It’s something I hear often when I tell people I’m a genealogist.

I always reply that the records are in fact, mostly free. Provided you know which archive they will be held in, you can book an appointment, walk in, and get looking.

Of course… you need to know how to search, and where to start, and you have to know about different record sets, and take into consideration that your ancestors might not have stayed in one place, so that even within that one archive you might have to guess at which parish they came from before the one you know about… because at the archive, although every volume or box of records is catalogued, individual entries within them are not indexed. The image below is, genuinely, all the boxes that were waiting for me (by advance request) on one of my trips to the West Yorkshire Archives in Leeds, together with part of my To Do List in the foreground. I think there were fourteen boxes all together for me to tackle over two full days.

Before the advent of the Internet, and dedicated websites for genealogy, this is how all family research was, but it was slow going and hard work. I’m going to explain the difficulties with reference to just two generations of one of my ancestral lines.

My 3x great grandfather, Thomas Mann, was born in Norwich, but I only learned this because I found his birthplace on the 1851 Census. My family had no idea that they had roots to that part of the country before this. Following up on this, I found Thomas’s baptism, and learned this took place at St Peter Mancroft, one of roughly fifty-eight parish churches in the square mile or so that we would now think of as Norwich’s city centre. From that record I found the name of his father: Robert, and mother: Hannah née Christian.

Later, after Thomas’s death, I found an entry for one of his daughters on the 1861 census. She gave her birthplace as Norwich St Martin at Oak. This was some years before Norwich’s baptism records were available fully indexed on any subscription website, but I found a way to browse records online, and in that way found several other baptisms for children of Thomas and my 3x great grandmother Lucy, all in Norwich St Martin at Oak; and that was how I learned that Thomas and his wife lived in that parish until they migrated to Yorkshire.

So far all this research has been led by the Censuses. If the censuses were not online I would have had to go the The National Archives in London. The originals are now no longer available to view, but presumably would have been prior to the digitisation… but without the indexing, how on earth would I find them? In 1830 the population of Norwich numbered around 36,000, while that of Leeds in 1851 (which is where they were when I first found reference to birthplaces in Norwich) was 249,992. Simply finding them at their house in Leeds could have taken months.

Back in Norwich, Thomas’s father, my 4x great grandfather Robert, died just before the 1841 census, so everything I know about him comes from baptisms of his children, plus his own baptism, marriage and burial records, a civil death record and an apprenticeship record. I’m confident that Robert lived his entire life within the county of Norfolk – and therefore all the local records relating to him are lodged at Norfolk County Record Office. He was baptised at Great Yarmouth, apprenticed to a master at Wymondham, and then moved to Norwich where he remained for the rest of his life. However, there, he moved around several of the fifty-eight parishes, marrying at St Peter Mancroft and baptising children there, plus others in the parishes of St Stephen, St Michael at Thorn and St Peter Parmentergate. Later, he moved to the parish of St Stephen and was buried at All Saints parish church. I know all this not because I spent many months scouring the free-to-consult records at the Norfolk Archives, but because I input a few details on the commercial Ancestry and FindMyPast websites and managed to work it all out from the selections of records returned for my consideration by their powerful search engines.

Robert’s children did not all remain in Norfolk. Apart from my own ancestor, Thomas, who travelled with his family to West Yorkshire and eventually ended up in Leeds, two sons joined the Royal Horse Artillery. One of those retired in Woolwich where he had a family; the other married a lady from Pontefract and he too eventually settled in Leeds after a military career involving the Battle of Waterloo. Leaving aside the information about the military years (mostly at The National Archives), that involves records from four more County Record Offices. And yet, apart from one Settlement hearing for my Thomas and his family, there is nothing in the archives at Norwich to suggest any of that: mentions in the records for those migrating individuals simply cease. Again, I learned about most of it with the click of a few buttons and browsing digital images of original records online, although I have also followed up some of this information in targetted examination of specific records at the Norfolk Archives and The National Archives. That research involved browsing through lots of images on microfiche, or examining the pages of original volumes in search of mentions of my people.

It’s the indexing that is so important. It points us directly to records that, based on our search terms, would appear to be relevant.

The records we find online are made available to the commercial websites by licence from the original archives; and they have to pay a small amount to the relevant archive every time someone clicks on the records. However, it is the commercial websites that photograph them and have them indexed. The archives hold far more than what we see online – even though the amount online is increasing all the time. It tends to be the more local and much older records that have not yet been (and perhaps never will be) photographed and indexed and made available online. However, having located an ancestor in a specific place, if we do visit the archives, thanks to all the online stuff, we can approach it with a To Do List or a Wish List of information we would like to locate and examine.

The following video gives an insight into the amount of work involved in photographing, alongside carrying out essential conservation work, for a huge nationwide record set like the census.

It’s true that some records or transcriptions of records are available freely online. Invariably, these are made available through the work of volunteers. Their work can help us enormously, and we must be grateful for the dedication of those who do this, either by giving their time to develop records of a big website like Family Search; as part of a local Family or Local History Society; or as a personal project/ labour of love. But we can’t expect everything to be done on a voluntary basis.

The big subscription websites do offer a valuable service. What they do is far more than simply taking public records and charging for them. The photographing, conservation and indexing of a large set of records is an enormous undertaking, involving professional archivist and conservationist input as well as teams of indexers. Quite simply, if they didn’t do this, it wouldn’t get done – there is just too much demand on public funding and this is way down the list. That’s not to say I agree always with the level of the charges, or the introduction of additional charges for some aspects of the service that used to be part of the original fee. I also would prefer that indexers with local knowledge were used. It is much easier to make out a scribbled place name if you know the area. Which seems like a good time to mention possibly the worst transcription/ indexing I’ve ever seen: a Land Army Index card. The name ‘Muriel’ was indexed as ‘Kendriel’; ‘Crescent’ was indexed as ‘Cusad’; ‘Beeston’ as ‘Beeka’; and the job ‘Edging Machine Operation’ as ‘Edjcing Hadine Dpersior’. I mean… those last three words just don’t exist!

Times are hard and not everyone can afford subscriptions. Back in June 2019 I wrote a blogpost about Genealogy on a Budget. I hope there’s some tips in there that will help to bring down the costs for everyone.

However, in general, the next time anyone tells us they think records about our ancestors are ours, and should be free… this is why they are not!