Census, census and more census

Census Calendar 1911 RG 27/8

I spend a lot of time in among the census returns, to the extent that I often feel more at home in the nineteenth century than the twenty-first. And if that was true before, for the next couple of weeks you can double that.

I have already done a couple of radio interviews, and responded to some press enquiries. And as of today I have started a round of live speaking engagements. Tonight I was one of three speakers at an evening event at the British Library, to a large and appreciative audience. I had a very enjoyable evening anyway, and I was very impressed with the smoothness of the BL's organization. The pre-show tea and biscuits were exceptionally good, too.

On Saturday I am the first speaker at a Census day conference at the Institute of Local and Family History at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston. After a short break in sunny (?) Manchester, on my first day back at work at The National Archives I give the Thursday afternoon talk on...the census. I have also just been informed that the transmission date of a BBC 2 programme 'This is Britain' with Andrew Marr will be next week, Friday 25 March. I shall be watching from behind the sofa, so that I can avoid the bits where I might be on-screen. I had a lot of fun doing the filming, and Andrew Marr was very nice, but the less I appear on screen the better, so I can enjoy the rest of the show. The filming took a morning, which in my limited experience means a few minutes of actual TV. It will make my mother happy, though.

This is all part of the lead in to the real thing, the 2011 Census on Sunday 27 March. Everything you want to know about this year's census, and probably quite a lot that you don't, is on the Office for National Statistics site, but David Schneider provides some more interesting answers. Alternatively, if you want to read an opinion piece of the census, try Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph, described by the Press Association as 'irreverent', but it seems more like just plain old grumpy to me. 

Not just Chelsea Pensioners

The results of a recent Friends of The National Archives project has been added to the online Catalogue. This is good news for the genealogist, as the project was the indexing of the discharge documents of more than 20,000 soldiers, held at Kilmainham Hospital in Dublin (series WO 119). Kilmainham administered the records of these out-pensioners until 1822, after which they became the responsibility of the better-known Chelsea Hospital. Many of the men are Irish, or from Irish regiments, but you will find plenty who had no obvious connection with Ireland.

The Chelsea Pensioners' Records (series WO 97) have already been digitised and indexed on Findmypast.co.uk and eventually these Kilmainham records will be onlinethere too. In the meantime this major addition to the Catalogue will make it much easier to track down some of our soldier ancestors.

It is worth noting that there are other sources for soldiers beyond the wonderful online Chelsea Pensioners' records; they will soon be joined by a series of attestation records for the militia 1806-1915 (series WO 96). There is also another set of discharge documents of Chelsea Pensioners (series WO 121), much of which has also been indexed in the Catalogue, again by the Friends of The National Archives, and the records are on microfilm at Kew. This is well worth a look if you fail to find someone in the WO 97 records. This is where I found one of my own ancestors, William Charlton, who fought in the Peninsular War. He was a private in the 74th (Highland) Regiment of Foot and was pensioned following the battle of Fuentes D'Onoro in 1811, where he received a gunshot wound to the jaw. If, like me, you are a fan of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe books, Sharpe's Battle is the one that describes this particularly bloody episode.

WO 121/126

These early records don't give as much information as some later ones, but I was still able to find out quite a bit about him. The document itself told me his age and birthplace, that his former trade was labourer, and gave a physical description; he had black hair, dark eyes. and I was surprised to find how tall he was, 5 feet 11 inches. Once I had found him in the pension records, knowing his regiment and dates of service meant that I could look in the regimental muster book for December 1806 when he joined the regiment. This gave me his exact date of birth, 2 November 1786, and showed that he had enlisted at Dumbarton. The muster also showed the height of all the recruits, and of the 35 men on the page, only two men were taller than William.

So thanks to these military records I know that my Irish ancestor from two centuries ago arrived in Scotland, where he spent his life after the army, before he joined up. I have some idea what he looked like, and I even know his exact date and place of birth, where the parish records didn't start  until much later. Not a bad result for an Irishman.

Fearless Females: tragic deaths

The more I study my family history, the more I find women making their way in the world without men. Some of them were widows for a number of years - not all that surprising, since women generally live longer than men. Some of them had husbands who must have been around at the conception of their children, but don't seem to be around for much of the rest of the time, and a couple never married but produced children anyway. But the one that touched me most when I found out about her was my great-great grandmother, Jane Hanavan.

She came from Ireland, and she married twice. Her first husband, Michael McDonough, was a soldier, in the 3rd Regiment of Foot, the East Kent Regiment, known as the Buffs. He was also Irish, possibly from County Clare. During this first marriage, Jane followed her husband's regiment and gave birth to their four children in County Clare, Dover, Limerick and 'England' in that order. When her youngest child was only two years old, Michael died, not heroically in battle, but, like many soldiers, of the entirely unglamorous cause of dysentery. I have yet to work out how she made her way to Dublin where she married her second husband, my great-great grandfather Thomas Cross less than a year later, presumably with the four young children in tow.

Thomas was from County Tyrone, but the family settled in Glasgow, where Jane gave birth to four more children. She would have been on her own with the children for much of the time, since Thomas was a merchant seaman, and was away a great deal. He certainly was never at home with them in any census - although I am now counting the days until the Scottish 1911 Census is released to see if he was at home then. Poor Jane gave birth to her seventh child, a son called Thomas, in 1889, but the poor little mite died of acute bronchitis when he was only nine days old. She registered both the birth and the death herself, so it is possible that Thomas never even saw the son who was named after him.  A year later she had another son, William, who died of scarlatina when he was four. By now Jane was in her forties (I don't know her exact age) and had suffered the loss of a husband and two sons. You'd think this was enough tragedy for one person, but fate hadn't finished with her yet.

Navy Memorial at Plymouth Hoe.
Thomas Cross is commemorated there

Widowhood might be considered an occupational hazard when you are married to a soldier, but when you are in your 60s and married to a civilian, you do not expect to become a war widow. But this is just what happened to Jane. During the First World War, Thomas was among the crew of a merchant ship, the Ermine, that was commandeered by the Royal Navy as a fleet messenger, and in 1917 the ship was torpedoed and sank, with the loss of most of the crew, including Thomas. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jane died two years later, of a cerebral haemorrhage, but the family said she died of a broken heart. This last bereavement must have been just too much for her. Her granddaughter, who is still alive, never knew her, but was told by her mother that Jane was never the same after Thomas' death. She said that they had to watch her carefully at night, otherwise she would go and stand at the street corner in her nightdress, waiting for her Tommy to come home.  

Census anniversary - today

On this day in 1801 the first British census was taken. Although it wasn't the snapshot in time that the census became from 1841 onwards, so the actual day wasn't all that significant. Still, everyone needs a birthday, even a census. The picture above is from a religious magazine 'The Fireside' in 1901, to illustrate an article marking the census centenary. Unfortunately the artist seemed to be under the impression that householders filled in schedules in 1801, which they didn't, but it's quite a sweet picture all the same.

Moving swiftly on to the present day, the Census is in the news and in the media. The Guardian published a short feature this week on William Farr as part of the coverage of a new exhibition at the British Library Census and Society: why everyone counts. The exhibition runs until the end of May, and is worth a look if you are near the Library (and it's FREE). There is an evening event on Monday 14 March in the British Library Conference Centre 'Broken down by Age Sex and Religion: the History of the Census in Britain' where I will be one of the speakers. Despite that, they tell me that ticket sales have been very good.

I have another two census-related speaking engagements this month; on Saturday 19 March I shall be at the Institute of Local and Family History day conference on the Census at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, and back at base at The National Archives, I shall be giving the Thursday afternoon talk on 24 March. I know I'm a bit of a nerd on the subject of the census, but it's just fascinating, and there's always something new to find. I've been looking at the census almost on a daily basis for twenty-something years, and I have never tired of it. It's not just me, is it?

Manorial Documents Register - Shropshire now online



Acton Burnell manor house, Shropshire      


Few people consider using manorial records while researching their English and Welsh ancestry, but you’d be surprised how useful they can be. One of the difficulties can be that they are not always easy to track down – they can be held a long way from the place they relate to, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find them, you just need to know how.

When I first began doing family history research, to track down manorial documents I had to go the National Register of Archives building, discreetly tucked away in Quality Court, Chancery Lane in London. This was the same street that housed part of the Public Record Office, but at that time there was no other connection between these two organisations. In 2003 they combined to form The National Archives, and both are now entirely based at Kew.

The first thing you had to do was identify the manor that you wanted, which might or might not have the same name as the parish where your ancestors lived. If it did have the same name, it didn’t have the same boundaries, and there might be a number of manors connected with the parish. You had to ask for the parish books, which were lovely chunky little volumes, arranged by county, that listed all the manors relating to each parish. Once you knew the manor or manors you were dealing with, you needed another set of books, the manor books, which told you what records survived for each manor, and where they were held. Some of them were roughly where you might expect them to be, and others were in places you might never think of looking. For example, most of the manorial records for Chesham, where I live, are in the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, or in record offices in the neighbouring counties of Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire. But if you are interested in Andover, Hampshire, you’ll find plenty of records in the Hampshire Archives, or Winchester College Archives, but also a sizeable number at Magdalen College, Oxford, which is not the first place you’d look for Hampshire records! There are even some documents here at The National Archives, and one set which isn’t in a record office at all, but is in private hands.

Nowadays this part of the process is a little easier, because the chunky little books have been microfilmed, and are on open access here in The National Archives, Kew. For some counties, including the whole of Wales, you can even do the search online, although for the really interesting bit, looking at the actual records, you still have to go to a record office in person. The latest county to be added to the online Manorial Documents Register is Shropshire, so this might open up some new possibilities for research if you have a connection with that county. I don’t, but I wish I did, because it’s a lovely place to visit.

If you want to know what you might find in manorial records, and why they might be useful to you, there is a useful Research Signpost on the subject, with links to more in-depth information.