Subscription services
There are plenty of subscription sites, each specialising in different areas. The most useful for genealogists are www.ancestry.co.uk and www.findmypast.co.uk, both with frequently updated information, so check frequently for what’s new. Collections depend on which subscription service you use. Both have directories such as Pigot’s and electoral registers. The Genealogist www.thegenealogist.co.uk has tithe records plus some transcriptions of parish registers and is good for Nonconformist sources.
Origins www.origins.net is useful for London research, London apprentice abstracts and wills pre-1858 but, by the time of publication, may be subsumed into FindMyPast. Other genealogical sites include www.parishchest.com, www.parishregister.com, www.genesreunited.co.uk, www.deceasedonline.com and www.myheritage.com. The SoG and many libraries subscribe to many sites, giving free access.
Free services
Free genealogical sites are www.freebmd.org.uk and its sister site www.freecen.org.uk, aiming to give access to the 1841–91 censuses; www.ukbmd.org.uk offers locally created indexes for birth, marriage and death as well as access to Online Parish Clerks www.ukbmd.org.uk/online_parish_clerk and www.freereg.org.uk with indexes and transcriptions of parish registers. The Society of Genealogists is at www.sog.org.uk (although you must be a member to use some online services) and http://forebears.co.uk is a good portal for other sites. Don’t forget Family Search at https://familysearch.org/search/collection/igi.
Through collaboration between the Open University and the Universities of Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, www.oldbaileyonline.org is a fully searchable free database for all trials held at London Central Criminal Courts from 1674 to 1913. Be aware that, although trials were held in London, people gravitated to the capital, such as former button maker, Elias Smith from Ludlow, condemned for horse stealing in 1686.
You must register for the free forum to post genealogical questions at British Genealogy www.british-genealogy.com. Rootsweb occupations mailing list is at www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~jfuller/gen_mail_occ.html. There is a timeline of dates and resources, such as Ecclesiastical and Assize Courts, compiled by genealogist Roy Stockdill, at www.british-genealogy.com/resources-and-guides/seminal-dates.php.
www.histpop.org, based at Essex University, has online access to the census reports (not enumerators’ books) for Britain and Ireland from 1801 to 1937. It is an in-depth view of the economy and society of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and has a breakdown of the numbers of people working in different occupations from the 1831 censuses onwards. Although of no biographical use, this site has useful links to all genealogical databases, both subscription and free.
www.genuki.org.uk is another useful free search engine e.g. search ‘goldsmiths’ and find sources throughout the country. It gives addresses and contact details for county record offices.
Ruskin Avenue, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, TW9 4DU. Tel: 020 8876 3444, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk and http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk.
In 2014, with hopes for completion by 2016, A2A morphed into Discovery to access all possible archives from one portal and identify all sources into one integrated catalogue. Guides to the Poor Law can be found on www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/research-guides/poor-laws.htm with a link to a recommended book list for finding countywide records. Their research guides are particularly helpful and can be found online. The London Family History Centre run by the Church of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) is, at the time of writing, based at the National Archives but looking for a new home.
2 Titanic Boulevard, Belfast, BT3 9HQ. Tel: 0289 053 4800, www.proni.gov.uk, email: proni@dcalni.gov.uk.
2 Princes Street, Edinburgh, EH1 3YY. Tel: 0131 535 1314, www.nas.gov.uk, email: enquiries@nas.gov.uk.
www.british-history.ac.uk is a valuable website run by the University of London and the History of Parliament Trust. It can be searched by region, name, urban and metropolitan districts and is a fascinating view into archives and records. A huge amount is free but not all and, at the time of writing, subscription was a reasonable £30 per annum. The University of London’s www.history.ac.uk is involved in the Rollco Project (see Chapter 2) and the history of London and other cities. The BBC gives a flavour to Victorian middle class, society and industry at www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians.
Free www.cyndislist.com/uk is a world wide database and may be useful if your ancestors migrated.
Some Kelly’s (after Frederic Festus Kelly, d.1883), Pigot’s, Post Office and telephone directories have been digitised (FindMyPast and Ancestry). Your library and record office may have local directories which are, of course, viewable for free. Check what is available before visiting. The University of Leicester has digitised some directories, found free online at http://specialcollections.le.ac.uk/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16445coll4 (formerly www.historicaldirectories.org) and these include, for instance: Kelly’s Directory for Staffordshire 1896; the Post Office Directory for Birmingham, Staffordshire and Worcester 1850, and Peck’s Trade Directories of Birmingham 1896–97. The originals are in Birmingham Central Library. Be aware that directories have flaws; not everybody is listed (you paid to be in them, so were therefore financially secure enough to do so) and there may be mistakes insofar as they were not always updated. It is estimated that only six percent of London’s residents from the 1851 census are listed in London’s Post Office directories, usually the wealthier ones.
At Reading University www.reading.ac.uk/merl, the Museum of English Rural Life has collections and archives relating to agriculture and the rural economy. The National Museum of Rural Life, Scotland www.nms.ac.uk/our_museums/museum_of_rural_life.aspx has a supply of photographs on the Scottish Life Archive section www.nms.ac.uk/explore/collections-stories/scottish-history-and-archaeology/scottish-life-archive.
It is incredibly unlikely you will find a film of an ancestor unless they are famous, but old films are a fascinating glimpse into the past. Many can be accessed online although, should you wish to download a copy, you usually pay. Pathé News, www.britishpathe.com, whose archive is based on thrice-weekly newsreels projected at cinemas, has over 90,000 clips dating from the beginning of the twentieth century to 1970. The North West Film Archive www.nwfa.mmu.ac.uk, run by Manchester Metropolitan University Library’s Special Collections based at Manchester’s Central Library, has films of industry, work and home life of communities in North West England from the 1890s to today. By putting in a keyword on their search facility e.g. blacksmith, you can view scenes such as Irlam steelworks dated 1935, iron clog making from 1945 and Soutergate blacksmith John Coward shoeing a horse in 1946. In this case, the blacksmith is named. The BBC and ITN also have online archives often viewed for free at www.gettyimages.co.uk and www.itnsource.com/en.
14 Charterhouse Buildings, Goswell Road, London, EC1M 7BA. Tel: 020 7251 8799 – closed Sunday, Monday and Friday. Free for members, a daily rate for others. www.sog.org.uk, email: librarian@sog.org.uk.
This wiki www.gracesguide.co.uk provides historical information on manufacturing in Britain. Key your industry into the search box for information on various manufacturing companies. Additions are added daily.
Aldermanbury, London, EC2V 7HH. Tel: 020 7332 1868, email: guildhall.library@cityoflondon.gov.uk. www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/visiting-the-city/archives-and-city-history/guildhall-library/Pages/default.aspx
www.history.ac.uk/gh/18v.htm lists all the almshouse records available at Guildhall including: bakers, brewers, coopers, fishmongers, fishmongers and poulterers, grocers and haberdashers. See British History above.
Run and maintained by Roehampton University’s Centre for Hearth Tax Research, this free site www.hearthtax.org.uk gives basic information (surname, where they live and whether the person pays) for the tax introduced in England and Wales in 1662 during the reign of Charles II. Not all counties have been transcribed and the project is releasing information as they research it. Many records are in poor condition due to damp and deterioration of the ink. This particular tax was unpopular as it involved an inspection of all homes. Those too poor to pay poor rates or who owned property worth less than twenty shillings a year were exempt. The issue here is whether your family could afford or were too impoverished to pay taxes. The records are held at the National Archives in E179 with an explanation of taxation prior to 1689 on www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/research-guides/taxation-before-1689.htm.
40 Northampton Road, London, EC1R OHB. Tel: 020 7332 3820. Email ask.lma@cityoflondon.gov.uk. www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/lma, online catalogue at http://search.lma.gov.uk/opac_lma/index.htm.
You need a free history card to use the online search facility at LMA and to access original documents at the centre itself. Many records are digitised and can be accessed through www.ancestry.co.uk. The LMA computers have free access to Ancestry, digitised copies of The Times, The Daily Mirror and seventeenth to nineteenth century British Library Collections, plus other sources. It has excellent free information leaflets found online and in the centre covering a range of London research including:
• Searching for members or those apprenticed to members of City of London Companies
• City Freedom Archives
• Membership records of the Merchant Taylors’ Company
• Licensed Victuallers’ Records
• Directories of London and the Home Counties
• George Goodwin and The Builder
Sessions Papers and Middlesex Justices’ records have been digitised free to view on www.londonlives.org. There are over 3.35 million names including some biographies. Fully searchable, it provides a fascinating mirror of crime, poverty and social policy in London. By typing in ‘goldsmith’, Middlesex sessions papers (among others) appear and you can read the transcript and look via a magnifier at the original page. It is possible to search a name but with variable results. http://spitalfieldslife.com is a contemporary blog with historical photos and adverts. Old Bailey Online www.oldbaileyonline.org is a free site for the Central Criminal Court.
Enclosure maps are useful from roughly 1800 as they are large scale. Local libraries and record offices hold them together with older and more specialised maps of varied dates and scale. The Charles Close Society www.charlesclosesociety.org, founded by Ordnance Survey enthusiasts in 1980, has a useful online map-finding service giving advice on locating old maps. Key in the relevant address on www.charlesclosesociety.org/CCS-sheetfinder and see what is available.
It is possible to buy map reproductions; I bought one dated 1848 for 50p in a sale at my local library. Second-hand bookshops, charity shops, specialist shops and bookshops at museums sell them and some can be bought online from commercial companies such as www.alangodfreymaps.co.uk, www.mapseeker.co.uk, www.pastpages.co.uk, and www.old-maps.co.uk/index.html. By double-clicking on a map of the UK, it shows what map, scale and dates are available and at what cost. Some archive maps are online, although many are too small to see detail. Lee Jackson’s website www.victorianlondon.org has some maps of London. The National Library of Scotland has a variety of maps from the Reform Act of 1832 found online at http://maps.nls.uk. An 1866–67 map of Aberdeen, for instance, is on http://maps.nls.uk/townplans/aberdeen.html. Maps can be enlarged and printed from your home computer.
Charles Booth’s maps showing the poverty of London street by street is a fascinating if ghoulish reminder of London’s poverty and found online at http://booth.lse.ac.uk. The SoG has copies of the original books. The earliest 1889 Booth maps can be found online via the University of Michigan at www.umich.edu/~risotto.
For the definitive map experience, you must go to the British Library map room www.bl.uk/reshelp/bldept/maps. No maps can be removed from the library. A reader’s ticket (free) is essential.
The first daily newspaper in England was The Daily Courant (1702–35). Consisting of one sheet, it had news on the front and advertisements on the reverse. A history of newspapers, regulation and taxes www.newspapersoc.org.uk/history-of-british-newspapers is on the Newspaper Society www.newspapersoc.org.uk website.
The British Library’s superlative British Newspaper Archive, dating mainly from the nineteenth century, is currently being digitised. Newspapers already microfilmed and digitised can be viewed for free with a reader’s ticket in the St Pancras and Boston Spa reading rooms. Print copies of magazines held in Yorkshire can be viewed in the St Pancras reading rooms if ordered up forty-eight hours in advance and in a good enough condition to travel. See the website for details www.bl.uk.
Microfilms of local and regional newspapers (e.g. The Bucks Standard and The Manchester Evening News) are held at central libraries and record offices. If you know your ancestors traded in a certain town or village, look for them in the relevant papers but be prepared to scan through a lot of pages. FindMyPast has an online local British newspaper collection 1710–1953.
Several newspapers such as The Scotsman http://archive.scotsman.com, The Times www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/archive and The Guardian/Observer http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/guardian/advancedsearch.html have subscription online archives, accessible for free if your library has a subscription. Another subscription service is www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk and, again, your library may subscribe.
The London Gazette www.thegazette.co.uk has been published every weekday except Bank Holidays since 1665 and is an official public record of the British government. It is useful for bankruptcies, insolvencies, patents applications, appointments to public office and changes of name. There are Gazettes for Edinburgh, first published 1699, and Belfast from 1921.
Several occupations have their own trade magazines, such as Licensed Victuallers Guardian 1869–87, but genealogical information may be minimal.
Some commercial companies such as www.tilleys vintagemagazines.com and Ken’s Paper Collectibles www.kens.co.uk in Newport Pagnell sell original vintage magazines and other paper ephemera. The Ephemera Society might be useful www.ephemera-society.org.uk as well as http://ephemera.ning.com/group/ephemeradealers and www.pastpages.co.uk. Alternatively, search for vintage shops and postcard fairs online. As they sell what they have in stock, dealers may not have what you want.
For books, Amazon is useful as is http://books.google.com. The Gutenberg Project www.gutenberg.org and https://archive.org/details/texts have digitised some out-of-copyright books. Bizarrely, you may find British information in other countries’ national libraries and universities, such as the National Library of Australia http://trove.nla.gov.au.
The earliest recognisable photographs are William Henry Fox Talbot’s (1800–77) calotypes from the 1840s. However, in effect most are dated after the (rare) 1850s and more commonly from the 1860s. The Museum of English Rural Life has over 750,000 photographs, although you are unlikely to recognise an ancestor; most ‘sitters’ are unidentified. Photographs are catalogued by location, as is the extensive Francis Frith (1822–98) www.francisfrith.com archive, published in coffee-table style books. This site is useful for maps and books of the area. Local, county and specialist libraries have photo archives. Again, your ancestor may be named, but usually people appearing in general scenes are not recorded. Your best bet, once you know the area where your ancestors lived, is to contact the local library, family history association and county libraries and search through their records. Many libraries’ photo collections are online.
Postcard fairs are an unusual source and cards showing occupations can be pricy – up to £50 is not uncommon. Postcards of the town or village from which your ancestors originated are a pleasant trophy of a bygone age. Postcard heyday was roughly 1900 to the beginning of the First World War. Getty Images (see film) has a stills archive.
Settlement examinations from the various Poor Law Acts, which started in 1601, give information on place of birth, apprenticeships served and employment history. The SoG has extensive records. Poor Law records before 1834 are parish based and kept locally; the Archon Directory www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archon might help locate them. The Poor Law Union Gazette carried adverts for missing mothers and some editions are held at the British Library newspaper collection and via subscription at the British Newspaper Archive. www.genguide.co.uk/source/workhouse-records-poor-law-unions/53 explains workhouse records, as does the National Archives website.
The museum has some interesting articles online to give background to trade and industry. For example, www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/s/industry-power-and-social-change and www.vam.ac.uk/page/i/industrial-revolution.
This enterprise, originally started in 1898, resulted in the famous large red volumes found in virtually every record office and many libraries. There are fourteen county sets for most counties apart from Northumberland and the West Riding of Yorkshire. Paperback copies can be bought online from www.victoriacountyhistory.ac.uk and, although they give little information on crafts, you may find the local squire or important businessman referenced here. As part of the Institute of Historical Research based at London University, also responsible for British History Online, they conceived the England’s Past for Everyone (EPE) project www.victoriacountyhistory.ac.uk/publications-projects/epe which has led to the publication of books such as Simon Townley’s Henley on Thames, Town, Trade and River. Few, however, are dedicated closely to trade.
Lee Jackson’s dictionary is on www.victorianlondon.org.