A sneaky peek at the new 'Start here' desk

This will only be exclusive for a few hours after posting, but here it is anyway. This is what visitors to The National Archives will see when we open tomorrow, Tuesday 30 November. Regular visitors and followers of the website will know that there have been some changes over the last few weeks, and they will continue for the rest of the year. Every Saturday when we close at 5pm the contractors come in to install/move/paint things, and this continues on Sunday and Monday, while we are closed to the public. Every Monday the staff go and look at the search room to see what has changed, so that it doesn't come as a total surprise when we report for duty first thing on Tuesday (those who have Mondays off just have to get their orientation done really quickly first thing, and home the day starts gently while they get their bearings!).

The Start Here area is the closest to completion so far, with a soft seating area and some magazines.Some of the new signage is in place, and the new layout is starting to take shape. Because the work is being done a little at a time over the weekends, some things can't be moved to their final positions yet, so they are temporarily a little out of place; the cabinet containing the printed Research Guides is currently stranded on the wrong side of a glass panel, causing staff at the Research Enquiries desk to dodge round a pillar to fetch copies to give to readers. Fortunately this won't be for much longer. The new enquiry desks have been built, although they are not ready to use yet.
 
Although the changes to the main reading rooms are going on while we are providing a normal service, the Map and Large Document Reading Room is closed until Tuesday 14 December. It is having a much-needed major refit that can't be done while remaining open, but it should be well worth the wait. Details are on The National Archives website

All the changes have involved quite a lot of work for staff, especially those who work in the Map Room (fortunately for me, I'm not one of them). But it's a good opportunity to have a good clear-out, much like moving house. That's when you discover all kinds of unexpected things; I was checking the contents of some microfiche drawers when I discovered a roll of microfilm that didn't belong there. Not only was it a film in a fiche drawer, it wasn't even one of ours! It was an LDS film, which, you'll be glad to know, is being returned to its rightful owners.
 

Royal registration rivalry



Queen Victoria   

Civil registration of births, marriages and deaths was introduced in England and Wales in 1837, the year that Queen Victoria came to the throne. When her children were born, they had to be registered like everyone else's, with the local registrar, but which one? It should be simple enough; the registrar of births and deaths for the district where the birth occurred, of course.

But the queen gave birth to her children in Buckingham Palace, so big that it was in two different registration districts. When her first child, Princess Victoria, the Princess Royal, was born on 21 November 1840, George Rawlins, the registrar of births and deaths in the Charing Cross sub-district of St Martin-in-the-Fields believed that he was entitled to register the birth. He had, however, heard that a person from outside the district had been appointed for all the royal palaces, and wrote to the Registrar General on 5 December for clarification, pointing out that a registrar was empowered by Act of Parliament to register all the births in his district, and it would take another Act to deprive him of this right.


Princess Victoria born 21 November 1840

 The Registrar General, Thomas Lister, 'caused enquiry to be made', and found that since most of Buckingham Palace was in the Belgrave sub-district of St George Hanover Square, the registrar of that sub-district was to have the honour of registering the birth of the princess. So Mr Rawlins was disappointed. (The National Archives reference HO 39/5)

Queen Victoria went on to have nine children in all, and when the fifth of them, Princess Helena, arrived in 1846, George Rawlins was no longer registrar of the Charing Cross sub-district. His successor, James Leonard, made a valiant attempt at reclaiming the registration of royal births for St Martin-in-the-Fields. He wrote to the Registrar General '...it being certified to me by the Churchwardens and other Parochial Authorities of the Parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, that the north wing of the said Palace, in which are the private apartments of Her Majesty the Queen, and wherein the birth took place, is within the Charing Cross District for registration...I did on the 26th of May present myself with my Register Book of Births at Buckingham Palace and left a written request that a time might be named to register the birth of the said Royal Infant... ' The response from the Palace was to suggest that Mr Leonard should refer to the Home Secretary for guidance, which he duly did.

The matter was once again referred to the Registrar General, Lister's successor George Graham, who confirmed the earlier decision. His records showed that the question had also been raised in 1841 and 1843 on the births of the Prince of Wales and of Princess Alice, by both parishes, and that plans of Buckingham Palace and boundary maps had been consulted. George Graham wrote 'I am of the opinion that the same course should again now be pursued;...and to inform the Registrar of Births and Deaths for the Charing Cross District...that his services will not be required' (The National Archives reference HO 45/1424)

There and back

Robert and Mary Donaldson

One of the great things about records going online is the new things that you find. OK, that's pretty obvious, but I don't just mean the things you are actively looking for, like waiting patiently for an new census release to get an elusive ancestor's birthplace. It's the unexpected finds that are the most fun, the things that you wouldn't even have considered looking for.

My favourite find was when I did a 'hit and hope' kind of speculative search and got much more than I bargained for. The people in the picture are my grandfather's grandparents, and I knew a lot about them. They were born in the 1830s and lived well into their 80s. They had eight children, and I have plenty of birth, marriage and death certitificates, parish register entries and census returns for the family. They moved around a lot, but always in the counties of Fife and Forfar, much as you might expect of farm workers. Two of their sons, including my great-grandfather, moved west and settled in Glasgow, and I used to think that this picture was of a sweet old couple who stayed behind in the countryside while their more adventurous offspring moved on. I was wrong.

Like most genealogists I am interested in tracing forwards to see what happened to the siblings of my ancestors, and I had accounted for some members of the Donaldson family in Scottish records, but not all of them. Donaldson is not exactly a rare name, but one of their sons, Robert, had the distinctive middle name of Robertson, so in a fit of optimism I put his full name into Ancestry.com as an exact search, and got a result in the US World War I Draft Registration Cards, with his exact birthdate, giving his resdience as Marshall, Minnesota. I wasn't entirely surprised to find that he had emigrated, but when I investigated further and looked for him in the US census, I was amazed to find that his parents were with him!  I then found that they had sailed from Glasgow to New York in 1888 on SS Devonia, with his younger brother James. I have the death certificates of Robert snr and Mary in 1919 and 1920 respectively in Inverkeilor, Forfar, so it had never occurred to me that they might have left the country, although I hadn't been able to find them in the 1891 or 1901 censuses. In 1902 Robert and Mary returned to Glasgow on the Laurentian, and as far as I know this was the end of their travels.

So the sweet old couple that I assumed had never ventured beyond two counties in the east of Scotland turn out to have spent 13 years farming in Minnesota! Robert stayed on in Marshall, where he died in 1946, and was a veterinary surgeon. He became a US citizen, and married his wife Jean, another Scots-born immigrant, in around 1912. They don't appear to have had any children, so I probably don't have any distant cousins in Minnesota. His younger brother James also stayed in America, but I hold out no hopes for any cousins there either, because the last sight I have of him is as a 54-year-old newlywed in the 1930 census.

This shows the benefit of looking for collateral lines, which can bring the unexpected bonus of extra information about your direct ancestors; but now that so many records are easily searchable, particularly passenger lists, I'm sure I'm not the only person with emigrant ancestors they never suspected of being emigrants at all. Perhaps you can't find the death of an ancestor who seems to vanish after their children have grown up and married, because they emigrated with another son or daughter and their family. I also have a couple of those, and I can't believe that my family is all that unusual, so maybe it's worth looking at passenger lists, or doing the kind of entirely unscientific search I described at the start of this post. You never know what you might uncover.

Mappy Monday - the Valuation Office Survey 'Lloyd George's Domesday'

Part of central Oxford, featuring Broad Street

We have an anazing collection of maps at The National Archives, and one of my favourites is the set that goes with the Valuation Office Survey, taken shortly before the First World War. The field books that were compiled for this survey are the most wonderful source for house histories, and to identify the right field book, you need first to use annotated versions of Ordnance Survey maps, and this is generally the trickiest part of the operation. This has been made a little easier by the Valuation Office map finder being tried out on the The National Archives Labs site.

I was doing some research on Oxford, and in particular Broad Street, one of the streets featured in my post Those Places Thursday - Oxford so I used the map finder to locate the field book that included Blackwell's Bookshop and found it in document reference IR 58/64883 It shows details of the property including the owner, in this case B H Blackwell.

The description of the property shows the type of construction, number and size of rooms, and what they are used for, as well as services like gas, water and electricity and the general state of repair. Unfortunately the person who wrote up this field book had fairly horrible handwriting, but with some perseverance you can make out that it describes it as a 'mixed lot' with some lath and plaster construction, and a number of store rooms for books - quite recognisable to anyone who visits Blackwell's in Broad Street today!

Sometimes the field book includes a small sketch map or plan of the property, but unfotunately there isn't one for Blackwell's. There is one for the Coach and Horses public house next door, on the corner of Broad Street and Parks Road. The pub no longer exists, and its site is now part of Blackwell's

Follow Friday - The Workhouse

Now celebrating 10 years online, The Workhouse is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the Poor Law. That is pretty much anyone researching in England, Wales, Scotland or Ireland. Even if none of your ancestors were not among the poor (lucky you, lucky them) they will have been involved in its operation. Workhouse masters, medical staff, contractors, Guardians of the Poor and a host of clerical staff can be found in the records. And even those not directly concerned in the administration were ratepayers.

The site is an astonishing achievement, as is largely the work of one man, Peter Higginbottom. He has not only researched and written the content of the site, he has photographed many of the buildings too. There are countless maps, pictures and old photographs too.

This is not the place to look for lists of names, although there are some; it is where you will find out how the poor were looked after - or not - back through the centuries. It's also a great way to find out what records exist, and where you can find them. I keep returning to the site because there is always something new to discover.