Tracing Your Regency-Era Ancestors

My latest feature for the new-look Your Family History magazine (April issue) explores the wealth of Georgian records available to help you smash the pre-civil registration barrier: parish registers, poor law records, apprenticeships, Home Office papers, criminal records, militia lists, newspapers and magazines, etc. 

There's also a great review of Regency Spies, and you can also 'Meet the Author' and read an interview with yours truly!
Image: 

‘A Street Row’. Footpads and robbers were rife in Regency England. The night-watchman waves his rattle to call for help. Illustration by George and Robert Cruikshank, Life in London, John Camden Hotten, Piccadilly, 1869. 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.

Tracing Your Ancestors’ Childhood

My forthcoming book Tracing Your Ancestors’ Childhood, which will be published by Pen & Sword this September, is now available for pre-order from Amazon UK!

The first part of Tracing Your Ancestors’ Childhood and Education explores children’s experiences at home, school, work and in institutions.  In Victorian times, children and young people formed a far higher proportion of the population than the present.  In 2009, twenty per cent of the UK’s population was under sixteen years old.  In 1841, thirty-six per cent of the population of England was under fifteen.  If you could travel back in time and walk down a Victorian street or explore a factory, you would be struck by how many children and teenagers were present.  Many thousands of children lived in institutions, too: in 1840, 22,300 children aged nine to sixteen were workhouse inmates.

In my book, I discuss childhood records in detail such as poor law records, apprenticeship indentures, school registers, criminal records, wartime records, child migrant records (including evacuees), and so on. 

The second part of the book is a directory of archives and specialist repositories, and children’s societies. It includes databases of online records, useful genealogy websites, and places to visit.

Images from the author’s collection:

1920s postcard of children.

Two boys working Delarue’s envelope machine. Illustrated London News, 21 June 1851.

The Child Gangs of Castle Acre

There were over 73,000 boys aged ten to fourteen at work in the countryside in 1851. Over ten thousand girls worked as 'live-in' farm servants. Boys were not usually considered physically strong enough to do full-time jobs such as ploughing until they were about ten years old (age fifteen for girls). However, they did odd jobs such as scaring birds from the crops, or helping to glean after the harvest.  The Poor Law 'reforms'  of 1834 had resulted in a large increase in child labour in the countryside; children worked in the fields or helped with hedging and ditching at far younger ages than in former times. The restriction of parish relief meant that parents were desperate to find work for their children.
In counties such as Norfolk, a system of ‘gang labour’ grew up. It was a way of getting labour-intensive jobs such as turnip harvesting done as cheaply as possible. A farmer would pay a gang master to do the job at a fixed price. The gang master recruited workers at the lowest page possible to maximise his profit. Children as young as six worked in the gangs. Because they had to travel where the work was, they often walked miles to work, and back home again after their day’s toil. The parish of Castle Acre became notorious for its use of gang child labour.  You can find out more about the gang children and reformers' battle to stop the gangs in The Children History Forgot.
Image: Oxen pulling haycart. Unknown artist, c.1790.

Cold Comfort

The winter months were desperate times for poor families in Regency Cheshire. The wealthiest families raised subscriptions to aid the poor during particularly harsh winters, such as the one of 1819-20; nearly 5000 families in the Chester area needed help with food, fuel and bedding. If people were starving and had no jobs, they would pawn their furniture and bedding to buy food, but once those were gone, they faced real hardship. The same was true during trade depressions such as the one following the banking crash of 1825-6. Charity balls were held and soup kitchens set up to help relieve silk workers’ families in Macclesfield and Congleton.

If you were in dire need, there was the prospect of the poorhouse or workhouse. The quality of these varied hugely, but the Chester House of Industry was said by Hemingway, the historian, to be run kindly and humanely. After the new Poor Law of !834, workhouse regimes across Britain were purposely designed to be as forbidding as possible to deter applicants. Workhouse children, whose only crime was to be poor, might suffer greatly if they were ‘farmed out’ to contractors for a flat fee. The cheaper they were fed and housed, the greater the profit.

Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist told the story of a pauper orphan. You can find out more about Dickens and conditions for workhouse children in ‘Mudlarks and guttersnipes,’ my latest feature for children's magazine Aquila.

Images: Northwich Workhouse, built 1837 (now the Salt Museum). Many children under the age of 12 lived here in 1851; some were only babies. Image © Sue Wilkes.

Charles Dickens. (unknown artist) from Beeton’s Dictionary of Universal Biography (1870.) (Author’s collection.)