Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy (49 page)

In 2004 the National Library of Wales held an exhibition entitled Life on the Land to celebrate the centenary year of the Royal Welsh Show. This exhibition has been digitized for everyone to enjoy online at http://digidol.llgc.org.uk/METS/XAM00001/ardd?locale=en.

‘
The experience of labourers varied according to where and when they lived
.'

The National Museum of Scotland is home to the Scottish Life Archive, whose collections include photographs, letters, documents, diaries and oral recordings. Some of the archive's holdings can be searched online via the Scran Trust website at www.scran.ac.uk. Scran provides digital access to educational material found in Scottish institutions and private archives, including the Scottish Life Archive and the National Archives of Scotland that represent Scottish culture and history. To search the Scran database for free simply enter a keyword into the search box on the homepage. Results will only display the object's title and a thumbnail image with details of the repository, unless you pay for a subscription that allows you full access to the catalogue. If you are unable to find anything useful online then you can visit the Scottish Life Archive at the National Museum of Scotland on Chambers Street in Edinburgh.

The NMS also founded the Museum of Scottish Country Life in East Kilbride just outside Glasgow, where you can visit a Georgian farmhouse and learn about farming techniques introduced in the eighteenth century that revolutionized Scottish agriculture, and how land clearances affected the lives of Scottish labourers.

The Ulster Folk and Transport Museum has a Folk Collection comprising archived material documenting the history of ordinary northern Irish people through images, sound recordings, written documents, artefacts, folkloric and oral history collections. The Folk Collection has a section specifically dedicated to agriculture covering arable and pastoral farming and rural society. The museum has an extensive range of agricultural equipment on display and a working farm with indigenous livestock. The museum is currently putting items from its Folk Life Archive online via the museum website but you should also contact them by telephone on 028 9042 8428 to find out if they hold any additional material in their archive and library relevant to the area your family were from.

The Irish Agricultural Museum, set in the grounds of Johnstown Castle in County Wexford, is worth a visit if you had Irish agricultural ancestors. Though it does not have its own archive, you can see the museum's extensive displays on farming activities and households and their exhibitions about the effects of the Great Famine.

David Tennant decided to investigate the background of Archie McLeod, his grandfather, who had left Scotland to earn a living in Northern Ireland as a professional footballer, only coming back to his native Glasgow after his playing career was ended through injury to work in a shipyard. Yet his family had not always been based in Scotland's industrial heartland. Archie's grandfather, Donald, had been born and raised in Mull, a rural setting where for centuries farming had been the main profession. Using census returns and birth, marriage and death certificates – located on www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk – David was able to trace the old parish registers for the family (also online) and discovered that Donald was born there in 1819, one of ten children. His parents, Charles and Catherine, lived in a small stone cottage on the estate of the local landlord in the parish of Kilninian and Kilmore, Mull. Charles's occupation at the time of his marriage in 1806 was listed as farmer.

David visited Mull, and investigated the social history of the community further in order to gain a greater understanding of the lives of Charles, Catherine and their family – and why they eventually ended up in Glasgow, as shown by Donald's place of residence on later census returns. The turning point for the family came in 1832, when David's research in local archives revealed that the economic conditions of the day resulted in landlords attempting to maximize profits from their land by switching to sheep farming – forcing out small crofters and minor tenants to create large farms. To facilitate this process, rents were raised and tenants who could not pay were forcibly evicted. This would appear to have been the case for Charles and Catherine, as their children all left Mull and started new lives elsewhere. This would appear to be a general pattern affecting whole communities, and David was shocked to discover in history books describing the period that by the end of the nineteenth century the Scottish Highlands were one of the most sparsely populated parts of Western Europe. Families such as the McLeods were forced to journey south to places such as Glasgow to earn a living. Their stone cottages still litter the empty countryside to this day.

Rural mills played an important role in agricultural life for many centuries as the wheat grown in the fields was taken to the local mill to be ground into flour. Traditional wind and water mills slowly disappeared from the British countryside and were replaced by factories as a consequence of industrialization in the nineteenth century. The Mills Archive in Watlington House, Reading, is home to a large collection of historical material relating to traditional mills and ancient milling processes collected by a small group of volunteers who are members of the Mills Archive Trust. To aid family historians, the Trust is compiling a database of mills, millers and millwrights from the records in its archive complete with digital images for all to share. The archive is very small and visits are strictly by appointment only, which can be booked by emailing [email protected]. If you cannot visit the archive in person or find what you need on their online database, the Mills Archive Trust will answer queries that take less than 5 minutes of their time for free but a fee is charged for more time-consuming queries sent to the same email address.

In the first instance, before emailing the Trust or making an appointment at the archives, you should search the Mills Archive online database from www.millarchive.com. Once you have registered for free you can search the database using the People Index, the Mill Index, or by doing a simple keyword search. The online collections contain the names of around 30,000 individuals connected with the milling trade and are a great source for family historians, although there is still a lot of material waiting to be catalogued. The Mills Research Group has also published a series of books containing articles about specific mills and milling processes, an index to which can be found on their website at www.millsresearch.org.uk where you will find instructions about how to order copies.

Once you have a general understanding of the farming industry in your ancestor's region and the type of work they undertook, you can start a more in-depth search for documents specific to your ancestor's village and some of the events that may have changed their world. Manorial records kept by landlords may mention your ancestor's name, while enclosure maps for the village will show how the open fields where they worked and lived were divided and tithe records may even give you a description of their property and the land on which they worked.

As always, a trip to the local record office or studies centre is in order, where you should look for estate papers for the land your ancestor
worked on. It is not always an easy task establishing which manor – or indeed whether any manor – owned the parish where your ancestors lived. If there is more than one possible landlord it will be necessary to search for manorial records for all those estates. Contemporary maps from the time your ancestor lived in the village may help you establish who the landlords in the area were and where the boundaries of their land lay. Local history books should also be of use, particularly the
Victoria County History
, an encyclopedic record of England's places since the earliest times. Some editions of the
VCH
have been digitized and are available to read for free at www.victoriacountyhistory.ac.uk, where you can also find details of other editions not yet available online.

There are several publications you can consult to find out the names of Scottish landowners for various places at different points in time, including Francis H. Groome's 1883
Ordnance Survey Gazetteer
, Loretta Timperley's
A Directory of Landownership in Scotland c.1770
, and the
Statistical Account of Scotland
compiled by the ministers of the Church of Scotland from 1791 to 1845, available online from Edinburgh University's EDINA website at http://edina.ac.uk/stat-acc-scot. The names of landlords in Ireland can be found from Griffiths' Valuation Books (see
Chapter 6
). The name of the landlord appears in the column headed ‘lessor'.

Agricultural labourers usually rented their homes and the land they worked from their employers, and records of estates often include rent rolls showing any money received by the landlord. Manorial records vary widely in their content but can sometimes give valuable information about generations of families who were tenants on the land, including dates of death or remarks about a tenant's character, while information among lease records can contain correspondence that throws light on the grievances of tenants such as pleas to reduce the rent.

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The Manorial Documents Register covering England and Wales is a card index held at The National Archives containing details of the location of manorial records and is also available online from www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/mdr.

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Try the National Register of Archives' Family Name search engine to locate English and Welsh manorial records not yet uploaded to the MDR database and for the papers of landed estates in Ireland and Scotland.

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Scottish estate papers can also be searched
under the name of the landowner using the online catalogue of the Scottish Archive Network (SCAN). A guide about locating Scottish estate papers can be found on the National Archives of Scotland website at www.nas.gov.uk/guides/estateRecords.asp.

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The National Archives of Ireland has a guide to the private estate records among its collections at www.nationalarchives.ie/genealogy1/genealogy-records/private-source-records, but if they do not hold the estate papers you are looking for the National Library of Ireland (NLI) might have them among its Manuscript collection, details of which can be found on the NLI website.

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The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland holds some private papers including estate records, many of which were deposited following an appeal to prominent families in Northern Ireland in the 1920s. A guide to estate records at PRONI can be found on their website at www.proni.gov.uk/index/research_and_records_held.htm, which also contains an index to some of the larger estates.

See
Chapter 28
for a more detailed look at manorial records.

The Board of Agriculture published agricultural county reports between 1793 and 1817 covering England, Wales and Scotland, with indexes and references to particular parishes. They can be particularly enlightening about agricultural conditions in the places where your ancestor lived and worked. Copies of these out-of-print books can be found in the library of the Museum of English Rural Life, but have also been digitized and are available online from http://books.google.co.uk. Simply type into the Book Search ‘General View of the Agriculture of …', stating whichever county you are researching. These digitized copies are free to view online and the text within them can be searched by keyword.

Agricultural communities in England and Wales were subject to pay tithes for the upkeep of the local parish church, an ancient tax that continued into Victorian times. One tenth, or a tithe, of the products arising from the ground such as grain, vegetables and wood, and all things nourished by the ground including livestock, dairy products and wool, and the produce of human labour such as the profits from milling and fishing, had to be paid in kind to the local clergy until the dissolution of the monasteries. At this point many tithes were sold off to non-clergy ownership and money payments began to be substituted for payments in kind. The Inclosure Acts of the nineteenth century substituted the payment of tithes by allotting land or introducing a fixed monetary payment or a payment that varied according to the price of corn, known as a corn rent. Those areas that did not arrive at an alternative to tithe payments as a consequence of enclosure underwent tithe commutation in 1836 when the government decided that everywhere in England and Wales should substitute tithe payments for corn rents, known as tithe rentcharges.

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Tithe payments – for the upkeep of the parish church – continued into Victorian times
.'

Acts of Enclosure and the accompanying maps produced from the eighteenth century (and earlier, though these records are scarce) are held in a variety of repositories. The best way of finding out whether details of an enclosure for your ancestor's parish exist, when the enclosure award was granted and where the records are held is by checking the directories in Tate's
A Domesday of English Enclosure Acts and Awards
, J. Chapman's
Guide to Parliamentary Enclosures in Wales
and Kain, Chapman and Oliver's
The Enclosure Maps of England and Wales: 1595–1918
. The latter index can also be searched online by place name on a website funded by the University of Exeter at http://hds.essex.ac.uk/em/index.html.

Enclosure documents rarely list many names other than those of the people to whom the land was allotted, but they are an insight into how the wider social issues of the time must have affected your ancestor's way of life. Steven Hollowell has written
Enclosure Records for Historians
, containing plenty of example documents to illustrate the type of records that survive, with case studies of opposition among commoners being of particular interest.