Cross Atlantic Scandal and Compassion
—Bernie Zelitch, by Annie Powell executive director
In June, 1891, Joseph Senior, 47, abandoned his wife and five children in West Yorkshire, England, when officials discovered he embezzled from the local poverty fund. Senior, a tax collector, it seemed was doing his own unauthorized collecting.
When boarding the steamship, he told the ticket takers he was an inspector from Scotland. His ruse allowed him to board the S.S. Samaria sailing from Liverpool to Boston. Upon his arrival, he was to take the B&M Railroad to Lowell and meet family members who immigrated a few years earlier.
Upon hearing of Senior’s travel, we believe that his niece, Annie Powell, 31, quickly packed her photo equipment and left her husband in West Yorkshire to join this journey.
Joseph managed to evade the law and Annie sought the photography career that had eluded her in Britain. She and husband John operated a photography studio in a small English village but to pay the bills, she worked in a textile mill.
Senior found work in the Lowell textile mills and was able to shake off his notorious past. The United States, surely unaware of his history, awarded him with citizenship soon after. Unbelievably, the man who was convicted of stealing money in his home country served for eight years as treasurer of Lowell’s Bunting Cricket Club. He was affectionately called “Uncle Joe.” By 1921, he returned to live with his son in England without any legal consequences.
Professionally in her new home of Lowell, Annie hit the ground running, taking souvenir and municipal photographs. She also became the guide for family migrations. A year later, she returned to West Yorkshire to accompany her husband to Lowell. In 1903, she brought her youngest sister and her four young children from West Yorkshire to Lowell. And in 1910, it seems, she guided a reverse migration. She brought her widowed, blind sister-in-law, who had come from West Yorkshire to Lowell back to West Yorkshire to live out her days with her parents.
Joseph Senior, Annie Powell's uncle, stole from the poor and abandoned his family in England, but that may have been unknown in his adopted Lowell. In this photo in the 1910 Lowell Courier-Citizen he is being honored as treasurer of the local cricket club.His theft ties to another family scandal. The money would have gone to the Crosland Moor Workhouse where Annie's father-in-law William Powell was a resident. An interesting question is why the Powell family did not pay to release William from the English equivalent of a poor farm.
By the time the West Yorkshire overseers of the poor fund met to retrieve money Joseph Senior stole, he was ten days safe in Lowell. His theft, for which he saw no consequences, was equivalent to $22,000 in today's dollars. This is from the HuddersfieldEvening Post June 19, 1891.
In June, 1891, Annie Powell likely either took or had this photo taken of herself for the family she left behind in West Yorkshire. A photo historian in England recently shared this image with us. After we identified it using facial recognition software, he donated it to the by Annie Powell Collection, saying that was its “rightful place.”