Audrey Collins | The National Archives blog

Posts by Audrey Collins

My job is Records Specialist - Family History in the Advice and Records Knowledge department. I worked as a freelance researcher for 15 years before joining The National Archives in 2002, and I have written extensively on family history subjects. I have also spoken at conferences and events both at home and overseas, and my research interests include the history and development of the General Register Office, retail history and the researching newspapers and periodicals. In recent years I have become particularly interested in the application of technology and the use of online resources in genealogy.

Mon Jun

2013

Armed forces birth, marriage and death records

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

Sample RAF baptism certificate from AIR 82/1

Sample baptism certificate used by RAF chaplains from AIR 82/1

If you need a copy of a birth, marriage or death certificate issued in the United Kingdom, you need to apply to the General Register Office for England and Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, as appropriate. Before civil registration began the main sources of information on these vital events are parish registers, usually held in local archives.

Many family historians will find all the entries that they ever need in one or other of these sets of records. So you might not think that The National Archives will have much to offer in this area. In fact, we have a surprisingly large number of records relating to births, marriages and deaths, in a variety of record series. They include many registers of baptisms, banns and burials, as well as births, marriages and deaths. There are thousands of files, and most of them fall into four main categories:

Nonconformist and non-parochial registers, mainly from the 18thand early 19thcenturies, handed in to the Registrar General of England and Wales.
Registers from British consulates, legations and embassies, found among the records of the Foreign Office.
Records of births and deaths on merchant vessels at sea, reported to the Board of Trade.
Records created or collected by the various armed services.

This last category is in many ways the most interesting, for a number of reasons. For sheer variety it is hard to beat with a date range of more than 300 years and entries from all over the world and, unlike most of the others, new items are still being added to the collection. The earliest record in the collection is a baptism register from Sheerness Dockyard, starting in 1688.

Mon May

2013

Who needs to read fiction?

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

I don’t read a lot of fiction. I don’t need to, because some of the real stories I have come across in documents held in The National Archives are just as exciting and dramatic as any novel.

The first page of Mr Prickett's petition to the Home Secretary

HO 45/7900 Registration of births, etc: Fraudulent abstraction of a leaf from the registers for St Pancras Parish: baptism of Elizabeth Laura Keeling

A catalogue search for ‘fraud’ turned up an item of Home Office correspondence entitled ‘Registration of births, etc: Fraudulent abstraction of a leaf from the registers for St Pancras Parish: baptism of Elizabeth Laura Keeling’ dated 1866-1867 HO 45/7900. I thought there must be an interesting story behind this incident, so I ordered the file, which turned out to be a long letter of complaint to the Home Secretary from Mr Prickett of Bridlington. He gave a lengthy account of how Captain George Boynton had come to marry Mr Prickett’s daughter, Elizabeth Ann, very much against her parents’ wishes.

George Hebblethwaite Lutton Boynton was one of the youngest of the 13 children of Sir Henry, the 9th Baronet Boynton, and his wife Mary. This was a wealthy family, but since George had three older brothers he was not going to inherit the title, the money or the family home, Burton Agnes Hall. He must have decided at an early age that his best chance of making money would be to marry it. This is exactly what he did, having found himself a young heiress, Elizabeth Laura Keeling. Her father died in 1832 when she was a baby, leaving his substantial fortune to her, his only child. Not only that, he left it to her outright; under the law at that time a married woman had no separate legal existence from her husband, so that if she Elizabeth Laura married, all of her property would now belong to her husband. She was only 17 when she and George were married by licence at St George Hanover Square.

Mon Apr

2013

Censuses compared

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

1940 Census indexing Just over a year ago the 1940 census of the United States was released, causing much excitement and activity in the genealogical community there. Unlike recent census releases in the UK, it did not arrive fully indexed, but as soon as the census images were made public a massive crowd-sourcing project got underway to create name indexes. This is no mean feat since that census contains over 132 million names. The project was jointly undertaken by FamilySearch and by two commercial companies, findmypast.com and Archives.com with batches being allocated to volunteer transcribers and moderators using FamilySearch indexing software. The enthusiasm of the volunteers exceeded expectations, and the whole project was completed ahead of schedule within a few months. Quite independently of this, two other companies, Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com, also compiled their own indexes.

I indexed a few batches myself, because I thought it was a worthwhile project, but also because I have an interest in American records. My own ancestry is all Scottish and Irish so far, but learning about American records is useful to me because I keep finding distant relatives whose families migrated there in the 19th and 20th centuries, and I have an American daughter-in-law. It’s also relevant to the day job, since many Americans have British or Irish roots, and when I am answering their research enquiries on British records it helps to know a little about the kind of records they are used to.

Nationwide or federal censuses have been taken in the USA every ten years since 1790. In Great Britain there has been a census every ten years since 1801, with the exception of 1941, and in Ireland every ten years from 1821 to 1911. There was no Irish census in 1921 because of the Troubles, but a census was taken in 1926 in both the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. There is a lot more US census to look at, and not just because it is a much bigger country. There are lists of names all the way back to 1790, albeit names of heads of households only before 1850, while in Great Britain no name lists at all were collected centrally until 1841 (although some lists from 1801 to 1831 do survive in local archives). But there is also a great deal of extra census material in the USA, including state censuses, often taken half-way between the federal censuses. There are also ‘Non-population’ returns for some years, recording details about agriculture and manufacturing.

Wed Jan

2013

It’s not the document, it’s the information

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

Researchers spend a lot of time looking for documents. In fact, they may spend more time on this than on reading what they have found. It took me more than 20 years to find my great-grandfather’s birth certificate, but only a few minutes to read it once I had tracked it down. Not that I spent every waking minute of those 20 years in hot pursuit, but I did devote many hours to the problem during that time. It took quite a bit of creative thinking and the use of some less than obvious record sources to get there, but I made it in the end, and felt very pleased with myself as a result. The fact that the answer to one question presented me with another bigger, and so far unresolved, problem is neither here nor there.

Many kinds of research lend themselves to the use of standard sources which provide the essential information in most cases. Genealogists in particular use various birth, marriage and death records, census returns and probate records to work their way back through the generations. This works fairly well much of the time, but when you can’t find the marriage or the census entry you want then you become stuck. But when the direct approach doesn’t work there may be another way. Think about it; when you say that you need to find a death certificate, or a census entry, what you really mean is that you need the information that you would expect to find in that document, rather than the piece of paper itself. So if your search is unsuccessful, think about the specific information you want, and then consider whether you might be able to find it from another source. Sometimes you will find that there is more information in the alternative source than you would have found in your first choice.

PCC Will of Colin McKenzie 1808, en route from Jamaica to England

Fri Dec

2012

My Tommy’s War: Thomas Cross, merchant seaman

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

My First World War Tommy was not in the army, or any of the armed services, but he was called Tommy, and he died for his country. His name was Thomas Cross, and I know a great deal about his death, but very little about his life, except that he was my great-great grandfather. He has no birth certificate, because he was born in Ireland before the start of civil registration there, and although the birth certificates of his children give the date and place of his marriage to my great-great-grandmother, there is no trace of that in Irish civil registration either. He only appears in one census, 1911, because he was a merchant seaman, and was away at sea for all the others.

Medal card BT 351/1

Like many other merchant seamen he was caught up in the war, and when he died in 1917 he was around 52 years old, older than most men in the fighting forces. His ship, the Ermine, had been commandeered by the Royal Navy as a Fleet Messenger, and sank in August 1917. Continue reading »

Mon Nov

2012

Missing from the census?

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

All family historians use the census, and most of us find most of what we want, most of the time. This is of course due to the fact that every census for England and Wales has been indexed; sometimes you even have a number of versions to choose from, so if you don’t find a person on one website, you might find them on another. Where the handwriting is hard to read, it all comes down to interpretation.

But sometimes, despite your best efforts, a person or a family stubbornly refuses to be found. You might even have tried searching for them ‘the old-fashioned way’. That is, searching by address, assuming you have some indication of where they were living at the time of the census, and that they either lived in a village or there is a street index for their town. That was the usual way of finding someone in the census until just over a decade ago.

If you have exhausted all the possibilities of using name indexes, including possible mis-spellings and mis-transcriptions, you are left with a dwindling number of possibilities, which fall into three catagories:

They are there, you just can’t see them
They are missing from the census altogether
They are, or rather were, in the census but in a part of it that has since gone missing Continue reading »

Fri Oct

2012

The National Archives of…where, exactly?

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

People sometimes comment on the fact that we are called ‘The National Archives’ and not ‘The National Archives of…’ If you look at the Who we are page of our website you will see that ‘The National Archives is the official archive and publisher for the UK government, and for England and Wales.’ Or, to put it another way, some of our records cover only England and Wales, and some cover the whole of the United Kingdom. So far, so good, but then you have to remember that the United Kingdom has changed over time; it came into existence until 1707, with the Union of the English and Scottish parliaments, to which Ireland was added in 1801. Most of Ireland gained its independence under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, and forms of devolved government were established in Scotland and Wales in 1999 with the re-introduction of a Scottish Parliament and the new Welsh Assembly.

For a student of history this is interesting – I was interested enough to take a course called ‘Territory and Power in the UK’ in my final year at university – but it’s also important for a genealogist to know about the history of the United Kingdom and its constituent parts. Two of those constituent parts, Scotland and Northern Ireland, also have their own national archive bodies, the National Records of Scotland (NRS) and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI); Wales has been entirely under the control of England and its legal system since 1282 and does not have a national archive, but it does have the National Library of Wales.

Frederick James Allison from the Registry of Seamen in BT 350

If you have English ancestry you need to work out which records are held locally in county record offices, and which records are here in The National Archives, but if you are researching Welsh, Scottish or Irish families you might also need to work out which national repository you need to consult. People researching their Irish ancestry are often particularly surprised to discover just how many Irish records we hold here, and yet The National Archives rarely features in lists of major resources or websites for Irish research.

The Irish Diaspora is particularly large, since Ireland once had a large population but which dropped dramatically from the 1840s onwards, mostly due to emigration. In 1841 there were 8.2 million people in Ireland, compared to England’s 15.9 million, but by 1911 this had fallen to 4.4 million while England’s population had more than doubled to 36.1 million. As a result, there are far more people outside Ireland with Irish ancestry than there are in Ireland. They may not be aware, at least to start with, that Ireland was part of the UK during the time period they are researching. I have no such excuse, having lived in the UK all my life, but I didn’t realise just how much we had until I started gathering material for a talk on Irish records in The National Archives, which I first delivered about 8 years ago.

Mon Sep

2012

260 years of double-dating

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

September 1752 was a very short month. In fact, it was 11 days shorter than the average September, to bring the United Kingdom into line with most of the rest of Europe. In fact, there were three separate calendars in use in 18^th century Europe; Catholic states had generally adopted the new (and astronomically more accurate) Gregorian calendar in place of the Julian calendar the 16^th century, Protestant states took it up in the 18^th century while the Orthodox Christian countries of Russia, Greece and the Balkan states did not come into line until the early 20^th century.

This can lead to misunderstandings over dates in historical documents, especially before September 1752. In that year, 2 September was immediately followed by 14 September, which must have caused some difficulty for anyone for whom one of the ‘missing’ days had some significance, like a birthday or a legal contract. As well as the loss of 11 days to bring the days into line with those countries already using the Gregorian calendar, the other major change adopted was that the start of the year was now 1 January, and not 25 March, or Lady Day.

Independent chapel Wrentham, Suffolk: baptism register

If you look at early church registers of baptisms, marriages and burials you can easily see when the new year begins, as in this example from the baptism register of the Independent chapel at Wrentham, Suffolk. But if you see a reference just to a single entry dated between 1 January and 24 March, perhaps on a family tree, it might not be obvious whether the date is exactly as it appears in the register, or has been adjusted to conform with the Gregorian calendar. This is where the ‘double-dating’ comes in. To avoid any ambiguity, the correct way to express one of these dates is in the format ‘20 March 1698/99’. This register also provides an interesting example of ‘double-dating’ at the bottom of the page, in acknowledgement of the fact that there was an alternative system of dating in existence.

From 14 September onwards dating is a much simpler business, but there was still scope for confusion. Countries where Orthodox Christianity prevailed continued to use their own calendar for much longer, so dates of events taking place in those countries need to be treated with care. Registers of British consulates and churches in those countries habitually used both dates for events registered there, such as this entry from the register of the British consulate in St Petersburg recording the death of Henry Thornley, who died on 19 or 31 March 1872. Continue reading »

Mon Aug

2012

A singular name

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

‘A Somerset House clerk once declared that the tedium of his labour on the registry of births and deaths is often relieved by coming across a humorous juxtaposition of names…then the face of the clerk will be covered with a smile.’

A General Register Office clerk at Somerset House

So began an article in Cassell’s New Penny Magazine in 1899. For ‘Somerset house clerk’ you could substitute anyone who works with lists of names on a daily basis. This has been my lot for most of my working life, first in customer accounts for a major department store, then as a professional genealogist and now as part of my job here at The National Archives.

One of the things that we do when we are not on public duty is cataloguing, and I recently joined the team working on the School Admission Records among the papers of the Royal Greenwich Hospital in series ADM 73. These are interesting records in themselves, often containing copies of birth, baptism and marriage certificates, service details and correspondence. But, as in the case of the man at Somerset House, this clerk’s face was covered with a smile on discovering the best name I have seen in a long time – Singular Onion Gallehawk. I had to read it a couple of times to be sure I wasn’t mistaken, but the writing was very clear.

Naturally, I had to find out more. On applying for a place in the school for their child, parents were asked for the names of any other children they had, which told me that John James Gallehawk, a customs officer, and his wife Effield had named their other children Cassandra, Lorenzo, Arthur, Olive and Hamilton. Since the children were born in the 1840s and 1850s I easily found the index entry for the parents’ marriage on FreeBMD which revealed that Effield’s maiden surname was Onion, which at least explains young Singular’s middle name. As forenames go, Singular is extremely rare, but not unique – or, if you prefer, not strictly ‘singular’ at all. According to FreeBMD, which is close to being a complete record of all birth, marriage and death entries in England and Wales from 1837 until about the Second World War, there were six people with Singular as a first or middle name, one of them being Edward Singular Onion. Searches of worldwide databases FamilySearch.org (free) and Ancestry.com (a subscription site) reveal a few more instances of the name, but not many. Within England and Wales, the name appears almost exclusively in Kent, Essex, London and the south coast. People (of both sexes) bearing his mother’s forename, Effield, are a little more numerous, but are still rare. It is more common as a surname, concentrated in the Lincolnshire area.

Wed Jul

2012

Distress in the cotton districts 1863

Posted by Audrey Collins in Records and research

Spinning mules from Chambers' 'Information for the People' 1856

A century and a half ago, the American Civil War was well under way, and its devastating consequences for that country are well-known. But the conflict had serious repercussions on this side of the Atlantic, too. The cotton industry in north west England was dependent on supplies of raw cotton from the southern states, and when this supply was interrupted there was real hardship in some places.

This led to the fear of civil disturbances in some towns, including Hyde in Cheshire, where the authorities were sufficiently concerned to swear in a number of special constables to keep the peace. This document (Ref HO 45/7523) comes from the treasure trove that is Home Office Registered Papers 1839-1979, series containing more than 26,000 boxes and files.

Authors