Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you all have a lovely Christmas and peaceful New Year.

Image: Engraving of an ancient sculpture unearthed in Hampshire: The Offering of the Magi, Gentleman's Magazine,|January, 1824.

Regency Cheshire Talk - More Photos

I had a wonderful time at my Regency Cheshire talk on Saturday - a big 'thank you' to Lena Shiell and all the library staff who worked so hard to make the Jane Austen Christmas event so special.  Sadly the traffic was so bad that I only got a glimpse of the Regency dancers, but I did hear the choir singing beautifully.

You can see more photos from the day on my Jane Austen blog and on the Chester Library facebook page.









Images:
Chester Library staff and David Mitchell, the Chester town crier at the Jane Austen's Regency Christmas day (3 photos).
Sioned Webb, Welsh Triple Harpist.
The author preparing to give her talk.

All photos on this blog post are © Lena Shiell of Chester Library.

Schools and School Registers

My latest feature for Who Do You Think You Are? magazine focuses on school registers, which are a wonderful resource for tracing your ancestors' childhood. Until fairly recent times, parents paid for their children’s education.  Admission registers were essential so that schools could check how many children attended, their parents’ contact details, and whether school fees were up-to-date. 

Upper class children, and middle class children whose parents were well-off, were usually taught by tutors or governesses at home during their early years.  When they were about ten years old, boys went to schools like Eton and Harrow to prepare them for university. Girls like Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra were sent to a ‘honest, old-fashioned boarding school… where girls might be sent to …scramble themselves into a little education without any danger of coming back prodigies’ (Jane Austen, Emma, 1815).  Most boarding schools taught a smattering of ‘ladylike’ accomplishments rather than a good, all-round education.  Alternatively girls attended a local day school or a seminary if affordable.

Working class children (if their parents were prepared to pay for their education) attended ordinary day schools for a few pence per week, unless they obtained a charity (‘Blue Coat’) school place or a free scholarship. Thousands of poor children had no education at all, or perhaps just went to Sunday school.

Middle-class parents in straitened circumstances who did not want their children to mix with working-class children at ordinary day schools, tried to get them a place at a charity school where education was free or subsidized.

The Revd. Patrick Brontë (1777–1861) had a very limited income. He sent his four eldest daughters, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily to the Clergy Daughters’ School, Cowan Bridge after their mother Maria’s tragic death.  The fees for this school were subsidized by a charity.  The school’s regime was spartan, with poor quality food, and the two older Brontë sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, whose health was not robust, died in 1825. Charlotte later immortalized her experiences in Jane Eyre (1847). 

Some public and grammar school registers are available in large reference libraries, and free on Google Books and the Internet Archive.

Images:

A class of school girls with their teacher, postcard circa 1910.

Charlotte Brontë.

Plaque marking the location of the Oliver Whitby (Blue Coat School), Chichester.  © Sue Wilkes.

Kindertransport Live

A new play looking at the experiences of child evacuees during WWII is being performed at theatres and railway stations across the UK.  The Kindertransport was a mission to help rescue children fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe.  You can find out more about the play and the history behind the play's story here; tour dates are here.

If your ancestor was a child evacuee in England and Wales, my new book Tracing Your Ancestors' Childhood includes sources for evacuees.

Chester Library Talk: Regency Cheshire

Just a reminder that I'll be giving a talk at Chester Library on 30 November from 2-3pm as part of the library's 'Jane Austen's Regency Christmas' fun day. I'll be reading extracts from my book Regency Cheshire, and I will have some books to sell which you can buy on the day.
However, if you've already bought one of my books (or prefer to buy a copy online first), if you bring it with you, I'll be happy to sign it after the talk.
There are details on how to buy a ticket for the event here.
Image: Eastgate St, Chester, in the 1820s. 

Narrow Windows, Narrow Lives on Kindle!

My book 'Narrow Windows, Narrow Lives: The Industrial Revolution in Lancashire', published by The History Press, is now out on Kindle! 
 

Photo © Sue Wilkes: 

India Mill, Darwen.

Jane Austen's Portrait For Sale

You can read the story here on my Jane Austen blog.

Cheshire Soulcakers

The quiet Cheshire villages of Antrobus and Comberbach have their own very special celebrations for All Hallows’ Eve - the Soul-cakers - a tradition dating back hundreds of years.

The Soul-cakers, or Soul Gangs, tour local pubs with their ancient Mummers' Play and its star performer, the supernatural Wild Horse.  Country folk in Cheshire and parts of Derbyshire once believed their ancestors’ souls could return to the family fireside at this time; they made special ‘soul-cakes’ as offerings to appease the family spirits.

The tradition differed from village to village.  Before WWI, around Malpas, Tarporley and Frodsham, children and adults marched from house to house, singing traditional ‘soul-caking’ songs in return for small, spicy ‘soul-cakes’ (similar to parkin cake).   

‘Soul a soul a soul cake

Please good missus, a soul cake...’                                                                                                                                   

In other villages, ‘Mummers’ plays were performed by the Soul-cakers, going from house to house.  Afterwards they passed the hat round for a collection - and some soul-cakes.

Over forty Cheshire villages are thought to have had versions of the play, but the Great War proved disastrous for the tradition; so many men never returned. Luckily Major Arnold Boyd, a Cheshire naturalist and author in the 1920s, was interested in the play.  Major Boyd wrote down the words, called a ‘nominy,’ which had been passed down through the generations, and helped the play survive. 

The Play has many unusual characters, for example, the Letter-in, Black Prince, King George, the Quack Doctor, and ‘Dick’ the Wild Horse and his Driver, resplendent in Cheshire Hunt livery. All the parts, played by men, are thought to represent the souls of the dead.

Wild Horse’s head is a horse’s skull, with its jaws wired so it can ‘snap’ its teeth alarmingly at the audience, and is worked by a man covered with a blanket.  His legs form the horse’s back legs, and a short pole supports the skull at the horse’s front end. 

Nowadays, the Soul-cakers play in local pubs, beginning on Hallowe’en, instead of house to house. The Antrobus Soul-cakers have raised hundreds of pounds for charity over the years. The plays have enjoyed a revival in other Cheshire towns and villages like Chester, Comberbach, Alderley, and Mobberley.  You can search for forthcoming events here on the Master Mummers Directory.

Image © Sue Wilkes: the Comberbach Mummers performing in 2000, with ‘Wild Horse’. 
'Riding a Mumming'. From J. Brand, Popular Antiquities, London, 1841. 

Baby Days

The new royal baby, Prince George, will be baptised on Wednesday 23 September at the Chapel Royal in St James's Palace. Although your ancestors are unlikely to have made their first public appearance in a blaze of publicity and media attention like the young prince, your ancestors' parents may have placed a birth notice in a local or national newspaper.

Publications such as the Gentleman's Magazine printed birth, marriage and death notices for the middle classes, gentry and aristocracy. Magazines like these can be very useful for tracing ancestors before civil registration was introduced, and before census records were kept.

However, the name of a person's wife and child is rarely given in old newspapers (see this example from the Gentleman's Magazine, below left): just the child's gender is usually mentioned. 

Local record offices and archives keep copies of old newspapers, but it can be very time-consuming to search through these unless you know an approximate birth date already.  However, you can now search many old newspapers online at websites like the British Newspaper Archive and Welsh Newspapers . 

Baptisms were recorded in parish registers (local record offices) from 1538 onwards, and many local family history societies have transcribed parish registers. Familysearch and FreeReg are both useful free websites for searching for baptismal records, too.  Remember that baptisms may have taken place several months or even years after they were born (one of my ancestor's children was baptised at Manchester Cathedral seven years after her birth!)

You can order birth certificates for children born after 1837 (when civil registration was introduced) from the General Register Office or local register offices (the latters' indexes are the most accurate).  There's a list of sites offering access to the General Register Office indexes here, and some local indexes are listed at UK BMD.  Children born in institutions like hospitals and workhouses were recorded in registers of births, too.

And of course, there's lots more info on how to find out more about your ancestor's baby days in Tracing Your Ancestors' Childhood.

Images:
Undated photo postcard of a child and baby. Author's collection.
Gentleman's Magazine, December 1827, Vol. XCVII, Part 2, Author's collection.