Shopping Saturday - my favourite piece of retail ephemera

My mother was going to throw this out. Fortunately I was around to rescue it. and now it lives in my sitting room where I can look at it every day. It's a painted plywood box that was used to store reels of sewing cotton in a draper's shop in the 1950s, and my mother acquired it when the shop was modernising or re-fitting, as far as I remember, about 50 years ago.

The top and three sides all have the distinctive Sylko thread logo, which also appeared on the cotton reels themselves, and these were visible to the customer in the shop. You can't see the drawers on the other side, not just because of the angle I chose for the photograph but because, sadly, they are long gone, although the runners are still there. Each drawer held several rows of reels of cotton, with cardboard dividers separating the rows. Mum used it to keep her buttons, needles and other sewing bits and pieces, including of course some cotton reels. I used to love this little chest of drawers, and I remember playing with it when I was small. It came with us through 7 house moves, and at some point the drawers went AWOL, I have no idea when. It hasn't been needed as a sewing box for a long time, because Mum's arthritis means she can't sew any more - not that she was big fan of sewing, she sewed on buttons, mended and even made clothes because she had to, not because she wanted to. Remember when you used to be able to save money by making your own clothes? Knitting was much more her thing.

 Here's a close-up view of the logo, although I'm pretty sure we didn't call them logos in the 50s. I like the fact that the box is rather shabby, and that the colours have mellowed a little with age. The box doesn't fulfill any practical purpose these days, it just sits on my sideboard. I keep my buttons and sewing gear in a big layered basket.

Writing this set me thinking about the old wooden cotton reels that were sold from boxes like this. I think I may have a few of them tucked away somewhere, and they are so much better than the plastic ones you get now. Once the thread had been used you could use them to make all kinds of interesting things; you could hammer three or four nails into one end of a wooden cotton reel and and turn it into a 'Knitting Nancy' for making long woollen cords. You could pile them up like building blocks, or turn them into dolls house furniture, or crude wheeled toys - I seem to remember something that involved matchsticks and twisted rubber bands as some kind of propulsion  system. Lightweight plastic just isn't the same.

 

This week's census release

RG14/4135 SN194 'Delicate health'

This week is much less exciting than I thought it would be, and that's a good thing. If you had asked me, or many other British genealogists, about five years ago, we would have said that we were eagerly looking forward to the once-in-a-decade release of a new census in January 2012.

The first working day in January in the year ending in 2 has for many decades been census release day for England and Wales, Scotland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, with a bigger fanfare every time. This week we have seen the unveiling on Findmypast.co.uk of the details in the 'Infirmities' column in the 1911 census for England, Wales, Channel Islands, Isle of Man, the British Army overseas and some shipping. And that's it. This is because the 1911 census for England etc was released early following a request under the Freedom of Information act. The infirmities column was redacted until now, in accordance with the Information Commissioner's ruling at the time. The Scottish 1911 census not included in this release, since Scotland has its own Freedom of Information Act which would not allow its early release. However, instead of waiting for the customary January opening, the census was opened on the anniversary of the census itself, in April. 2011.

OK, the earlier than usual release dates mean a correspondingly longer wait for the release of the 1921 census - the 1920 Census Act which governed all future censuses is, apparently, much less open to interpretation than its predecessors, so there is much less chance that it will be released early. But there are so many exciting developments in the world of genealogy, and so many more to come in the next few years that I don't mind too much. The availability of online records on a massive scale means that we're not going to run out of new toys to play with anytime soon.

I have been researching my family history since the 1980s, so 1911 was the third census release I have witnessed, and they have all been very different. Some time before the release of the 1891 census the Public Record Office (PRO) had relocated the Census Reading Room from the abomination that was the Land Registry building in nearby Portugal Street to the newly refurbished basement of its Chancery Lane building. This was much more spacious and pleasant to work in than the old location, but there were still long queues every day in those early weeks of 1992. The census room staff (or at least some of them) dressed in period costume on the actual release day, which was quite a sight. Back in those days a new census release meant that you could view it on microfilm or microfiche. Place indexes, and street indexes for large towns, had been prepared in advance, but there were no name indexes until family history societies and other groups had time to compile them after the public release. In the meantime, we had to do all our searching the hard way, by location or address, and hoping that your people were there.

The next census release was very different. By January 2002 the PRO had vacated the Chancery Lane building and the census rooms were now part of the Family Records Centre in Islington. The census was released there as before, but on microfiche only, not film. Of course, what most people remember about that particular census is the all-singing, all-dancing digitised and indexed online version that, er, didn't quite work perfectly to start with. I had already tested the site, as a member of the advisory panel, under conditions of absolute confidentiality. It was the first time that any name-indexing had been done before a census release. The embargo on disclosing information before the official release date was taken very seriously by all concerned, I can assure you. When the 1901 site was finally up and working a few months later it was the first step on the path to a completely new way of searching the census that we now take for granted. We've come a long way in ten years.

Been there, done that, got the T-shirts

By the time of the early release of the 1911 census, the Family Records Centre was no more, and the Public Record Office had joined with the Historical Manuscripts Commission to become The National Archives with all its operations based at Kew. I had also joined the staff of the Family Records Centre in late 2002. Unlike a normal census release, 1911 did not arrive fully-formed, but was issued in phases, county by county. Because of the anticipated heavy demand, a special area was set aside in our reading rooms, and readers had to book one-hour time slots on the terminals there so that everyone could get their fair share. The reading rooms were transformed overnight, including smart new signage. My favourite part was the trail of stick-on footprints leading people to the 1911 area; you'd be amazed how many people tried to follow them step for step, like King Wenceslas' page! There were a few hiccups, but on the whole the system worked well, and after a few months when the initial rush had subsided the fledgling 1911 could be released into the wild and made available on all the public terminals.

I haven't forgotten Scotland - how could I! When I began researching in the 1980s Scotland was a decade ahead of England, because the 1891 census was already open there, although I had to travel a few hundred miles to Edinburgh to see it. So the first Scottish census I saw released was 1901 (my maternal grandparents were in that one, but I had to wait until last year for the paternal set, a pair of 20th century babes).

The so-called 'hundred year rule' doesn't really apply to Ireland, because so much of the 19th century Irish census was destroyed that 1901 and 1911 were opened way ahead of time, as a kind of consolation prize - at least in the Republic of Ireland. For a long time you could access the 1911 census for the six counties of Northern Ireland in Dublin, but not in Belfast. How wonderfully Irish.

Looking ahead, 1921 is next, except for Ireland, where no census was taken that year, although there are moves in the Republic to open the 1926 census early. After 1921 there is a long wait for the next England and Wales census, because the 1931 returns were destroyed by fire during the Second World War and no census was taken in 1941 because of the war. The Scottish returns for 1931 survived intact so, if spared, I look forward to seeing my father and a few aunts and uncles in it in 2031 or 2032.

 

Those Places Thursday - it's not where you think it is

Place names are full of trip-wires, booby-traps and assorted other traps for the unwary. You need to know this if you are going to get anywhere with your genealogy. It helps if you look at maps and gazetteers as well as records.

Over the years I have discovered all kinds of ways that place-names can conspire to be misleading, and I have fallen foul of a few of them myself. When I started researching in English genealogical records I thought I had a pretty good basic grasp of the geography, but I quickly discovered that I didn't know as much as I thought I did.

The first major lesson that I learnt was about registration districts; these are the first administrative units you come across when you start researching an English or Welsh family in the 19th or 20th centuries, and their names are not always as you would expect. They don't always correspond to modern place-names, or even historic ones. For example, if you know that your family came from Manchester, you might expect their births, marriages and deaths to be registered in the district called Manchester. And so  they might, but they could also be found in the registration districts of Ashton-under-Lyne, Barton-on Irwell or Chorlton. It's much the same for Liverpool; your Liverpudlian ancestors are as likely to have been born, married or died in the registration districts of Toxteth Park or West Derby as in Liverpool itself; note that West Derby has nothing to do with Derby, which is two counties away!

Similarly, England's second biggest city, Birmingham, also has three registration districts; Aston, Birmingham and King's Norton. But while Manchester and Liverpool are contained within a single county - Lancashire - Birmingham sprawls across three of them. Most of it is in Warwickshire, but there are parts of the city in Staffordshire and Worcestershire too.

And then we come to London. That's a whole subject in itself, but as far as registration districts are concerned there are LOTS of them, and most of them don't contain the word 'London'. One that does is West London, but it is part of the ancient City of London, and is nowhere near places like Ealing or Hammersmith, which are what most people would regard as West London nowadays. As for the county or counties that London is in, well, that could be Middlesex, but might be Surrey, Kent or Essex depending on the time period. Or the county of London itself, which came into existence in 1889.

Another way that place names can trip you up is when there are two or more places with the same name, particularly where one of them is large and well-known. For example most people have heard of Luton, a major town in Bedfordshire, but far fewer know of the Luton which is part of Chatham in Kent. This could trip you up if someone gave it as their birthplace in the census, even if they gave the information accurately. I have seen examples where the birthplace was 'corrected' by the enumerator or a census clerk, because they thought they knew better. I spent some time going in the wrong direction because my great-grandmother's birthplace, correctly written as 'Bona' which is part of Inverness, had been crossed out and changed to 'Boness and Linlithgow' by a census clerk. He must have thought that the silly woman had made a mess of filling in the census paper, and perhaps he had never heard of Bona, but he did know of Bowness in Midlothian. It's quite an assumption to make a chnge like that, but I doubt if he was unique.

And the moral of this story is...you really need to get to know the geography. I've mentioned it before, but it always bears repeating, the online England Jurisdictions 1851 which is part of FamilySearch is absolutely invaluable. There is nothing quite like it, unfortunately, for Wales or Scotland, but there is still A Vision of Britain Through Time

 

Mappy Monday - Strange Maps

This is an interesting site if you like maps that are a little out of the ordinary. It was the most recent post the Underwritten States of America that caught my eye, but there are lots of other intriguing links in the 'Recent posts' section. I particularly like the Alphabet Maps of Great Britain and Ireland

You can also search the blog archive of more that 500 posts, or browse back, post by post. There are a number of comments attached to each post, and these can make interesting reading too. For example, one on the Underwritten States of America page suggests that it is for the purposes of life insurance, rather than health insurance, which I am inclined to agree with.

 

2012 - It's going to be a Dickens of a year

At the hairdresser's - Nicholas Nickleby

You can take your pick of anniversaries to celebrate in any given year, but I think my favourite for this year will be the bi-centenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. I went to school in Chatham, which is very much Dickens country, and quite honestly you can get a bit over-Dickensed there; to this day I have an aversion to David Copperfield, one of his most popular books, having been dragged unwillingly through it at a tender age. It actually took twenty years after that for me to read Dickens without being forced to, but we get along just fine now, Charlie and me. I decided to give 'Great Expectations' a try, and I loved it.

You might wonder what works of fiction have to do with family history, and the answer is - quite a lot, as it happens. One of the reasons I think I found Dickens rather heavy going first time round was having to read the whole book in one go. That's not how Dickens' eager Victorian audience read them; the stories came out in instalments, often ending on a cliffhanger so that the next would be all the more eagerly anticipated. Since each section would be about the same length, sometimes they would go off at an apparent tangent so that the story would reach exactly the right stage on its last page. These little diversions might have little relevance to the plot, but are a goldmine of information on everyday life in Victorian England. For example, the picture above illustrates a visit to the hairdresser in Martin Chuzzlewit.

It was not exactly a hair-dresser's; that is to say, people of a coarse and vulgar turn of mind might have called it a barber's, for they not only cut and curled ladies elegantly and children carefully, but shaved gentlemen easily. Still it was a highly genteel establishment, - quite first-rate in fact, - and there were displayed in the window, beside other elegances, waxen busts of a light lady and a dark gentleman which were the admiration of the whole neigbourhood. Indeed, some ladies had gone so far as to assert that the dark gentleman was actually a portrait of the spirited young proprietor, and the great similarity between their head-dresses - both wore very glossy hair with a narrow walk straight down the middle, and a profusion of flat circular curls on both sides - encouraged the idea.'

You don't get that sort of detail in a dictionary of occupations. This is just one of many examples of passages in Dickens' novels that shed light on occupations in early Victorian England. I picked it because I happen to have an illustrated edition of Martin Chuzzlewit, but there are plenty more. And there are insights into other aspects of Victorian life and society. The stories may be pure fiction (and we can leave the question of Dickens' attitude to women and his female characters for another time) but they are set in a very real world. And if you have English ancestors it's a world you should be interested in.

Dickens didn't just write fiction, although that's what we remember him for. He wrote a number of non-fiction, mainly travel, books, and he was also a journalist, contributing to and editing a number of journals throughout his career. They make interesting reading, and there some extracts I will write about during the year. In the meantime, for some genuine practical genealogy here is a copy of the entry in the parish register of St Luke Chelsea recording the marriage of Charles John Huffam Dickens to Catherine Thomson Hogarth in 1836, and for a pre-1836 marriage it's more informative than most.

Happy new year.