To the Ladies Turbutt: Three women, three wills and three legacies.

The paper demonstrates that three women from one Derbyshire Gentry family, the Turbutt family through wills and legacies influenced, shaped and controlled the matrilineal line for well over two hundred years. From paper and ink to text and the digital screen the consequences of their decisions reverberate into the twenty-first century. A judicious evaluation of the archival collection of the Turbutt family indicated that this group of records would yield rather more than a regular male oriented family pedigree. The paper argues that through bequests in both life and death the three women had agency to help, guide and empower. It explores the choices made by later generations of the same family that society would otherwise have prohibited; in these choices the women would not only enrage their close male relatives but also later generations of the familial patrilineal line. The paper explores how the platform of letters enabled/allowed women to step out of the hegemonic ideal of domesticity and into a world outside the gates of the landed estate. It will see how legacies and letters afforded two women to play the nineteenth-century stock market, and furthermore, it demonstrates the difference a century made in the nature of the financial subjects about which the Ogston women were writing to determine what and whom was of greatest concern.

The paper demonstrates that three women from one Derbyshire Gentry family, the Turbutt family through wills and legacies influenced, shaped and controlled the matrilineal line for well over two hundred years. From paper and ink to text and the digital screen the consequences of their decisions reverberate into the twenty-first century. A judicious evaluation of the archival collection of the Turbutt family indicated that this group of records would yield rather more than a regular male oriented family pedigree.
The paper argues that through bequests in both life and death the three women had agency to help, guide and empower. It explores the choices made by later generations of the same family that society would otherwise have prohibited; in these choices the women would not only enrage their close male relatives but also later generations of the familial patrilineal line. The paper explores how the platform of letters enabled/allowed women to step out of the hegemonic ideal of domesticity and into a world outside the gates of the landed estate. It will see how legacies and letters afforded two women to play the nineteenth-century stock market, and furthermore, it demonstrates the difference a century made in the nature of the financial subjects about which the Ogston women were writing to determine what and whom was of greatest concern.