The story behind the story of an Eltham postcard

Now as everyone knows there can always be more than one story behind a picture postcard.

The first is the image on the front which in an instant tells you so much about a place in the past.

And then there is the name, address and message on the back which can be equally revealing.

The skill of the historian is to marry the two sides and tell a story, but just sometimes that story cannot be told and that is what happened to my friend Tricia who found this postcard on eBay back in September.

She told me that having found it “I did a little research on the information on the back and managed to trace the family history of the person it was sent to.”

The research led to a connection with the garage beside the church and a family who had lived in Eltham.

Tricia managed to trace the family, met up with one of them and handed over the postcard.

It would have made a compelling story but given that one of the familiy did not want the details made public Tricia quite rightly chose not to publish it.

But there is always a story in a story and for me the story is less aboutt the family and more about how one postcard in the hands of a skilled researcher can reveal much that might otherwise have been ignored or lost.

It involved Tricia's leap of imagination to use the name and search through social networking sites and then the diligence to match these against people and those listed and  then try and make contact.

And I like the final touch of Tricia's in  choosing to reunite the card with the family a full seventy seventy years after it was sent.

Location; Eltham

Picture; Eltham Church circa 1940s from the collection of Tricia Leslie

On carrying an identity card

I was no great fan of the idea of identity cards and said so.  

Some friends smiled and pointed out that any in store loyalty card probably carried more information on me, my habits and bank details than any official document while the Italian side of the family just couldn’t understand how anyone would object to a piece of paper which proved who you were.

And I suppose that is the point.  It is not my job to prove who I am, it is their job to prove I am not who I say I am.  Old fashioned I know and possibly unrealistic but it is what I firmly hold to.

Of course in time of war such niceties go out of the window, and I was reminded of this when I came across two family documents.  The first was my father’s Travel Identity Card issued in the May of 1940 which “together with the holder’s national registration identity card and ration book must be presented by the traveller to the Immigration Officer at the port.”

"Initially, the card had to be produced to a policeman on demand or alternatively within 2 days at a police station. Further regulations were also issued requiring notification of change of address, also for births so a card could be issued for the newborn, also surrendering of the card if the person dies.
In December provision was also made to make it possible to exchange an ordinary buff identity card for a green card with room for a photograph and description of the holder; the reason for this was to assist anyone who needed to provide better evidence of their identity where they did not possess any other acceptable document, for example if they required access to enter a protected area under the defence regulations.

Later in late May 1940, presumably as the danger of an invasion increased, instructions were issued that everyone over 16 must now sign and date the card and write their address on the right hand page of the card and also that the card must be carried at all times. In the case of under 16s, the parent or guardian had the responsibility of signing the card and entering the address; under 16s were instructed not to carry the card with them but instead follow advice given earlier of carrying a luggage label or card with them with their name, address and national registration identity number.
Initially, adult identity cards were buff, the same colour as children's cards, but in 1943 when registration and rationing were combined, a blue card was introduced and issued to all adults, replacing their previous cards. A new buff card for children was introduced at the same time but existing children's cards were not replaced apart from when a new card was necessary.

The Identity Card was finally abolished in February 1952, but the identity numbers were used within the National Health Service to give everyone an individual number. People who had a national identity number during the Second World War or just after still have the same number as their NHS identity today.*

Which brings me neatly to the second family document which was my own identity card, issued In October 1949; it was to run till October 1965.  And perfectly conveys that immediate post war world where much of what people had become used to during the national emergency persisted well in to peacetime.

Like all family documents it tells its own family story.  Here was my first address, followed by the homes my father bought at Kender Street and later Lausanne Road and in between a brief stay with my grandparents in Derby.  Each time we took up a new residence the card had to be produced at the local Registration Office and stamped.  And so I know that between the May and September of 1951 I was with my grandparents in Derby, and I know also it was just mother and I.

My father was away working at the job he loved all his adult life which was driving coaches for the tourist trade.  Before and after the war he worked for a firm called Glenton Tours who specialized in sight seeing holidays around Britain and later the Continent. And this meant that from the spring through the summer he was away arriving back for just one night between bringing one coach party home and setting off in the morning with another for trips which lasted between a week and fourteen days. It would in the 1950s take him across Europe, to places I only discovered in the last decade. 

So the pattern of our summers was set.  We decamped to Derby and I guess only when I began school did the long periods with my grandparents become just the six weeks of the summer holidays.  Now it has taken this long forgotten identity card to remind me of what we did.  So perhaps there is something in identity cards after all.  But on balance, for me, I am happy they vanished in 1952.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*http://www.1911census.org.uk/1939.htm

When is a building old?

Historical research is fun, or why else do it?  And that pretty much sums up what I did yesterday.  It started with a picture posted by one of my new chums on his facebook site.

Adge Lane takes and shares some remarkable pictures of the city and a few days ago he shared this one with us.  It is the building on the corner of Gartside Street and Quay Street and it provoked some interest and a debate about its age.

Now this is an area of the city I love and often wander back to.  Just a few minute’s walk away is the station and warehouse complex of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830, the site of St John’s church and basin of the Bridgewater Canal.

So a place full of history which brings me back to the buildings in Adge’s photo.  They look old but I had a vague memory of them being built in the 1980s and so the quest began.  The essential requirements are some maps, street directories, census returns, and if possible pictures which between us Adge and I could summon up.

I have to confess that for once I didn’t go looking in the census records but stuck to the maps and the directories.  A street or trade directory is a little like the telephone directory, it listed the streets and their residents along with the trades and businesses across the city.  In many cases the added bonus is that the occupations of people living in a house are also included and unlike the census they were published every year.

The drawback is that you only get the name of the householder, and the poor and those living in unfashionable streets are often missed off until late in the 19th century.  But they are a start and can be used alongside the maps of the city.

Now these go back well into the 18th century but the most useful are those made by Laurent in 1793 and Green in the following year and both show something at the corner of Gartside and Quay Street, as does the OS of Manchester and Salford for 1844-9.  This mid 19th century map was part of a series of “5 ft. town plans produced by the Ordnance Survey for the towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire with a population greater than 4000. They were produced between 1844 and 1849 during the time that these counties were being surveyed for the 6 inch maps. The 5 ft. Plans were important because of the need to improve urban sanitation to combat cholera and other diseases.


Only a few other towns outside this area were surveyed at 5 ft. usually when the town paid for the survey or as a training exercise as in the case of Southampton. After the publication of the Lancashire and Yorkshire maps, the county surveys were carried out at 25 inches to a mile and the town plans were produced at a 10 ft. scale. Although a smaller scale than the 10 ft. plans the 5 ft. plans contained, in many respects, more detail than did the 10 ft. plans. They show all street drains, street lamps and water pumps even the garden layout of large houses. Public buildings show internal layout and churches show the seating layout. The walls of public buildings are not drawn as a single line as on most maps but as a double line showing the thickness of the walls.”*

So this was a must to use, but the buildings listed here in 1849 don’t have the same footprint as those in Adge’s picture.  This detail from the OS shows the lower end of the row of buildings where Quay Street is joined by Young Street.





And this is where the two of us came together.  I had the OS for 1888-93 and Adge had the 1915 version and that same old footprint just kept repeating itself which was pretty much confirmed by the  satellite photo of the present buildings which are different in layout to those on the maps. But the photographic evidence was inconclusive and it was left to Adge to dig out the answer.


“I've found 70 Quay Street (the extreme left on my colour photograph) listed on Rightmove......it's described as "Mock Georgian building of traditional brick construction"...but nothing of any historical description, you may be right ...1980's sympathetic build.”

So there you have it, a nice piece of detective work by the two of us.

Pictures; of the buildings and 1915 map from the collection of Adge Lane, detail from the 1844-49 OS courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Digital Archives

To keep or throw away things ..... that tell a story

It’s one of those fault lines running through our house.  

I have a tendency to collect which if truth be known is just hoarding and there are others who relentlessly declutter.  It is that age old dilemma of which pieces of paper to keep to throw away?  Now I know it is easier now with paperless bills and emails but it remains a problem for me.

Not only do I have the entire collection of Beano’s from 1985 to 97, assorted runs of Look and Learn but during the 90s I went back and began buying whole volumes of the Eagle comic, which I first read in 1957.
More importantly there are the family documents, nothing I grant you as grand as a signed letter from minor royalty or the plans drawn up by Capability Brown for a new garden estate.  Ours are more down to earth.

They include wartime letters faded photographs and quite a few negatives which I reckon haven’t seen daylight for over 80 years and lots more.  Earlier I wrote about the family identity cards and today I want to share a medical certificate which I guess my father had to possess so that he could carry on working.

It is the International Certificate of Vaccination or Revaccination against small pox issued by the Ministry of Health.  Now I haven’t found out yet which European countries required it but as dad worked across Western Europe it could have been any one of many.  Or it may just have been that because of the outbreak of smallpox here in Britain in 1962 our neighbours naturally enough wanted to be sure he was free of the disease.

And smallpox was still a killer.  Today through the efforts of the World Health Organisation it has been eliminated, but in the early 20th century stretching back into time it was both feared and dreaded.  At best it could leave an infected person terribly disfigured and of course often proved fatal.

Now I remember the 1962 outbreak only because were vaccinated as were thousands of children across the country. Now like all these things there is a blog devoted to the outbreak http://smallpox1962.wordpress.com so I’ll let you go there to get the full story.

But had Dad not kept the certificate and had I in turn not stored it away there would be no record of the impact on the disease on my family.

Not perhaps great page turning history, but history.

Pictures; Certificate of vaccination, 1962, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Home documents from a World War No 2 the Clothing Book

I was too young to remember rationing but it lasted into my fourth birthday.

So here courtesy of Graham Gill are a reminder of when many ordinary items were rationed and only available on production of the right number of ration stamps.

Pictures, from the collection of Graham Gill

Revealing the stories of British Home Children ........ to publish or leave in the shadows?

Now one of the fascinating developments of social media is the way people want to share their lives.

Alghero on a hot evening, 2013

It ranges from photographs of their children to memorable holidays or the very mundane events of a busy and perhaps factious day.

And I have to wonder whether it was always so.

Certainly before the advent of facebook, Twitter and Instagram there were far fewer opportunities to tell family, friends and the world about the ups and downs of your daily life.

Or perhaps back before now we were more circumspect about what we let other people know about us.

After all knowledge is power and when identity theft is a serious threat the less someone knows about me the better.

Family stories, 1913

I doubt my great granfather Montague would have welcomed the new age.

He was born in 1868, and a part from census returns and his army records he pretty much successfully avoided a paper trail making it easy for him to fall through the cracks at the beginning of the 20th century.

All of which is a roundabout way of approaching the question of anonymity and the degree to which someone’s life should be paraded for all to read.

The hundred year rule adopted for census records seems sensible, but then increasingly so much is out there on line that restricting what can be published seems to be less relevant.

I may not know the details of who lived at our old house in the 1950s, but I can track members of my family through the shipping records, discover something of their wartime careers and even if they had a telephone in 1924.

So how should we treat the records of our children’s charities in particular those young people who were migrated?

Emma in the care of the Together Trust, undated

And this is not an academic exercise as I continue to work on the new book on the history of the Together Trust which has a proud record of caring for children in the twin cities since 1870.*

Throughout the late 19th an early 20th centuries it was known as the Manchester and Salford Boys' and Girls. Refuge.

And it is a real privilege to be able to look at the reports and letters of those who went through the charity, but it does pose a responsibility because even a young person born in say 1860, who was found destitute on the streets and is now long dead still has a right to a degree of anonymity.

The policy of the Trust is to identify these young people by just their first name and that I think is a good working approach.

If contacted by a relative the charity will do a search of their archives, which is a service they do for free and I know from conversations I have had, that that service is much appreciated by descendants who have been helped.

Some may argue that given the efforts to compile a full database of all British Home Children, restricting publication to just a first name undermines that initiative.

To which there is no easy answer, especially given that there are other avenues that can be perused as a means to find names, ranging from shipping records to newspaper accounts.

Working in the Print Room of the Refuge, date unknown

But there is that simple question of how far we have the right to delve into the lives of others?

At which point I have to concede I do it all the time in the course of writing books and the blog, but even I was stopped in my tracks when I discovered how one of my family died after I received his death certificate which in turn  made me ponder on if I was intruding on a very private moment.

I have always justified it by “bringing them out of the shadows” and in the case of the book on Manchester and The Great War, using their lives as examples of the heroism and sacrifice made during that conflict by people on the Home Front.**

Of course if the information is already in the public domain then in one sense it is permissible but when those records are held in trust even if they were created a century and a bit ago I suspect we have to be more careful.

And such considerations are nothing when compared with what we have lost.  For while I can trawl the meticulous records of the Together Trust, the records of my family’s time in the Derby Workhouse were thrown away a long time ago and much else will never be released.

Location; Manchester

Pictures; courtesy of the Together Trust and from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*A new book on the Together Trust, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/stories-behind-book-nu-2-digging-deep.html

**A new book on Manchester and the Great War, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/reflecting-on-anniversaries.html

The grand reopening of Central Ref today

It has been a long time coming but today Central Ref will reopen.*

Now for some of us who spent hours in the Archives and Local History libraries its closure left a gaping hole.

The temporary libraries on Deansgate and down on Marshall Street continued to provide an excellent service but much of the archives were locked away in the salt mines.

But with the reopening comes a new state of the art centre in the basement.

“Archives+ aims to create an archive centre of excellence in the heart of Manchester. 

It will be a one-stop resource centre providing a regional, national and international focus for community activities and learning from archive, library and other sources. 

The project brings together statutory, university and voluntary organisations to provide a holistic range of archive and heritage services from one location. 

Archives+ will raise awareness of and provide easy access to our histories for the broadest possible audiences, including existing and new ones.”

So there it is, an exciting new place to dig deep into our past.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Central Ref Reborn, http://www.manchester.gov.uk/centrallibrary?dm_i=PR8,28RVR,45WAQ3,84IU8,1

Coming soon ... the grand reopening of Central Ref on March 22

It has been a long time coming but  Central Ref will reopen on March 22.*

Now for some of us who spent hours in the Archives and Local History libraries its closure left a gaping hole.

The temporary libraries on Deansgate and down on Marshall Street continued to provide an excellent service but much of the archives were locked away in the salt mines.

But with the reopening comes a new state of the art centre in the basement.

“Archives+ aims to create an archive centre of excellence in the heart of Manchester. 

It will be a one-stop resource centre providing a regional, national and international focus for community activities and learning from archive, library and other sources. 

The project brings together statutory, university and voluntary organisations to provide a holistic range of archive and heritage services from one location. 

Archives+ will raise awareness of and provide easy access to our histories for the broadest possible audiences, including existing and new ones.”

So there it is, an exciting new place to dig deep into our past.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Central Ref Reborn, http://www.manchester.gov.uk/centrallibrary?dm_i=PR8,28RVR,45WAQ3,84IU8,1

Never forget to ask, ....... reflections on missed opportunities

Dad in 1962

It was the closing remark on a short film I watched on Friday evening where a celebratory revisits the home of his youth.

In this case it was Robert Winston, professor, medical doctor, scientist, television presenter and politician.

The pattern is much the same.  In the course of a wander around the house and garden the celebratory shares memories of the place and growing up there.

And it was the final comment Mr Winston made with his back to camera walking away from the property that has stayed with me.

His father had died when he was just nine and as so often happens that had made for a very quick growing up as he shared the responsibility for looking after his siblings.

And the comment was about his father and how it was only as an adult that he really came to miss him.

Dad circa 1918

It was a feeling that I too share about my father and I suppose a regret that I never took the time to really explore his early life with him.  Nor if I am honest was it just my dad that I took for granted.  There are whole acres of years for which I know so little about my mum or my grandparents.

This I freely accept is the way it is.  We all take our parents for granted while we are growing up and why should it be otherwise?  They are there, the providers of a warm caring home, the tellers of awful jokes and on occasion an acute source of embarrassment.  Not that I have ever shown current partners or girlfriends photos of the boys when they were young.  There are some things you just do not do.

But the serious point especially for a historian is the way that much of our family history and the lives of our loved ones are lost, and the task of filling in the gaps becomes at times difficult and frustrating.

Ah I hear you mutter there are some stories, some bits of their lives which should remain in the shadows and I agree but there is much also that I wish I knew.

Dad in the uniform of Glentours circa 1959

So for all young readers of the blog, get asking those questions now, piecing together the clues from Ancestry, old letters and photographs is no substitute to having the living tales presented in all that wonderful mix of exaggeration, modesty and just surprise.

So I leave you all with the tale of my dad on a thick pea souper of night wandering around the bombed out remains of the local church trying to find his way off the traffic island and across the road home to his family sometime in the mid 1950s.

Is it true?  I don’t know.  I remember the same thick days and nights of fog and smog, did my turn around the traffic island and treasure the story well.  I only wish I had written it down properly when he told me it back in 1963.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Home documents from a World War No 1 The National Milk Scheme

Sometimes it is just enough to let the documents speak for themselves.  

So here is the first from the collection of Graham Gill.

Graham has a vast treasure chest of personal and family material which spans the century we have just left.  

There are photographs from two world wars, adverts from the 1950s and many other wonderful things.

Today I want to feature a permit for the sale of milk issued under the National Milk Scheme, which had been introduced in 1940 as part of the wider policy of rationing.

The National Milk Scheme provided one pint of milk for every child under five. Expectant mothers and young children were entitled to free milk if the combined income of parents was less than 40 shillings a week.  

Parents had to complete a form every three month and obtain the signature of a doctor or “similar responsible person.”

Our document however comes from the other end of the process, and was the permit authorising the Co-op Dairies in Northenden to sell milk at the regulated price Two pence per pint.

Like much about war time regulations the permit ran for a short period and had to be renewed every three months and “at least 14 days before the permit expires.”

Mr Gill had to sell to only those registered with him and “identified by ration books bearing National Registration numbers detailed” with the documentation. 

And nothing was left to chance. So as one war time poster advised, “IN THE EVENT OF ENEMY ACTION PREVENTING YOU FROM OBTAINING MILK FROM YOUR USUAL SUPPLIER, YOU SHOULD APPLY FOR ADVICE TO THE MILK OFFICER, NATIONAL MILK SCHEME.”

So had the Northenden Diary been bombed then consumers were asked to visit Beech House on Yew Tree Road, while in Chorlton it was the Baptist School, Sibson Street, Wilbraham Road.*

What I like so much about the document is that it is an example of everyday life in the midst of a huge war and is an insight into how “the little people caught up in a great century” just got on with the routines.  In its way it is as important as any great paper of State or speech in Parliament.  And above all it is a personal item which fixes a name to an event.

*This was of course Sibson Road and the school was in the Baptist Sunday School Hall which stood behind the church and had incidentally been a Red Cross Hospital during the Great War.

Picture; from the collection of Graham Gill

Getting help with the past

This is not an advert more an appreciation of one of those magazines which have been helping many of us make sense of family history.

Now there are plenty of them about along with web sites and plenty of radio and TV programmes, all catering for that most basic desire to find out where we came from.

In my case it was to carry on the work of my two sisters who did it the hard way in the 1970s, visiting parish church yards and writing off to the family, friends and the General Registry Office.

Now I have never really been interested in just hoovering up past family members and have never had a desire to trace them back to the Doomsday Book.  I stopped at around 1800 and set out to fix my family in the context of where they lived and what was going on at the time, and of course what came to light was a remarkable group of people who “lived out small lives in a big century”.

So the BBC magazine Who Do You Think You Are?* just suits me fine.  There are plenty of reviews and general historical stories to fix a family as well as help pages and an opportunity for readers to share their research.  But above all for me it is the monthly upgrades of what sources have been put online which recently included a “major online Dorset collection,” the digitalisation of more convict records and the Manchester collection.

There are of course those who view all this as just popular entertainment which in one sense it is.  But then shouldn’t we all get some pleasure from finding out about great granddad and on the way learning about the place and time that shaped him?  Doing history always seems a more positive process than just being told something.

And many family and amateur historians do contribute to the bigger picture whether it is turning up unseen documents or providing an insight into the lives of working people a hundred or more years ago.  In our case it was amongst other things a twenty-five hand written letter detailing the experiences of my uncle from the Manchester blitz, via a convoy to South Africa, the fall of Greece and a particularly grim time in Basra.  All of which was complimented by a set photographs which perfectly accompany the letter.

So I think we should take the whole family history industry seriously, after all the history books are full of the lives of the rich, the important and the famous, but the lives of the people who cleaned their houses, grew their food and fought their wars are still under represented.

All of which takes me back to this edition of WDYTYA, with articles on our Servant ancestors, the Catholic registers, Court Records and Gardeners of the Past.  And I know that for some these will be light weight and only skim the surface, but they are a starting point for many just beginning to uncover their past families and I guess the first time they have engaged in history since their school days.

So there you have it.  The July edition of what I reckon is a pretty neat do it yourself family history.

Pictures; from cover of the June edition, and air gram from 1940 in the collection of Andrew Simpson

*http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/

All you ever wanted to know but never knew where to look .... an index of books on British Home Children

Even today when you tell people that 100,000 children were sent from Britain to Canada between 1870 and 1930, the usual response is surprise, followed by bewilderment and those simple questions of why and how?  

Of course here in Britain we have had a record of sending people out to other lands, whether it was as criminals from the 17th century, and settlers from the 19th or in the case of children to Canada and later Australia well into the 20th century.

Now there is some fine research being done, mainly in Canada, and a lot of serious work to help those who were sent as children to Australia as late as the 1970s to piece together their former lives but here in Britain there is still a deep chasm of ignorance.

Those who do pursue the topic are either a small band of historians or relatives who discover by accident that a parent or grandparent was settled in Canada.  In my case just over a year ago I made the connection between a great uncle and the British Home Child scheme which was responsible for the settlement of orphan and street children to former parts of the Empire.  My great uncle Roger was neither orphan nor homeless street child but one of those with a parent who the authorities deemed as “unfit to have control.”

When I first began researching his life and the BHC scheme I had little to go on, but with the help of people also on that search I found much that helped me.  And today many of these people I count as friends.  So perhaps this is the moment to refer to Lori who has collected together the biggest collection on the internet of books on British Home Children http://canadianbritishhomechildren.weebly.com/book--article-library.html

Her site http://canadianbritishhomechildren.weebly.com/ is a wealth of information, links and opinions which allow the researcher to lock into the growing interest and work on BHC.  Now at this point I should also mention other colleagues and friends as well as sites, but that would only distract for the moment from the task which is to highlight this index.

Picture’s from the collection of Lori Oschefski

In search of a book ............... clues to the story of Chorlton in the early 19th century

An occasional series charting the research that led to Chorlton-cum-Hardy A Community Transformed

There will be those who mutter “get a life” when I admit that one of the types of research I enjoy is using street directories.

 They are a little like the telephone directory in that for 200 years they listed who lived where and came out each year. The other advantage is that they list the occupation of the named person. So it is possible to follow an individual, tracking their movements and sometimes change of job and status. This has a real value given that the census records were every ten years and much can happen in a decade.

At the same time it gives a picture of the other people in the street and so allows the historian to gain an insight into the area. Added to this are some wonderful adverts of the period and often a section not only for residential properties but for businesses as well, enabling the researcher to cross reference people with their trade.

And of course by merely counting up the number of beer shops pubs or tailors begin to get an idea of what the place was like.
Finally the directories give directions so it is possible to locate a street off a bust highway and compare this with maps both during the period and right now. Add google maps to the search and the historian can walk along the same path as someone a hundred years ago.

This has allowed me no only to get a feel for a place particularly if the buildings are still standing but because the directories were issued annually it is possible to track the when a road was cut and how it developed.

But there are drawbacks. First the directories only list the householder and so unlike the census will not reveal family members. And what you get is patchy. Cities and towns are better recorded than rural areas and earlier directories concentrate on those with money, status or trade and business. Little hope then of finding a farm worker here in Chorlton during the first half of the century.

Still the directories will provide fascinating clues and will often contain a brief history and general description of a location along with a list of public buildings and local government officers, elected representatives and information on canal, road and later rail transport.

Most central and local history libraries will contain the directories for the area, some like Manchester are on microfilm and some like Salford are still held as original paper copies. Many are now also available on line from Historical Directories which is a project undertaken by the University of Leicester with funding from the Lottery and Enrick UK,and can be found at http://www.historicaldirectories.org/hd/

Picture; an advert for spectacles from Slater’s Manchester & Salford Directory 1850, from Historical Directories

In search of a book ............... clues to the story of Chorlton in the early 19th century, Cenus Records

An occasional series charting the research that led to Chorlton-cum-Hardy A Society Transformed

http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20for%20Chorlton

 If you want to find out about people’s lives in the 19th century, one of the best places to start are the census returns.
From 1801 and for the rest of the century a census was held every ten years. The first three undertaken did not retain the personal details of those who filled in the forms. But it is possible to view the statistical records of these and all the other census surveys at www.histpop.org Here the historian can trawl the data and build the bigger picture of what the country was like.

But it is the 1841 census which first allows the historian to investigate the lives of an individual Here are recorded the names of an individual, their marital status and occupation, the county they were born in along with where in the country they lived and their family’s details. And during the course of the rest of the century the information demanded became more revealing. So the 1851 census asked where exactly in a county the person was born and by 1911 the householder had not only to record all his or her living children but also those who had died, along with the number of years a couple had been married. And it became possible to calculate the number of rooms per household.

For the family historian such records are invaluable in building a family tree but they returns will also give a context to the lives of an ancestor. Looking at the other records it should be possible to gain a picture of the occupation of neighbours and the size of homes and so begin to better understand the area.

And so it is possible to follow the Higginbotham family who lived on the green and farmed south of the village.  They do not appear on the 1841 census but are recorded on all the remaining ones, and were still here opposite the old parish church yard in the early 1970s.

Much of the detail of their family history comes to light, from their birthplaces, the names of their children and those who shared their home, like the five Irish farmhands who in 1891 lived above the shippon.*

But of course there a drawbacks. The census was undertaken every ten years and trying to fill in the gaps of where people moved to, the different occupations they may have had and the number of children that were born but did not survive can only be done by looking for other sources. Added to this was the problem that some entries are wrong either because of a deliberate attempt to hide something or the failure of the enumerator to record the details accurately. So in some cases ages are not correct, names are wrong and an illegitimate child is passed off as the offspring of the grandparents.

Nevertheless the census remains a very important starting point for historians. Those from 1841 through to 1911 are available to read online at a number of different sites, including http://www.ancestry.co.uk and http://www.findmypast.co.uk

Picture; detail from the 1861 census, Enu 14, Page 62 London Road, Manchester showing the family of Richard Buxton, working class botanist


* cowshed