Hi Jess.......this is a surprise ...id love to know more..........this is what I originally posted ....... below
My gt gt grandad Joseph Field I have just found out this week on getting his cert of death back from the records office in brum died young ......he was 48 when he died in 1890 leaving a young family behind . But the question to anyone that might know this is .
He was a skilled man , a Gun Finisher , and he died in the registration district of Kings Norton in 1890 even though according to the census of 1880 and ones prior to that that he lived and worked in the gun quarter of the city , but he died according to the death cert in Rubery hill asylum. The first thing that sprung to mind for me was asylum.....is that not for people that were mentally ill ? . None of my family have any info on him at all . So considering that his death cert states cause of death as ACUTE BRONCHITIS .....why was he in that asylum ?????.
I have actually found the admissions book a few years ago in bham library but cant remember what it said but the book was the original from 1890 which was pretty amazing as I saw his signature.....I would love to know more about him........I have spoken to a historian thereafter and tehy told me that a lot of people that worked in the gun quarter in Birmingham in these little back street gun workshops were so unregulated and this meant that they were extremely noisy and apparently the constant noise of the manufacturing and quite often the guns actually deploying meant that this sent guys mental and kind of shell shocked and were therefore sent to Rubery hill mental asylum. I would love to get to the bottom of this one. Thanks Karl, please feel free to call me ...07881260240