This book is a supplement to the only other full-length book about Great Britain's suspected greatest murderess - 'Mary Ann Cotton, her story and trial' (1973) by the late Sunderland-born Arthur Appleton. In a classic which has stood the test of time, Appleton took the conventional line that Mary Ann was as guilty as sin of most of the murders attributed to her. In this book, using newly unearthed birth and death certificates, Seaham historian Tony Whitehead, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, casts doubt on many of the earlier alleged killings, though conceding that it would have taken a jolly smart lawyer to exonerate her regarding the four corpses actually exhumed at West Auckland and subsequently found to contain high levels of arsenic. The other 17 suspected victims were never exhumed.

Follow Mary Ann's life, from its beginning at East Rainton in 1832 to its end on the scaffold in Durham prison, via four husbands (the last one bigamous) and several circuits of the north east. Her victims lie at South Hetton, Seaham, Sunderland, Walbottle and West Auckland. She is still remembered in Durham and Northumberland and is mentioned in the Guinness Book of Records because of her sex but has since been overtaken as greatest British murderer (either sex) by Lancashire's 'Doctor Death' Harold Shipman.

Contains many photographs and images of birth, marriage, and death certificates, parish register entries, and census returns associated with Mary Ann Cotton's turbulent life.

Paperback, 72 pages.

Mary Ann Cotton and her importance to the civil death registration system

Most of us have ancestors whose deaths cannot be found in the GRO indexes. We have Mary Ann Cotton to thank for the system changing in 1874.

Civil registration of births, deaths and marriages was introduced in England and Wales on July 1, 1837. It was meant to be compulsory, but a small fee was charged for each registration and the law specified no penalty for failure to register. There was no way round paying for a marriage licence if a union was to have any legal validity (although we do find cases of unregistered marriages), but many people, particularly the poor who lived some distance from the registrar's office, did not bother to register births and deaths. Why bother making a long journey to purchase a piece of paper which told you what you already knew? It was not necessary to obtain a death certificate before a corpse was disposed of - in fact the only reason to bother with a death certificate at all was if the deceased was insured and the insurance company demanded to see a death certificate before paying out. For the first few decades of the registration system, many births and deaths, possibly running into the millions, missed the official net. Then, in the autumn of 1872, a serial killer was uncovered almost by accident at West Auckland in County Durham, which obliged the authorities to have a rethink. This killer was a middle-aged woman who, in a rampage across the northeast between 1860 and 1872, may have poisoned as many as 21 people, mostly her own blood relatives, for their insurance money,

The ease with which Mary Ann Cotton (nee Robson; formerly Mowbray, Ward and Robinson) flouted the existing registration and insurance systems by constantly remarrying and changing her name and murdering with apparent impunity sufficiently disturbed the authorities such that nine months after her execution at Durham in March 1873, the fee for the registration of births and deaths was abolished (the marriage licence fee remained) and a substantial fine or imprisonment was introduced for failure to record a birth. The new penalty for not reporting a death was prison. From January 1, 1874 it also became necessary to obtain a death certificate, signed by a medic, before a funeral could proceed.

The genealogical world therefore owes a debt of gratitude to Mary Ann Cotton and her perversity. Before Mary Ann, many births and deaths went unrecorded. After Mary Ann, very few were.