So many stories...

My research this morning led me to various websites about conditions for workers around 1900.
For some reason I found myself following a link to an index of records of patients who had been admitted to the then South Yorkshire Lunatic Asylum - between 1872 and 1910.
Wow! Incredible stuff!
'Reasons for Insanity' were identified, and ranged from 'Trouble and old age' 'Intemperance' 'Being blind and deaf'' 'Confinement' 'Attending spiritual meetings' 'The Change' 'Inflammation of the eyes' 'Excitement over the election' to 'Love and religion' and 'Domestic troubles' but the most poignant for me were the women whose 'cause of insanity' was put down as 'pregnancy' as this took me right back to the days when I worked in Sheffield in residential care homes during the early 1980s.
Around that time there was a move to close the large institutions where people had been kept, sometimes for years without review. In some cases people had been inmates for so long that they were unable to cope in the community.
One lady who came to live in the care home where I worked was one such case.
Wearing clothes that were clean but impersonal and carrying a bundle in her arms, she stood stock still in the doorway and looked around her in silence. I took her bags of belongings, sparse though they were and offered to carry the bundle that she gripped close to her, she refused, but followed me quietly to the bedroom that had been allocated to her.
She sat on the bed and smiled at me before asking, 'Do you want to see my baby?'
Moving forward I could see the doll that was nestled in her arms, wrapped carefully in a baby blanket and dressed beautifully in clothes that some kind nurse at the hospital must have provided.
This woman's story is unsettling but not rare I think. She was placed into the asylum when she became pregnant as a very young woman. Shamed, her parents signed her into the custody of the asylum. She was one of the longest staying inmates, and had spent more years in the asylum than she would ever spend out of it.
Another woman who came to live with us had offended her father's new wife, who had quickly found a number of reasons to have her locked away so she could enjoy a marriage without a troublesome new step daughter.
It seems that, in the search for my own story, I have recalled so many others linked to my own experiences, even though they are not a part of my own history.
It just serves to remind me that everyone has their own story, and that all of our stories are of equal importance.