£13 Million Scheme to Create New History Centres

Progress is continuing on a Cheshire Archives plan to create two new bespoke history centres, one in Chester and one in Crewe

Cheshire Archives and Local Studies is a shared service between CWAC and CEC. The £13 million scheme would see each authority contribute £4.2m with the remainder sought via a bid for a Heritage Lottery Fund grant. 

Chester's new history centre is earmarked for the site of the former Cheshire Enterprise Centre off Hoole Road which burnt down in December 2010. Crewe's history centre would be located at the 'Old Library' in the town centre. The current Cheshire Record Office off Duke Street in Chester is said to be 'no longer fit for purpose'. 

Both councils recently placed an advert seeking a quantity surveyor to implement this Local Archives project in a £90,000 contract. This follows news that National Heritage Lottery Fund gave permission to start the archives project in March 2020 with initial round one funding of £544,900.  This current development phase of the project runs for 18 months and includes:

• Developing activities to engage new audiences with archives across the county
• Drawing up detailed plans for the proposed new centres in Chester and Crewe
• Writing a delivery phase funding bid for 2021

Detailed proposals will then be considered by the Lottery Heritage Fund with a view to securing full second round funding of £4,455,100.

The centres would be climate-controlled environments to house collections, better display them and make them more interactive. Chester's would house the majority of the collections. It is described as 'a natural, logical home for the service' given the city's long history as the seat of county government. 

Ask the Experts Week 20-25th July 2020

Tune in every day to watch some of AGRA's finest bringing their expertise to bear on your family history questions

The first Family Tree Academy: Weekend Online Conference, in association with FamilySearch

24 to 26 July 2020 

The 'War' in the title relates to the Suffragists in North-East Wales who continued to meet throughout WW1, 'Peace' relates to the 1926 Peace Pilgrimage in Britain and the the ‘Women’s Institiute’ relates to the early years of the first WI in Britain at Llanfairpwll, Anglesey. 

Synopsis - 

In the early 1900's north-east Wales was a dangerous place for women - Suffragist's meetings descended into near riot, or in some cases were banned by police before they even started! 

Against this background, Llangollen Suffragists continued to meet throughout WW1. As well as working for votes for women, they actively supported two war charities: The Welsh Hospital, Netley, Southampton and Scottish Women’s Hospitals. The Welsh Hospital, funded entirely by the Welsh people for the duration of WW1. SWH, founded by Suffragist, Dr Elsie Inglis, sent nurses abroad – including Nurse Goodwin, a Llangollen Suffragist, particularly to Serbia where they endured truly horrifying conditions. Once the vote was won, many Suffragists supported the Women’s Institute and the Peace Movement. One man and his dog, Colonel Stapleton Cotton and Tinker were responsible for the foundation of the first WI in Britain at Llanfairpwll, Anglesey, in 1915 – which still meets on the third Tuesday afternoon of each month.

In 1926 2,000 women, their blue peace flags flying, descended on the little market town of Pen-y-groes near Caernarfon, at the beginning of the Peace Pilgrimage (based on the Suffragist’s 1913 Pilgrimage) to London.

The appendices for each section include fascinating minibiographies of personalities mentioned in the chapters. Some of the Anglesey WI members lives are nothing short of amazing – manning soup kitchens one day and attending Balls at Buckingham Palace the next!

Author Biography - 

Barbara Lawson-Reay was brought up on The Wirral and has lived in north Wales for nearly forty years. During her working life she had several different jobs ranging from warden of a half-way house for recovering psychiatric patients, to social secretary at a Methodist hotel taking parties up Snowdon (climbing – not on the train!) once each fortnight during the season. Since she retired twelve years ago, she has been able to pursue her interest in modern social history. She is particularly interested in the lives of ‘ordinary’ people – which often turn out to be extraordinary! She is also the author of Votes for Women, published in 2015.

Further information - 

The book has just been published by a small, local company which needs all possible support at this difficult time and costs £9.50 plus £2.50 packing and postage. It is also available from:
Gwasg Carreg Gwalch. 12 Station Yard, LLANRWST, North Wales LL26 0EH or pop along to the Gwasg Carreg Gwalch website to order  - https://carreg-gwalch.cymru/war-peace-and-the-womens-institute-2469-p.asp

I have just uploaded a list of CD's and Books for sale by post to our Document Library under Public Documents.  The CDs are on offer with 20% off, not sure about the books but assume the same discount.

Dont forget that many of our CDs are also downlaodable via our shop products for sale.

Find My Past recently added a tranche of Catholic Church Records to their Collection

Quite a lot of the older records are written in Latin - which is nowadays considered, by many people, an extinct language, but it's useful to know some basics when searching the Catholic records. So below are listed some words that crop up on a regualr basis and a 'rough' translation as a guide. There are varations according to nominative, accusative and genitive use of a noun, as well as plural and singular.  If you wish to view a more detailed and nuanced list of the translation of Latin then pop along to the FamilySearch guide [link at the bottom of this post]

Nomen ~ Name [Christain name]

Cognomen ~ Surname

Filius ~ Son

Filia ~ Daughter

Die ~ Day

Mensis ~ Month

Anno ~ Year

Biptizatus/baptizata  - Baptised [Male/Female]

Matrimonium ~ Marriage 

Sepultum est ~ Was Buried

Pater ~ Father

Mater ~ Mother

Patrinus Fuit ~ Godfather [he was godfather]

Matrina Fuit ~ Godmother [she was godmother]

https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Latin_Genealogical_Word_List

Find My Past announce details of the release of the 1921 Census

In the most anticipated family history development since the online publication of the 1939 Register, Findmypast has been selected as The National Archives’ commercial partner to make the 1921 Census of England & Wales available online.

The census, which was the first to be conducted following the introduction of the Census Act of 1920, will be published online by Findmypast in January 2022.

The project will see Findmypast capture digital images and transcribe the records in a way that will enable family historians across the globe to conduct meaningful searches of these important records when they are opened for the very first time.

Taken on 19th June 1921, the census consists of more than 28,000 bound volumes of original household returns containing detailed information on close to 38 million individuals.

It provides greater detail than any previous census as, in addition to the questions asked in 1911, the 1921 returns also asked householders to reveal their place of employment, the industry they worked in and the materials they worked with as well as their employer’s name.

The 1921 Census also included detailed questions on education, and was the first in which individual householders could submit separate confidential returns.

Those aged 15 and older were required to provide information about their marital status, including if divorced, while for those under 15 the census recorded whether both parents were alive or if either or both had died.

For more details and a comprehensive list of FAQs - see the following link - 

https://www.findmypast.co.uk/1921-census

A House Through Time ~ Series 3 ~ 10 Guinea Street

Review and Resources List 

David Olusoga’s A House Through Time, chose Bristol, a city with historic links to the slave trade, which as it has turned out recently, was a theme that resonated more that he could possibly have imagined when he first knocked on the door of No 10 Guinea Street, built in 1718 by Captain Edmund Saunders, a prolific buyer and seller of people at that time.  

The researches linked Saunders to over 40 voyages conveying 12,000 souls from their homes in Africa to slavery in the Americas. Saunders himself never lived in the house but rented it to another slave trader, Captain Joseph Smith.

• Why not take a look at the Slave Voyages database– a digital memorial that asks questions about the slave trades and offers access to the documentation available to answer such questions. Another source of information on the slave trade can be found at the British Slave-ownership database which lists slave owners. The registers of the enslaved are held by the National Archives; you can read a brief account of them on the Moving Here: UK Government Web Archive site. [The Moving Here pages are no longer maintained: see Moving Here archived pages.]

Moving on with the story of No 10 Guinea Street and a foundling baby which was left on the doorstep, Smith and his wife having refused to take her in, she died at the age of three in the doubtless negligible care of the parish. This section took us down the highways and byways of poor laws and the options available to the vulnerable in a time long before the welfare state.

• If you are interested in Foundlings, then the Foundling Museum is always a good place to start. Mothers would often leave a ‘token’ with the child and a blog by the historian John Styles on an exhibition in the museum can be read here. Of course, searching through the relevant local parish registers can sometimes turn up gold when a curate might make a comment in the margin with regards to a child being found on a doorstep or in the churchyard and then go on to mention it’s fate. Many local archives have workhouse records as well as Poor Law and Board of Guardian records, which are parish based. Many such London records are online at Ancestry.

The next owner, Tory political satirist John Shebbeare, whose main hobbyhorses were the ‘national ruin’ brought about by the Hanoverian kings and the general uselessness of women, famously saying ‘The best I ever knew is not worth the worst man’ and about his own wife in particular, ‘I think I have been yoked for about one and 40 years and have wished my wife underground anytime since’. Charming!!  But could you imagine if he ever had his own Twitter account!!

Next came another link to slavery with the Holbrooks, whose fortune lay in slave-run sugar plantations and they had the latest ‘must have fashion accessory’, namely a black servant, the Jamaican born Thomas. He ran away, but eventually returned after a newspaper advertisement asking for information on his whereabouts, however, what happened to him after that, we will never know. Olusoga also ventured into the dark world of domestic violence, the joy of his presenting style I find, is that he gives the story time to draw breath and talks about the small people, such as the lives of servants and women, lives that normally go undocumented, hidden from history and thus pays tribute to the silent anguish of those who life events never made it into official records.

• Many cases run away servants can be found in the advertisement sections of the local papers and court cases concerning domestic violence were also reported, not always without some bias but reported all the same. Newspapers can be found at the British Newspaper Archive.or if you have a subscription to Find My Past then the newspaper archive is also available on that site, as well as hard copies or microfiche copies at local records offices/libraries/archives

By the time Olusoga reached the final episode we were dropped into the 1930s when N0 10 was owned by the Wallington family and when the clouds of the Second World War were about to burst open. Bristol, being a major port, inevitably became a target for the Luftwaffe, and in November 1940 a 50kg bomb hit Guinea Street. Among the injured was Isaac Long, who with his wife Mary, later became a lodger with the Wallingtons at Number 10.

• The 1939 National Register, available on both Ancestry and Find My Past is excellent source, discovering who was where just before WW2 as well as giving an accurate [we hope] date of birth. You can also find out about the previous owners of your house.

After talking through the deaths of the Longs within a few months of each in the early 1950s, Mary apparently killed herself after her husband’s death, Olusoga then devoted a good deal of the episode digging into the chequered past of a tenant, Cyril Tabrett, a man of some mystery, with several different birth-dates and a variety of professions, even claiming at one point to be Belgian. However, it was eventually discovered that basically he was just a petty thief and forger.  I am not convinced that the attempt by the programme makers to make his story into an ominous model of poverty and despair quite came off. In similar fashion the death of Norris, moved from a possible suicide into the rather anticlimactic fatal gas leak. The series closed with the current owners, who rather serendipitously had given a home to an Ethiopian refugee.

A couple of things here:

• Cyril Tabrett was shown to have a number of documents with contradicting information on them. Beware of what I like to call, official fiction masquerading as historical fact. Information given for birth, marriage and death corticates, even in the not so distant past was never double checked against any official sources. Such documents often need a lot of careful interpretation, and in many cases a healthy dose of scepticism, all a certificate really proves is that an event took place and was recorded by a registrar, what if doesn’t prove is that any of the particulars noted were actually true in the first place. Even today mistakes are still made and still recorded, as truth for posterity

• Kim, the lady who lived in the house at the time of Norris’s death is a prime example of making sure that you take any oral history with a slight pinch of salt. People’s memories are fallible, especially childhood memories, which can be clouded by parental judgements or scruples and even the occasional skeleton hiding in a cupboard  – Kim said it was Cyril who died in the cellar and possibly committed suicide but she wasn’t sure, in the end it turned out to be Norris, who actually died in his room from an accidental gas leak -  perhaps Kim’s parents told her he had died in the cellar to scare the children and stop them going down there? Who knows!  Memory and folklore are not always that reliable, as was shown, and so whenever you can triangulate your story by checking any facts against other sources and official accounts, more often than not there is a good deal of truth there, you just have to sift it out from the prejudices and ‘rose coloured spectacle’ approach.

Other records to use to trace your ancestors or those living in your house include but not limited too:

• Trade Directories and Occupation Records of individual trades such as teaching for instance, which are searchable on Find My Past and The Genealogist
• Electoral Registers – although beware these are only those who could vote at any particular point in time, various electoral/rates records can be found at Ancestry and Find My Past
• Local Newspapers – at local archives, libraries, records offices, try the actual paper themselves if they still are in operation. Also at the British Newspaper Archives and Find My Past online
• BT Telephone Books – to be found at Ancestry
• School Registers – many which can be found on Ancestry and The Genealogist
• Wills – at the moment there is free access and download to many wills at the National Archives. The Genealogist also has some earlier downloadable wills and the National Probate Calendar is accessible at Ancestry
• FamilySearch has many records that you perhaps would not think of looking at, have a search through their data bases, especially for records from Europe
• Military Records can also give a lot of information and are available in various guises at Ancestry, Find My Past, The Genealogist as well as on local archive/record office databases
• Passenger Manifests can help to pinpoint ancestors to certain places at certain times, again held my Ancestry and Find My Past

Your local records office may also hold coroners’ reports, National building records. Civil defence records, hospital records as well as access to the main genealogical web sites. A good search of the catalogues at your local archives, records office, library can easily turn up some interesting records that you perhaps would never thing of searching. 

If you are interested in researching the history of your house then a couple of good blogs/sites to read are -

https://www.findmypast.co.uk/blog/help/house-design-history

http://www.tracemyhouse.com/

June 15-21 this year marks National Refugee Week

The National Archives are sharing, free online, some of the refugee stories from their huge collection

Find My Past host a series of events live on their Facebook page every week

The week beginning 8th June 2020 have the following events:- 

Tues 9th  - Census Records with Myko Clelland

Wed 10th - Ontario Sources with Jen Baldwin & Steve Fulton 

Thur 11th - Regimnetal Numbers with Paul Nixon

Fri 12th   -  Fridays Live with Alex Cox

Follow Find My Past on Facebook - at 

where the events will be broadcast, also scroll down the page to catch up on previous live events