I’ve sometimes complained about how disappointed I am to be a crime historian with not a single criminal ancestor in my family tree. My husband’s family is full of them: from the ancestor who was convicted of stealing women’s underwear in mid-19th century Cornwall, to the female ancestor who attacked a bailiff with an axe, and her daughter, who was hauled up before the magistrates for assaulting a relative in the street. My family tree, however, is the opposite – it is full of vestrymen, Poor Law guardians and even one of Gloucestershire’s first police officers. My ancestors appear to have been fine, upstanding members of their communities, and the only sniff of anything untoward I’ve ever detected is in the coverage of my 2x-great-grandfather’s death. A wealthy Dorset farmer, who had only ever dealt with the courts when giving evidence in relation to a burglar stealing from his property, he unsurprisingly had his obituary printed in the local press. However, the way his obituary was phrased suggested that he was seen as rather old fashioned and not particularly respected by his neighbours or the press.

Yet it was also clear that he had merely been a fusty, pursed-lipped old man – a relic of an older age rather than a baddie. Surely, though, I could not be from a long line of law-abiding men and women, particularly when so many people in the past appeared in court charged with offences ranging from merely stealing a handkerchief to arson and murder? As it turned out, I did recently find a criminal ancestor – and this unpleasant piece of work was an ancestor I had previously dismissed as uninteresting. He had died young, so what could he have managed to achieve in his short lifetime? And I knew little about him because of his early death – I knew far more about the lives of his widow and children after his death, when his widow retrained to be a nurse, and moved from Warwickshire to Wales with her children to start a new life.

Her late husband, Edward Tew, was a more complex character than I had imagined. He was born in Leamington in 1823, the second youngest child of Thomas, who worked variously as a baker, labourer and waggoner, and his wife Sarah. His parents were in their 40s by the time he was born, and they died within two years of each other, leaving Edward an orphan at the age of 13. Although his older siblings were old enough to be independent, the loss must have been hardest for Edward and his younger brother Robert, who was then only 11.

This was a hard start to their life, but Edward started work as a cordwainer, or shoemaker, and made a regular income from this for the rest of his life. He also got married, to Lucy Manning. She was from a good family; her father Joseph, a literate book-keeper, was from Coventry, but at the time of her birth in 1822 was working in Bethnal Green. Joseph then relocated his family to Leamington, where he established an Oddfellows’ branch in the town.

Lucy and Edward married in Coventry in 1843; Edward was described as being of full age, but would actually have been just 20. In 1851, Lucy was described as a shoe binder, and it is likely that she was helping Edward in his business. They established their own family in Leamington, which included my great-great-grandmother Emma, but Edward was to leave his children fatherless at a young age, as his own father had left him decades earlier. He died of rheumatism at the age of 35, and I had just assumed that he had been fondly remembered and sorely missed by widow Lucy and their children. She had never remarried, despite living until 1892 – was this because he was a hard act to follow, or simply due to a lack of opportunity?

Then, though, my mother told me a vague story that had been passed down through Emma to her descendants. It involved one of Edward’s sons having to lock himself in a bedroom on hearing his father returning home, shouting – apparently recognising the tone of voice as one signifying violence. A violence that had been witnessed before. This made me wonder what kind of a man he had really been; I hadn’t found any trace of him when I had searched crime records and local newspapers a few years earlier, but new papers (or issues of them) and new digitised archival records are put online regularly, and so it was worth another try.

This time, a whole raft of information about Edward came to light, and painted a different picture of him. A Quarter Sessions record showed 19-year-old Edward being convicted of theft and sentenced to a couple of months in prison. There are a couple more thefts that appear to have been committed by him.

Then, exactly a year after his marriage, and still only 21 years old, he was convicted of assaulting a lamplighter named Charles Harrison, by kicking and beating. The case exposed Edward as a violent man with a tendency to drink. He was a frequent visitor to the town’s pubs – one imagines an exhausted Lucy tending to the children while her husband disappeared yet again for a pint or three, spending the valuable family income on drink – and when drunk he would pick fights with other locals. On this particular occasion in 1844, he had gone into the Bath Hotel in Leamington, had a drink, and picked a fight with the lamplighter. Charles Harrison had owed Edward money, and Edward demanded it back. When it wasn’t forthcoming, he attacked the man. For this, he was fined a pound, and ordered to pay 14 shillings in costs.

Edward died on 6 July 1858 at his home in Grove Place, Leamington. Lucy Tew now had to look after their children. Perhaps she had always done so, being a vital part of Edward’s business, and maybe even covering for him in his absence. Now, she changed tack and became a nurse: three years after her husband’s death, in 1861, she is listed as a nurse and head of household. Although she stayed in Leamington for several years, when her daughter Sarah moved to Swansea with her family, Lucy saw her chance for a new start, and by 1881, she too was living in south Wales, and still working as a nurse. This woman, who had witnessed violence and unhappiness in her relatively short marriage, was remembered as a kind and gentle woman by her family, and arguably lived a more satisfying life after her husband’s death, finding fulfilling work and living with her daughter, surrounded by familial love.

Was Edward Tew a one-off in my family? It’s hard to tell. The Leamington newspapers detail various offences committed by Tews in the early and mid-Victorian eras, but Tew is a fairly common Warwickshire name. Some of the Tews mentioned may be cousins or even siblings of my direct ancestors, but it’s not certain. An 1827 news story details how one Thomas Tew created a riot one Sunday night in Leamington, together with several friends, in the process assaulting local constable George Pickford in the execution of his duty. Thomas was charged with a friend, William Bradley; Bradley was a gentleman’s servant who returned from Ireland to answer the charge against him and pleaded guilty straight away, meaning that he paid a cursory fine of a shilling and was discharged. Thomas Tew, however, insisted he was not guilty. He received several character witnesses as to his ‘sobriety and honesty’ from people who had known him for 20 years, but despite these, he was sent to prison for a month and made to keep the peace towards the constable. Was this Edward’s father, or one of his other relatives, behaving in high spirits and punished rather severely compared to his friend? I like the idea of an ancestor of mine committing an offence that was out of character, with friends loyally insisting on his usual good behaviour, but I have no evidence that it was Edward’s family.

Similarly, Joseph Manning, Edward’s father-in-law, is regarded by his descendants as a decent, educated man with a keen eye for improving the lives of others, but is this simplistic or false? In 1843, the Leamington Spa Courier recorded an assault case brought against a Joseph Manning, and heard in his absence after he failed to appear in court. He was accused of knocking down a ‘poor tailor’ in the parade in Leamington, in an unprovoked attack, was convicted, and ordered to pay 20 shillings within two weeks or face 14 days in jail. There is no detail, though, of how old this Joseph was, or what his trade was, in order to determine whether it was my ancestor or not.

My research into the Tews, and Edward Tew in particular, shows that many more of us may have a criminal ancestor than we expect – it may just be that the relevant records aren’t accessible yet. It also shows, though, the difficulties of assembling a truthful family history from partial accounts, and the need to corroborate newspaper reports with other evidence, before we can confidently say that our ancestors were black sheep.

Read Nell’s article about the history of criminal gangs in the new print edition of Discover Your Ancestors, Issue 9, available via discoveryourancestors.co.uk