In the 1840s, a young cowkeeper and his wife arrive in London, England, having walked from coastal Wales with their cattle. They hope to escape poverty, but instead they plunge deeper into it, and the family, ensconced in one of London’s “black holes,” remains mired there for generations. The Cowkeeper’s Wish follows the couple’s descendants in and out of slum housing, bleak workhouses and insane asylums, through tragic deaths, marital strife and war. Nearly a hundred years later, their great-granddaughter finds herself in an altogether different London, in southern Ontario. In The Cowkeeper’s Wish, Kristen den Hartog and Tracy Kasaboski trace their ancestors’ path to Canada, using a single family’s saga to give meaningful context to a fascinating period in history—Victorian and then Edwardian England, the First World War and the Depression. Beginning with little more than enthusiasm, a collection of yellowed photographs and a family tree, the sisters scoured archives and old newspapers, tracked down streets, pubs and factories that no longer exist, and searched out secrets buried in crumbling ledgers, building on the fragments that remained of family tales. While this family story is distinct, it is also typical, and so all the more worth telling. As a working-class chronicle stitched into history, The Cowkeeper’s Wish offers a vibrant, absorbing look at the past that will captivate genealogy enthusiasts and readers of history alike.

Part intimate family memoir, part robust social history, The Cowkeeper's Wish is a genealogical excursion through an era of astonishing change.

The early nineteenth century witnessed the mass movement of people from Britain’s countryside into its burgeoning towns and cities; people came to the city in search of work. This prompted many dairy farmers to follow suit and move themselves, their family and their cows into the country’s growing metropolises, where they opened the first generation of city dairies. In the 1830s, transportation in Britain was revolutionized by the coming of the railways, enabling foodstuffs, including milk, to be transported in bulk from countryside to city. Large dairy companies took advantage of this opportunity, opening a new generation of retail dairies. The demand for milk was so great that some cities boasted a dairy at the end of every street. For the next hundred years the cowkeepers fought a rear-guard action against the mighty corporate dairies and their attempts to monopolize the liquid milk market. The cowkeepers continued to produce their own milk, selling it — ‘fresh from the cow’ — over the dairy counter and out on the milk round. These dairies were kept in the family, handed down through successive generations. Despite surviving two World Wars, the rapid technological, social and economic changes that followed, brought about the demise of the traditional cowkeeper. But the city dairy continued as a family business, working as part of a national distribution network, overseen by the Milk Marketing Board. Out on the round, the family dairyman was almost indistinguishable from the corporate milkman. The sixties and seventies saw the arrival of the Supermarket, a game-changer in retailing. To survive, the city dairy had to change once more. It expanded its offer and seamlessly joined the ranks of those other most British of institutions: the Corner Shop and the Convenience Store.

Book Review

As a food, milk has been revered and ignored, respected and feared. In the face of its 'material resistance', attempts were made to purify it of dirt and disease, and to standardize its fat content. This is a history of the struggle to bring milk under control, to manipulate its naturally variable composition and, as a result, to redraw the boundaries between nature and society. Peter Atkins follows two centuries of dynamic and intriguing food history, shedding light on the resistance of natural products to the ordering of science. After this look at the stuff in foodstuffs, it is impossible to see the modern diet in the same way again.

A moving, revealing memoir about a man and his young family during the Nazi occupation of Holland, as told by his granddaughters, one a beloved novelist. At once a memoir and a social history of a time, The Occupied Garden is the story of a good but poor man, a market gardener, and his fiercely devout wife, raising their young family in Holland during the Nazi occupation. Pieced together by the couple’s granddaughters, who combed through historical research, family lore, and insights from a neighbour’s wartime diary, the story chronicles how the couple struggled to keep their children from starving, but could not keep them from harm, and reveals the strife and hardship endured not just by them, but by a nation. These experiences, kept from subsequent generations of the family, were almost lost until, long after their deaths, the path of the couple through the war and on to Canada was uncovered. A personal and intimate account within the larger context of a terrorized nation, this is also a story of the bonds and strains among family, told with the haunting, evocative prose for which Kristen den Hartog is known.