Helen Barrell

Helen Barrell is a librarian at the University of Birmingham. She has written for magazines such as Fortean Times and Family Tree, and transcribes parish registers from Essex and Suffolk for the FreeREG project.

It was while transcribing the burial register for Wix, in Essex, where some of her ancestors lived, that Helen found a note in the margin: ‘This man was better known by an alias, “Spratty Wats”. He was poisoned with arsenic by his sister-in-law Mary May, and she was hanged for it.’ The more she read, the more Helen realised it was part of a much larger scandal, and discovered that the story of her own family crosses over with the ‘poison panic’.

Helen has her own history website and blog at www.essexandsuffolksurnames.co.uk and author website at www.helenbarrell.co.uk