Another way of tracking down MJK?

[kensei]

I had a random thought about ways of tracking down exactly who Mary Jane Kelly was. As chronicled in "Will the Real Mary Kelly...?" by Christopher Scott, none of the information she gave about herself has been able to be verified by exhaustive searches of census and other records, to the point where Mary Jane Kelly may not even have been her real name and much of her life story might have been made up. But obviously, someone lived and died in 13 Miller's Court. Someone is in that awful photograph.

I was thinking- if MJK was murdered while living under an assumed name that ended up on her official death record, resulting in her having no findable birth or census record, what if we turn that back on itself? It would also mean that whoever she really was has a birth record and probably appeared in at least one census but has no death record, as if she just faded away. Could it be possible to compile a list of possible candidates for her based on this- women of her approximate known age and description whose deaths were never recorded? Or would the sheer numbers involved and having no name as a starting point make such a thing impossible? Just a thought.

[Bob Hinton]

Unfortunately.......

I had a random thought about ways of tracking down exactly who Mary Jane Kelly was. As chronicled in "Will the Real Mary Kelly...?" by Christopher Scott, none of the information she gave about herself has been able to be verified by exhaustive searches of census and other records, to the point where Mary Jane Kelly may not even have been her real name and much of her life story might have been made up. But obviously, someone lived and died in 13 Miller's Court. Someone is in that awful photograph.

I was thinking- if MJK was murdered while living under an assumed name that ended up on her official death record, resulting in her having no findable birth or census record, what if we turn that back on itself? It would also mean that whoever she really was has a birth record and probably appeared in at least one census but has no death record, as if she just faded away. Could it be possible to compile a list of possible candidates for her based on this- women of her approximate known age and description whose deaths were never recorded? Or would the sheer numbers involved and having no name as a starting point make such a thing impossible? Just a thought.

A non starter. If you tried to limit yourself to paper records you would have to trawl through approximately 30 million individual entries.

If you tried using a computer you would need a team of people working for about 30 years to produce nothing.

What people forget about records is that they expect people to be on them, unfortunately it doesn't work that way. Even today it is estimated that modern census records are about 5 to 6 million people low in Britain alone.

[kensei]

Well, that is about the kind of answer I was expecting. Just thought I'd throw it out there.

[Rubyretro]

I should love to find Mary Kelly , too. It seems horrible to me that her killer suceeded with her, in wiping her from the face of the earth.

The other Ripper victims seem to have 'got one over' JTR, because they are
world famous and we have their photographs (if only from the mortuary for the most part), and we know something about their lives..and even some of their descendants. JTR remains anonymous.

I wonder if the 'Davis or Davies' isn't the key to the enigma?

IFMary had been married young, and this man existed -even if she just lived with him- then there must surely be a trace of him in mining records.

I wondered -since immigrant communities tend to stick together -if he was a
fellow irish man, and whether his name wouldn't appear with an irish spelling
(meaning 'Davis', but written very differently) ?

I also wondered -since she would have been of a fertile age and (maybe)
legally married, and presumably having regular sex, and too young to have damaged her body woth malnutrution and drink..perhaps there was a child of this union, left with 'family' ? There is an erroneous story that she had a child in Miller's Court...but this could be a garbled version of a child that came to stay once, or she could have told people that she had a child ?

I imagine that such a child would have the name 'Davis' (or a varient).

[lynn cates]

questions

Hello Ruby. Personally, I have tried to find Davies (much more common in Wales than Davis) in various Welsh mining disasters. I found about 7 who died in the Pen-y-Graig disaster. But none tallied with MJK.

Having read Chris' excellent book, I am not sure whether MJK was lying or if it were Barnet. Another question is, "Why lie?"

My sincerest best wishes to whomever tackles even a small portion of this mystery.

Cheers.
LC

[Rubyretro]

Hi Lynn -I looked at lots of welsh mining disasters too. I found loads of 'Davies' but I never tried to check them out.

There are loads of problems anyway :
-Mary might have lived with a Davies but never legally married him
-She might have married but simply abandoned him, and he might have been living
-he might have been injured in a 'one off' accident, but not a disaster
-he might have been injured in the mine, but died later as a result of his injuries -which is not obvious from a death certificate
-he might have moved and not been in the area that Mary spoke about
-if he were Irish too, then the name could have different varients in the legal records even though it had been simplified to Davies for everyday use.

I think that it might be worth looking for a hypothetical baby Davies, born at the right time, but apart from the fact that it would be common for such a
child to be 'adopted' by some family member -and a sister, or an aunt, could have married and have a different name altogether -Davies in Wales are ten a penny.

[kensei]

.

Having read Chris' excellent book, I am not sure whether MJK was lying or if it were Barnet. Another question is, "Why lie?"


LC

That is the big question whenever anyone lies in situations like this, but we all know that people just sometimes do, for whatever reason. She was technically living a life of crime after all. Worst case scenario with MJK is that her own name, her marriage to Davies, Davies himself, where she was from, her time in France and just everything, were all made up out of thin air. Hopefully that is not the case and at least part of her story was true. I still keep thinking- if she was once an artist's model then there must be paintings of her, and surely she must have had her photo taken at some point in her life?

I still wonder, if someone with a ton of time on their hands was to make a years-long project out of it, if looking for ginger haired Irish women born in the early 1860s who have birth and maybe census records but no death records just MIGHT at least offer up some possibilities. But of course even if it did we still probably couldn't be sure about them.

[Chava]

Honestly I think everything she said was a lie. When you think about it, all those details just served to make a more compelling story. 'I went to the bad after my young love was killed in a mine explosion' sounds better than 'I'd rather be on the streets than in a factory' (I don't blame her for that...) 'I spent time in a fancy house in the West End' sounds more enticing than 'I was on a corner in Cardiff and now I'm on a corner in Whitechapel'. 'I was taken to France by a gentleman' is a lot more up-market than 'I lived with a gas-fitter in Shoreditch'. She's in the business of making herself look and sound more attractive than the other whores because that way she'll get more money than they will. All this ties in nicely to her using a nom-de-guerre. Because the last thing she wants is reality in the shape of a relative or former boyfriend or whatever fetching up in the East End to ruin her lovely autobiography with a healthy helping of The Truth. So she picks a really common name--which isn't anywhere close to her own name--and off she goes, promenading into eternity. I think she made good and sure no one could find her. And now no one ever will.

[claire]

I think we've rehearsed this debate before. In my view, there's nothing that (Barnett said that) Kelly said about herself that was impossible, or implausible. We think that working in a house in the West End sounds a bit classy, but lots of younger women did--just because youth was a saleable commodity to the clients of those houses. Similarly, lots of women were shipped off to France where they worked, registered or not, in the many houses in the port cities, Paris and so on. Also, whilst changing your name may be a way of evading something, or someone, it's not as though there were reliable means of tracing someone through their name. So I don't think we can discount everything as utter fabrication--if one wanted to tell a story, it could be one a long way from tales of prostitution, no? There were many women who had bona fide hard luck stories likely to garner far more sympathy than a tale of various prostituting escapades...why not pick one? And Barnett's antipathy towards prostitution would imply that she'd have been better fabricating a tale that didn't include that on her CV.
I suppose I also dislike the notion that we will so readily say that someone was a liar, simply because we (130 years down the line) can't find evidence to back their stories up.
Just my opinion, though, of course

[Rubyretro]

So I don't think we can discount everything as utter fabrication--if one wanted to tell a story, it could be one a long way from tales of prostitution, no?

Hi Claire !

I agree with you.

I think that almost all good liars will mix fiction with truth, so although Mary's 'story' was almost certainly heavily 'romanced' (to make her look/feel more interesting), there is a very good chance that there is truth, or versions of the truth, mixed in with fantasy.

I certainly don't believe that she simply made up her autobiography (as related to Joe, wholesale).

I also think that she was probably close enough to Joe to want to tell him about herself...but maybe not her 'worst' aspects but a 'softer' version (ie; she may well have been married young to a man called Davies..but he may only have been dead to her, but not to the World).

[Chava]

But look at it and it's a tale full of romance. A young marriage quickly followed by a tragic accident! A West End bordello! A trip to France! There's enough there for more than one movie. Some of it may have been true but I doubt all of it was or even most of it. Look at Liz Stride. She had a lovely sob-story about losing her husband and family in the Princess Alice disaster. And the whole thing was a complete lie. Why did she tell it? Because it probably got her a few sympathy drinks and some attention.

I think, then as now, you take what a prostitute tells you about her life with a big grain of salt. They are not in the truth-telling market, they are in the fantasy-creating market. I am not saying this in any way that might be construed as a criticism. If I was a tart I'd be embroidering with the best of them. But to take Mary Jane Kelly's own account of her life--without independent corroboration of any kind--as anything close to the truth is a big mistake in my opinion.

[Rubyretro]

First of all, Chava, I agree with you that Prostitutes are in the 'Fantasy' market and surely tell tales to make themselves more attractive.

However, most (if not all ?) of Mary's biography comes to us via Joe Barnett, a man with whom she shared her daily life....with no telly or radio ! (ie they had plenty of opportunity to talk to each other).

We can't tell (unlike Heinrich) how close Mary and Joe were were, but with the number of hours that they must have spent talking, surely she can't have been so duplicitous/inventive as to only tell total porkies ?

Mary's Story does appear 'romantic' to us....but that was maybe only a 'gift' she had for presenting some of the Facts in the light that was excusing/flattering to herself ?