Memories of the Probate Service - Somerset House

The recent news about the move of the Probate Service searchroom from First Avenue House, with little advance publicity, set me thinking about how things have changed over the years. When I started researching, back in the 1980s, the Probate Search Room was in Somerset House, where it had been for nearly a century. The room, like the rest of the building, was a handsome one, and apart from the introduction of electric light seemed to have changed little during that time. Many of the index books, called 'calendars' were in shelved in free-standing bookcases with a lectern on top, as in the picture above, which actually illustrates the earlier searchroom at Doctor's Commons. The rest were in bookcases around the room, mostly without lecterns or handy shelving, although there were some tables. The most recent indexes were on microfiche, and as I recall there were never enough microfiche readers.

The books were large and heavy, but unlike the birth, marriage and death indexes, did not have handles on the spines, so they were prone to damage from mis-handling. When you found an entry for a will you wanted, you had to decide whether you wanted to read it, or order a copy, then fill in a form and pay the appropriate fee. This was more complicated than it sounds. As well as the form, you had to take the book to the desk for checking, and you could take two at a time - although carrying more than two would have been no mean feat! It cost 25p to read a will, or 25p a page for a copy. Either way, you then had to wait until the will was brought up for you to read, or a note of the number of pages if you wanted a copy to be posted to you. You would hear names being called out as each item arrived, and if you were lucky you'd work out fairly quickly that they called out the testator's name, not your name, or you might have a long wait.

The fun(?) part was paying the fee. You had to go down the corridor to the cashier, and it was a good idea to have the right money, because the cashiers never seemed to have any change. Except during the lunch hour, when the cashier's office was closed and you had to go down a different corridor and up two floors to another cashier who didn't have any change either. They never quite fixed the cashier problem, but the pricing did become simpler, when the price of copies was fixed at 75p, regardless of the number of pages.

Somerset House's days were numbered as a home for the Probate Search Room, though, because it simply wasn't big enough any more. It wasn't just crowded with probate searchers, it also shared the building with the Divorce Registry, which was desperately short of meeting rooms where the parties could confer with their lawyers just before a court appearance. On one memorable occasion I had to step over a barrister, in robe and wig, who was sitting on the stairs with his client as I made my way up to the cashier's office.

The good old days? I don't think so (apart from the price, of course). So the whole operation left Somerset House and moved up to First Avenue House, but that's another story.

 

Mappy Monday - working at Somerset House

In the census you occasionally come across a description page for an enumeration district like the one above in 1851, which includes a sketch map of the district as well as a list of the streets it contains. I found this one while I was working on one of my pet projects, the story of the people who worked for the General Register Office at Somerset House. 

I have been able to find some of these men in the census, and where I could identify them on a modern map of London I have plotted them using Google Maps. I created a map which I have called General Register Office staff. Each marker represents a member of staff in a particular census year, and its tab shows the man's name, the census year, his address and his post in the GRO at that time.

The markers are also colour-coded 1851  red, 1861 - blue, 1871 - pale blue, 1881 - yellow. It's an ongoing project, so not all census years are included yet, and I also need to do more work to locate some addresses where the street names have changed, or where the streets have disappeared altogether. 

I found the census map particularly interesting because the one of the streets shown, Chapel Street, was the home of the Registrar General at the time, George Graham.  

Happy birthday, Civil Registration in England and Wales

Somerset House in 1834

The 175th anniversary of Civil Registration in England and Wales was actually Sunday 1 July, so this a bit late. On Sunday I managed to achieve the remarkable feat of staying in a Melbourne hotel with no wi-fi! Well, the way I see it, you had six weeks to register a birth, so a couple of days' delay in marking this birth shouldn't incur a fine either.

I thought this would be as good a time as any to say something about the early days, and throw in a few lesser-known facts. for one thing, the familiar certificate layout and information could have been very different; for example, the cause of death on death certificates was only added at a very late stage of the passage of the registration bill though parliament. It is also interesting to note that the statistical side of the GRO, which became so dominant, was not part of the original plan at all. Thomas Lister, the first Registrar General, planned three divisions for his new department, records, accounts and correspondence. It was not until 1838 that he asked for someone to abstract the causes of death. Another proposed amendment in 1836 was that the details collected on birth registrations should not include the child's name! We can count ourselves lucky that this one was defeated, I think.

I have collected a lot of information about the staff of the GRO, including all kinds of personal anecdotes, as well as the official record of their service. One of the earliest employees engaged was James Rose, the office keeper. He resigned abruptly in 1843 when the new Registrar General, George Graham, discovered that he had been claiming large sums of money for postage expenses, but only a fraction of the amount was actually being used for postage purposes. He was not prosecuted, to Graham's annoyance, as the ever cautious Treasury Solicitor was not confident that there was enough solid evidence. Mr Rose is believed to have fled to Australia. An odd little footnote to this tale is that one of the witnesses to the will of the first Registrar General, Thomas Lister, who died in 1842, was James Rose. The same man?

If, like me, you are interested in the background to registration (there may be one of you out there, for all I know) there are some essays on the subject on the wonderful HISTPOP site, along with all kinds of other wonderful resources. Happy reading

 

Workaday Wednesday - the men behind the indexes

From Cassell's New Penny Magazine 1899

Everyone who researches family history in England and Wales between 1837 and the present day uses the General Register Office (GRO) indexes. Nowadays we usually access them online, in database format, but they started out as bound volumes of hand-written parchment pages back in the 1830s. They were compiled by an army of clerks, and in case you were wondering, they were all male until well into the 20th century. Oddly enough, there were female registrars of births and deaths as early as the 1870s, but that's a tale for another day.

When the GRO was set up in 1836, many of the staff were recruited from Grosvenor and Chater, a firm of law stationers who also operated as a kind of employment agency providing clerical staff. The senior clerks were always part of the civil service establishment, however. The clerks who prepared the indexes were part of the Record Branch, while others worked in the Statistical, Correspondence or Accounts Branches. The Record Branch clerks who prepared the indexes were divided into transcribers, sorters and indexers. The transcribers copied the names and references from birth, marriage and death entries onto slips that were then sorted by (guess who) the sorters. The details from the sorted slips were then written up on parchment pages by the indexers. These were bound into volumes, most of which were still in daily use in the Public Search Room until 2007. The transcribers and indexers were paid according to the number of entries they completed, known as 'task work', but their work was checked, and if it was not satisfactory they had to do it again. The indexers could even have money docked from their wages for the parchment they had wasted - it was expensive stuff, after all, at 1/- per skin. 

Marriage index December quarter 1865

On some of the original pages you can see, in pencil, the names of the indexer and of the senior clerk who checked his work. In the example above you can see the name 'Beddoes' in the top left corner and 'checked T Davies'. There were records clerks called John Beddoes and Thomas Davies on the staff of the GRO at that time. I know this because I have compiled a database of nearly 400 people who worked at the GRO in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Sad but true. From 1866 the system changed when the indexes were sent off site to be printed, and the transcribers and sorters were re-classified as 'index compilers'. 

From the beginning the GRO had more work that it could cope with, and the Registrar General frequently asked the Treasury for more staff, or at least for more money to pay overtime to the existing staff. The work was monotonous and the hours were long, often six days a week, and the clerks were not well paid. In the 1840s and 1850s in particular there were many instances of GRO clerks with serious money problems, appearing in the bankruptcy courts or even being imprisoned for debt. Running the GRO can't have been easy, and in 1870 the Registrar General, George Graham, had this to say:

'In some offices where there is occasionally a sudden temporary influx of work requiring speedy attention I know the system of writers supplied by Law Stationers who, as middlemen, abstract a large share of the poor writers' hard earnings in payment for the Law Stationers' patronage: I am also acquainted with the system of employing boys from 13 to 16 years of age at very low wages and then discharging them ; but I do not approve of either system in established government offices. I have had great experience of temporary clerks and boys in a temporary office; having had under my control 105 temporary clerks, 37 of whom were not 20 years old.

If temporary clerks and writers and boys are on day pay, they may be placed at desks; but no amount of supervision can obtain from all of them a good day's work. They know that the more work they execute in a day, the sooner their temporary employment will cease and they will be again turned adrift; therefore it is their interest to do as little work as possible'.

So next time you search the indexes by pressing a few keys and jiggling the mouse a bit, spare a thought for the GRO clerks a century and more ago who made it possible.

 

Those places Thursday - Collins Illustrated Guide to London

This is one of my favourite books, and one of my best bargains - it cost me £4.50 more than ten years ago. It contains some good illustrations, which I always like to see, and some gems of information for the tourist in the 1890s (the book isn't dated, but from the contents I have inferred that it must have been published around then).

Descriptions of the main tourist attractions make up most of the book, but there are sections on transport, including fares, suggestions for daily itineraries, and numerous appendices. These list hotels, lodgings, restaurants, picture galleries, theatres, music halls, concert rooms, billiard rooms, chess rooms and other places of interest.

There is also a long list of public baths, and the addresses of the embassies and consulates of various foreign countries, and the rates of exchange between their currencies and the £ Sterling. A dollar was worth 4s 2d, the equivalent of nearly $5 to the £ (if only!). The dollar in question could be from the US, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Chile, Peru or the West Indies, they were all worth the same.

The frontispiece is this general view of Westminster, showing the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey, but most of the illustrations inside are of individual buildings or monuments. Most of the attractions listed are still popular with visitors today, like the British Museum, Kew Gardens the National Gallery and the great cathedrals. Others have disappeared, notably the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, destroyed by fire in the 1930s, while others still exist, but no longer fulfil their original function, such as Covent Garden market and the Record Office. This last is one of two entries that may be of interest to the genealogist:

'The search rooms are open from 10 to 4, on Saturday from 10 to 2, every week-day, except Christmas-day to New Years-day inclusive, Good Friday and the following day, Easter Monday and Tuesday, Whit Monday and Tuesday, the Queen's Birthday and Coronation-day, and days appointed for public fasts and thanksgivings. Every visitor must write his name and address in a book kept for that purpose.'

The other place of interest is Somerset House:

'In Somerset House are several Government Offices, among which is the Registrar-General's department, where are recorded all the births, deaths and marriages that occur in the kingdom. These may be searched over any period not exceeding five years on payment of a fee of 1s, and a certified copy of any entry supplied for an extra fee of 2s 7d. The collection of wills has been removed hither from Doctors' Commons any one of which may be perused on payment of a fee of 1s.'

Smithfield Market

 

'Funny Names' in the New Penny Magazine 1899

I found this little gem of an article in an issue of  'The New Penny Magazine', published by Cassells & Company.   It continues: 

There is, indeed, a good deal of humour in the Somerset House registry, the fun consisting in an odd or barbarous collocation of names. For hours the eye of the clerk will roam over reams of dull propriety in such names as Henry Wilson, George Williams, or Samuel Smith, and then the face of the clerk will be covered with a smile as he comes across 'Ether' for the front name, attached to the surname of 'Spray'. It may seem strange, but is certainly true, that entered in the books is 'foot-bath', which must be written in capitals, 'FOOT-BATH' as really the name of a fellow-creature. 'River Jordan' is another case in point...Mr Anthistle had a daughter to name, and he must be forgiven for giving her the Christian names 'Rose Shamrock'. 'Rose Shamrock Anthistle' is a young lady whose names must please any patriotic man. Another happy father who gave his innocent offspring the names 'Arthur Wellesley Wellington Waterloo Cox' behaved rather unfairly to the infant, as he pledged him to a career of greatness. 

I couldn't resist searching FreeBMD to see if these were genuine, and indeed they were. A little poetic licence was in play in the case of the first, where the only example I found was Rose Foot Bath, born in 1840 and married in 1863, whose surname was Bath, and Foot was her middle name, with no hyphen. The others all checked out OK, though, and there were even TWO young ladies called Rose Shamrock Anthistle, both of whom found favour with patriotic young men - well they both got married, at least!

Mappy Monday - London, a birds-eye view

This map comes from the Pocket Atlas of London 1896, one of the many old books lining the walls of my house (and very good insulation they are, too). I published a reprinted version of this atlas some years ago, but because of the cost, it was in black and white. The level of detail is amazing, considering that the original is only about 12cm high and 18cm wide. It does look better in colour, though.

This is an enlarged view of the centre part of the map showing, among other famous landmarks, Somerset House. This was the home of various public offices over the years, but is probably best known as the home of the General Register Office, which left there in 1974. Today it houses a museum, and the unlovely car park in the courtyard has been replaced by fountains in summer, and an ice rink in winter

Somerset House in 2010