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Hello - My mum has lost track of a cousin she'd love to contact. Her name at birth was (*) She was probably born either in Scotland or Devon round about 1940. She may have emigrated to Oz as a child. She was last heard of married (?) with (I think) 2 boys running a caravan site somewhere I'm told is very beautiful! Something River, I think was the name of the place.... maybe Paraidse River? And that's ALL I know!
My mum, slightly older than her cousin, loved her and has always missed her. I'll try and find out more information from her that may help. But anything - a marriage for example - would be so good - both as a step to tracing her and as news for my mum.
Thank you all for taking part in an impossible task! 

(*) Moderator comment: see next reply

  continued (on and on!)
As for life pre-1900 - I will tell what I know.... The lives of 'lunatics' were goverened partly by the penal system and poor law, depending on how they'd arrived, and partly by the Lunacy Acts - there was one passed in 1894(?) - in my life it was a huge leather bound tome that I loved - well out of date after the 1959 ACt. It regulated the minutiae of the lives of lunatics - down to who visited and whether they were of 'fit character' to be allowed, to what was suitable for lunch and what a petticoat was to be made of. There was a previous Lunacy Act but I'm unsure of the date - early 1880's I think. I don't know how well you remember the layout of the extremely select housing that now makes up what was Central Hospital - but it certainly is the best possible resoration and recycling project! All possible materials have been recycled - the brick scheme of the buildings is new but exactly the same scheme and made largely of the old bricks. The layout - given that so many individual houses have been built - is pretty similar, eith only later additions built over. Your GGF would have recognised it, to be sure.
I don't know where in the world you're based but I do occasionally get to Warwickshire, where I have close family, and I usually manage to call in and take a walk around (I live in the Outer Hebrides, though). I'd be very happy to meet you and anyone else who's interested when I'm down next (unknown) and show you where everything was that your GGF would have known. There are still some very beautiful areas and most of the farms are still intact. As a senior, he would only have done light, probably indoor work, perhaps some work in the market garden, if he was well enough at all. Men lived in one part of the hospital, women another. there were seperate wards for people, graded on how violent or disturbed they were. 'Idiots and Imbeciles' were the very first to arrive in the late 1850's, and they had to build the first buildings themselves. They built a seperate block off to the far left as you face the building, named Highfield. In my day, it was rather showing that the builders had been inept - a 2 floored building, part of a ward on the 2nd floor collapsed one day and landed on the inhabitants below.... but I don't think many were injured as it was at night and it was the 'dayroom' end of the wards. The only one occasion that the 2 sexes were allowed to mix freely was at the once yearly dance, a huge, wooden floored room on the 3rd floor which covered the whole floor. It had room for all patients (1200 at fullest) and about 500 staff. Everyone danced together, whoever they were. In my time, wards were still single sex - but this was good due to the lack of privacy in the layout. Most people were allowed to go out, meet with whom they would and wander far and near if they wished. Several  patients were known to be 'carrying on' with several others. I think a blind eye was generally turned - we'd all been through the 1960's and 70's by then!
If you have a map, your GGF was probably living somewhere in the left half of the main hospital building, as it faces you.
treatments - were generally reserved for young 'non-senile' p\tients - what'd we'd today describe as bi-polar disorders or possibly schizophrenias. They were very wierd but based on some sort of logic, in a way. the first treatments involved locking the patient in a sort of upright barrel-type bath and alternating warm and tepid water into it. I think this probably relates to Galen's ideas about humours being out of order and about cold curing hot humours etc. Next (later than your GGF's time) there was an idea that people's minds were in a spin, so if you could 'unspin' them, that would do the trick. I remember the remains of a couple of large wooden summer-houses - lots of windows, on a huge sort of clockwork mechanism that I'm told had to be wound up by a horse. The summer-houses would then revolve slowly, with their cargo of patients inside to see if it would 'unwind them'.... sounds quite nice on a summer's day to me! The place also had its own TB wards (a possibility for your GGF, perhaps you can predict that by looking at his previous living conditions) though the admission criteria was still that you had to be 'insane, idiot, imbecile, moron or senile'. The TB ward all had sort of walled verandahs whos' roofs were made of a thick parchment, to let in cold and keep out weather. Patients would spend most of their TB lives out on the varandahs. It did work. I was unfortunate enough to work on one of these wards over a winter (TB patients had long ago been cared for elsewhere) and to have to do a daily Occupational Therapy session with my patients there. Believe me, we mostly danced for warmth, with icicles and snow deep on the ground outside and us no warmer than we would have been out in it! I think we also knitted blankets, so that we could get underneath them at the same time!

Yes, Lisa
don't get me wrong - in it's day it was an amazingly forward-thinking place and was built with all the kindness and forethought you could imagine - was one of the very first 'asylums' in the world.
My own G-grandfather was the mecdical superintendant of another asylum and my grandmother grew up in one. I know from her stories how 'family' everyone was and how the sulf-sufficiency of asylums at that time gave everyone a respected role, nurse, attendant or patient.
As well as some of the rather awful things we who worked there in latter years have described, there was even at that late date great love, kindness and community amongst both people who had to live there and those who worked there, with many of both caring greatly about the other. In many ways, at its best, it was a huge family.
What the other person who worked there and I also experienced were the negative results of pioneering brain surgery and medication - and that experimentation  was truly well meant at a time when science within mental health was unheard of and the idea that one could improve 'lunatic's' lives a revolutionary idea. There were, I believe, many people living in Warwicks generally who had benefitted greatly from such treatments. Because of lack of knowledge and facilities, these operations and medication schemes sometimes produced the most awful results and that is what we are describing, hopefully not too clearly.
I believe that when many people were admitted, it usually was as an alternative to the workhouse or the jail - and I've heard many long-stay patients describe the wonderful feeling of being released from those places to Hatton, which was humane and gentle by comparison.
Your GF would have been sent to Hatton as an alternative to the workhouse, no doubt, and many elders were cared for mostly by younger, fitter patients who lived beside them in all ways. The care I saw many of them receive, even at my late date, was generally good and loving, so be reassured. Probably, I could say this to anyone who reads what we've written and thinks that their relative was subjected to intentional cruelty. In my experience, that was rarely the case. What we saw, they were rarely aware of themselves - and most of us started in that work at very tender ages - I was considered quite elderly, being 19 when I started - so maybe we were short on life experience! I still work in mental health - it's been a lifetime commitment for me - it's just that looking back it seems so sad that more wasn't known and more could not have been done. Also, in our time, the government, in its wisdom, had legislated against patients working, which meant that many of them were disposessed of lifetime roles and no doubt changed the staff-patient relationships somewhat.
A word about patients working, to anyone interested - it was seen later as a form of slave labour by those who didn't understand the asylum system in general - I experienced the very late days of patients working what were apparantly long hours for pittances of money. The point is that the community began and continued for almost a century as a self-sufficient community. If you liked the job you had done outside, you could continue to do it - and if you had no trade, you could be taught one. The only things bought in were raw materials that couldn't be found on (or in) the land.
Even people who remained lifelong were highly respected and valued for their contribution to the community. It was until latter days a cashless society - people were piad in beer and other forms of rewards - better diet for manual labourers, for instance. When some well-meaning government in the 1970's legislated and insisted patients should be paid in cash, this didn't translate well - and people were left in the same position as today - there was a benefit trap, even then, so wages were very poor - but work pace was never forced - many people only attended sometimes, did nothing whilst there and were still paid. Some patients refused to stop doing what they'd always done and were continuing when I arrived in 1980 - we had a bootmaker, a watchmaker, glazier, plumber, barber, several gardeners and a newspaper delivery service all done by patients. Ask anyone who worked there at that time, I bet we all still remember their names and what sort of people they were - they were known and repsected amongst us all. I still have a pair of walking boots the bootmaker made me and I wouldn't swap them for the world..... on the other hand, the watchmaker pinched the inside of my watch and put it in to the watch of another nurse he preferred - I didn't find out until I took it into town, asked if they could fix it, since Harry couldn't. When they opened the back, there was nothing at all inside!!!
A quick PS about the graveyards - it wasn't the builders who destoryed grave markers - there were none at all there by 1980, though we knew where the burial grounds (2, I think) were. Glad they're marked today.

Thank you so much Sarah. I expect that's him. You've certainly done your good turn for the day!

  I'm amazed and delighted. Thank you all again so much.