research, fictionalise, and honour without it touching the bone. Yes, I had access to their diaries. Met them through their portraits. Walked the same streets they did. Visited their graves.

This story is different.

An afternoon’s idle play on Ancestry turned into a gut-wrenching discovery that blew open my family narrative and revealed a secret. These weren’t just records I was looking at, but a moment of decision that changed everything, and everyone, that came after.

In 1900, my great-grandmother took the hands of her ten-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son and walked them into the Lambeth Workhouse.

Admission papers. A transfer order moving two small children between institutions. A workhouse discharge. And a burial. Census records at ten-year intervals. And silence—long archival gaps where a family should have been.

What struck me was not only what was there, but what was missing. What hadn’t been told to me. When the secret had been omitted from our family narrative, expunged from the stories that the older generation passes on to the younger. I don’t even know who made the decision. Were the women ashamed? Or the men who chose to marry them?

And what this experience cost my grandmother to keep hidden. Or my mother to live in ignorance of. Or decide to continue the secret. For I knew nothing of this.

I found myself thinking about how courage is rarely recorded in the lives it belongs to. It is often only visible in what survives afterwards — in children, in consequences, in the silence people carry.

While researching, I travelled to a workhouse with my daughter. We walked the stone corridors, the high windows, the yards where children were made to exercise. We climbed the narrow stairs, stood in silence in the damp cellars. “You are the most resilient person I know,” my daughter said quietly. “Now we’ve discovered where it comes from.”

My great-grandmother entered my mind that day. She became one of the women I have researched and imagined and written about. Only she’s not from four hundred years ago. She is within living memory. It took me about four months to find the words to write. But they came. As did the tears. I am saddened that they lived with such a burden. Now they are gone, I can’t ask them why. But I can share my version of the truth, supported by all those documents that I discovered on that one idle afternoon.

Some stories do not stay in the past.

They wait.

And then they are told.

The Gate, a story in the forthcoming Courage anthology, is published on June 17.