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.

Tracing Your Ancestors' Childhood reviews

 'Sue Wilkes has produced a very detailed book on how to trace your ancestors’ childhood...The book is divided into two parts. The first is in chapters, each dealing with issues that might affect a child’s life; e.g. The Poor Law, Growing up at Work, Education and, very topically, Children in Wartime. This detailed book will help to provide a broad brush picture of life for your ancestors as children in a particular period. The second part of the book is a Research Guide which lists many of those Archives and Repositories. It lists useful addresses, twelve pages of web-sites (some free!), Education Sources and more, under helpful group headings...definitely one for your bookshelf to dip into now and in the future as a reference source'. Ann Gynes, FFHS, December 2013. 

'Over the years, many books have described how children and young people lived in the past. Many others have  shown us technically how to trace the lives of our ancestors of one sort or another.  This book does both, pulling off the now fashionable - and, it must be said, deeply satisfying - meshing of the two genres of social history and genealogy with aplomb.
While Wilkes helpfully begins by recapping on the basic genealogical sources (censuses, certificates and parish records), these soon take an almost subsidiary place among a panoply of other illuminating records from the archives. From cradle rolls and vaccination records, to school exemption certificates, apprenticeship books and records of transportation, 19th and 20th century sources for the study of childhood and youth seem endless...
The eight chapters of part one, themed around different aspects of social history, are vibrantly written, peppered with examples and 'case studies' of real youngsters who grin or grimace briefly at us from the records.
The second half of the book is an unrivalled resource pack for the family historian on the location and accessibility of relevant archives and repositories, as well as list of useful websites, addresses and places to visit...
While child mortality is obviously discussed, the emphasis here is on the way young people of the past survived and triumphed over their varied early experiences, to the point where they grew up and were able to become our ancestors'.  Ruth A. Symes, Who Do You Think You Are?, November 2013.

When Did Your Ancestor Leave School?

The school leaving age in the UK has changed to 17 years; there's more info here.  The age when your ancestor was allowed to leave school and start work was critical for working-class families if they were on the breadline, because then young people could earn a full week's wage for the family. Boys from more affluent homes could go on to university if their parents could afford it; it was not until the late 1870s that the first women were permitted to study for a degree.

If you are trying to trace your ancestor's childhood, then it's a good idea to check what the school leaving age was at the date you are interested in, because that will determine whether you should look for school records such as registers, or employment records, e.g. wage books.

But there may be a period of overlap because children who reached a set educational standard were allowed to work part-time, and you may find school exemption certificates (above) amongst family papers or in local archives.

You may be surprised how young your ancestor was when they began full-time work; the 1918 Education Act raised the school leaving age from 12 to 14.  As late as 1861, although the minimum age of starting work in a coal mine was nominally age twelve, ten- to twelve-year-old lads were permitted to work underground if they had a school certificate to prove that they had reached a sufficiently high standard of literacy.

Images:

Section of a school exemption certificate dated 4 April 1894 permitting a Manchester schoolchild to work one day per week. 

Girl with slate and schoolbook.  Early twentieth century postcard.  Author’s collection.

Collier’s phthisis. A Manchester doctor’s sketch of ‘black lung’ from a 65 year old collier. Reports of the Factory Inspectors, 31 October 1871.

Growing Up at Work

If you search through the censuses for your ancestors , you may be surprised at how early youngsters were expected to work, compared with the present day. When my great-grandfather, William Kirkwood Dickman, was fourteen years old, he was a coach-painter’s apprentice in Gorton (1871 census). According to later censuses, when he grew up he continued working as a railway coach painter, and his death certificate in 1931 gives his occupation as railway coach painter.

Another ancestor, my great-great-grandfather Arthur Lomas, born in Alstonefield, Staffordshire, was a child silk worker – a ‘silk picker’ - he cleaned loose fibres from the warp threads for the weaver. Arthur, aged 12 at the time of the 1881 census, lived in Leek with his parents. He was a ‘half-timer’, i.e. he went to school for half a day, and worked the rest of the day.

Some of my other Lancashire ancestors worked in the county's famous industries, cotton and coal mining. My great-grandmother, Sarah Jane Pickvance, was a ‘sheet weaver’ at Farnworth when she was fifteen years old in 1881. In the same year, my great-grandfather John Richard Tudge (who later married Sarah) was a coal miner in Little Hulton; he was fifteen years old, too.

John was lucky to be born later in the century; the the 1842 Children's Employment Commissioners found children as young as five working in Lancashire pits. The 1842 Mines Act banned boys under ten, and all females, from mine work.

Images from the author’s collection:

A Spitalfields weaver weaving silk by hand in the 1880s. Engraving, unknown artist, Cassell’s Family Magazine, 1883.

A disused miners’ cage (lift) at Astley Green Colliery Museum.

This early twentieth century postcard shows a cotton weaving shed and a Lancashire lass in her holiday finery.

Tracing Your Ancestors’ Childhood

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve just signed a new book contract for Pen & Sword! In Tracing Your Ancestors’ Childhood, I’ll be exploring the history of childhood and education in England and Wales, and discussing relevant records and archives for family historians. I’ll be looking at your ancestors’ childhood experiences at home, school, work, and in institutions such as workhouses for the period from 1750-1950. This handy reference guide will include court records, charities, wartime children, and child emigrants to the USA, Australia and Canada.
I’ll update this blog when more information becomes available about a release date.
Photo: The author growing up in Salford in the 1960s. Author’s collection.

Birmingham Children's Lives

I recently discovered a very interesting new blog about children's lives, a project by Birmingham Archives and Heritage. The blog has historical photos of children and images of documents which give an insight into their lives such as school logbooks, so do take a look if you are interested in exploring your ancestors' childhood records. 

Birmingham was home to the metal trades, such as the manufacture of steel pens. The two biggest factories were Joseph Gillott & Co. and Hinks,Wells & Co. In the 1860s, conditions in Gillott's factory were clean, and few children under thirteen were employed, but at Hinks's works like Jack Parden worked in rags because the vitriol  used to clean the steel strips for the pens splashed onto their clothes. The boys often cut their hands on the metal strips.

I hope to have some exciting news for you soon, so keep checking back for updates! 

Image: Rolling steel for pens at Hinks, Wells & Co., Birmingham. Some of the boy helpers were as young as nine years old. Illustrated London News, 22 February 1851.