Osborn Our Village Ancestors

A Genealogist's Guide to Understanding the English Rural Past
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7198-3148-5
Verlag: The Crowood Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

This book will be a source of help for anybody researching their farming and countryside ancestors in England. Looked at through the lens of rural life, and specifically the English village, it provides advice and inspiration on placing rural people into their geographic and historical context. It covers the time from the start of parish registers in the Tudor world, when most of our ancestors worked on the land, until the beginning of the twentieth century, when many had moved to the towns. Helen Osborn demonstrates how genealogical records are integral to their place of origin and can be illuminated using local newspaper reports, and the work of local historians. She explores the stories of people who lived in the countryside in the past, as told by the documents that record them, both rich and poor. The book will be particularly valuable to anyone who is looking for a deeper understanding of their family history, rather than simply collecting names on the tree.

Helen Osborn has worked as a professional genealogist and historical researcher since 1998. She is a member of AGRA and has been a consultant on the popular TV series Who Do You Think You Are? Helen was previously a business archivist at Young's Brewery in Wandsworth and was co-founder of online genealogy course provider Pharos Tutors. She is the author of Genealogy: Essential Research Methods, (Robert Hale), and has written three other books about public houses and brewing history.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Osborn, Helen

Leseproben

1

The Rural Past

This book is aimed at those who have discovered a love for filling in the details about the lives of their ancestors as they build trees; even the novice family historian should be able to take something away from it, although it is not a ‘how to’ guide in starting genealogy research. There are many books and resources that show how to start researching a family tree, and it is expected that the reader will have already progressed beyond the stage of simple name gathering, and will be ready to discover increasing amounts of local and historical context and how to open up the records to gain the maximum from them.

The subject is a wide one: English village life from the middle of the sixteenth century up to the nineteenth century, viewed through the lens of documents that genealogists commonly use. This 400-year sweep of time resulted in the creation of almost all the local records we use to build the pedigree of a family, whether that family is rooted in landed gentry and the lords of the manor, or came from the ranks of the humble farm servant.

The period begins with the setting up of parish registers in England and Wales in 1538 during the reign of Tudor king Henry VIII, and ends with the nineteenth-century census and the administrative reforms that centralized administration and records, making them less useful at the local level. Along the way we will meet some of the most important records that give information for genealogical tree building and evidence of relationships, as well as illustrating how life was lived in the countryside, through the stories they tell.

Notwithstanding the blood kinship links that DNA investigations have brought to the study of genealogy, genealogists remain overwhelmingly reliant on written sources – and luckily there are a huge number of sources for England. From the Middle Ages onwards the growth in those sources allows an increasing amount of light to be shed on our ancestors’ lives. As the centuries unfold, the documentary sources for both village history and family history simply within a rural parish multiply, and do not stop being of use until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the parish lost many of its administrative functions.

As well as the parish registers, there are other records of the parish, such as surveys and tithes, accounts and records of the poor law, and records of local charities. Outside the parish system there were the records of the manor, concerning themselves not only with tenancies and cultivation of land, but also with the misdemeanours of villagers.

This book doesn’t describe all the possible records in which people can be found for the whole of a 400-year period, but tries to put some of the most common and usable local records into a useful context. The emphasis throughout is on thinking about geographic and historic context, and the records that are created and held locally.

I do not deal with records created by the Victorian national administrations, such as civil registration, which started in 1837, although we will meet the Victorian census because it gives us so much useful information about a place. Nor do I describe many records created at the local but wider levels of diocese or county, except where they are particularly important to showing how life was lived, such as with probate inventories and the records of quarter sessions. Many of these records are of equal importance to the history of towns and cities: they are certainly not all unique to the village.

The family historian who desires to get ‘under the skin’ of their ancestors and understand their way of life, as well as to interpret the records correctly, needs to switch their focus away from names and on to geographical places. In that respect, this book is an antidote to the myriad online data websites, which encourage quick searching for names. I am convinced that research into the people of a place – research that unfolds in a more leisurely fashion, allowing the family historian to truly understand both the records and the location – is ultimately the most rewarding.

The Importance of Place

The sixteenth century witnessed a huge rise in record creation, documentary sources and writing of all kinds useful to both the genealogist and the historian. It is possible to combine information from these sources so that pictures of even ordinary individuals can be built up. The survival of all these records varies a great deal from parish to parish and village to village, yet it is still true that most English parishes have extensive sets of records from the sixteenth century up to the present. Even if records from the nineteenth century appear different from the earlier types, they were still created for the same purpose: to deal with the same kinds of problem that a community needs to deal with day to day. The good news for the genealogist is that they record individuals, sometimes in detail.

The way we should approach these records and interpret them is the same, whether the local system varies from north to south or east to west, although it is necessary to keep a firm sense of place and to understand that the interpretation and practice of the law in one area might differ from another.

As I showed in my book , genealogists often need to analyse documents in a very exacting way. This gives us special needs, which differ from the needs of local historians, because genealogists are always concerned with small personal details and minutiae. Historians choose topics and themes, and thereby select which sources to study; however, genealogists do not get to choose their sources: they are forced to use all available sources to prove a pedigree. Questions about individuals appearing or not appearing in records are of vital importance to the genealogist, while the local historian is quite rightly more concerned with whole communities rather than single families or individuals.

Yet there is much cross-over between local history and genealogy, because in order to gather truly the evidence that we need to reconstruct families into genealogical trees, we should understand both the historical and local context as well as have a good understanding of the documents used. Thus, local history and family history come together over questions of place community, and the melding of family history and local history is nowhere more apparent than when a locality has given rise to a particular surname.

As we get further involved with the history of our families, and in the wider context of surname history and the development of surnames, we find that many English surnames come from place names, some of them recognizable places today, others generic, still others so small or local as to be all but lost, others with subtle spelling changes: Attlee, Bainbridge, Bakewell, Eccleston, Greenwood, Heath are just a few examples from hundreds. Many of us still carry information about an original village, hamlet or farmstead around as our surname, like a long invisible thread tying us to a specific place.

The genealogist tends to look at his or her ancestors with backward glances, travelling in time backwards, starting in the crowded cities and moving backwards through parishes of lesser and lesser population, and sparser and sparser records. In a way it is the opposite of the traditional historian’s view of the forward march of history, with expanding populations, new places created, and social progress. As the genealogist progresses backwards up the tree, the broader world increasingly gives way to the smaller and smaller place, even while at the same time the whole ancestral tree increases! We move from the base of a pyramid up to the tip.

Adding a deep sense of geographic place to the analysis of records, as is the practice of good genealogists, takes family history into a whole new realm. It is often slow research, with an emphasis on acquiring knowledge through a deep understanding of place and context, yet it is deeply satisfying as mysteries and problems are solved or at the very least made a whole lot clearer.

Life has never been straightforward. Laws may be enacted and records created, and administrations can be messy, and it helps us to untangle whether the community in which our ancestor appears was interpreting the law as it was written, or whether it was widely ignored. Local situations can be just as complex as individual relationships, so any local or family historian must be aware that while a broad-brush approach can start you off on a voyage of discovery, the true prize is likely to be in bringing to life the real, messy human situation.

It has become a cliché to talk about putting the flesh on the bones of the family-history skeleton, but even when all the facts about someone’s life and family are discovered, the full story of the place your ancestors lived in, and the community that surrounded them, is often ignored. The distillation of my theme therefore is that whenever we genealogists research a person or family, we should really be thinking not just of the name or of the individual, but of the place. It is the place that adds the needed context: it is the cloth that clothes our ancestors, cut here by the wealth or poverty of the land, darted there by the climate, embroidered here by the local customs, and trimmed and seamed by local officialdom.

The English Village

So much has already been written about the English village that it almost consists of a genre in its own right. Local histories specific villages are available in their hundreds; books specifically about records, such as John West’s 1 and...