Category Archives: Resources for genealogists

Getting the most from cemetery records

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Today’s post is an interloper amongst my little ‘Ancestral Tourism’ series. It follows on from Part 1: Churches and Churchyards, Part 2: Municipal & other Public Cemeteries and Part 3: Graves and Gravestones. I’ve stepped away from the ‘Ancestral Tourism’ series here because this is something you can do online, whether you visit the grave or not – although it is, of course, also great preparation for a trip to the actual cemeteries.

The aim here is to show how the information from various records relating to burials, and even the same records on different platforms – including the gravestone itself if there is one – can be combined to give a greater depth of knowledge and understanding about an ancestor and their family. This technique of layering up information from different records works equally well with other aspects of an ancestor’s life, of course, but here I’m focusing on burial.

I hope this will be of interest to readers researching at Intermediate level, or moving on from Beginner to Intermediate level.

First, a comparison of records from two different cemeteries

Precisely what is included on the record varies from one cemetery to another, and possibly from time to time. I can illustrate this by comparing burial records for two of my ancestors: a 4xG grandmother and a 2xG grandmother. Both died after the introduction of Civil Birth, Marriages and Deaths, and I had already located the death entries on the General Register Office (GRO) online register, and bought one of the Death Certificates.

What the records include
This first record is from York’s Fulford Cemetery. It includes so much information that there is no need to buy a Death Certificate. CLICK FOR BIG!

Burial record of Sarah Wade, 14 Mar 1860, Fulford Cemetery York. Source: FamilySearch.org York: Cemetery Records 1837–1871, image 363/812

Here, we see that Sarah Wade, bottom entry, was buried in the York Public Cemetery at Fulford Road in 1860. She has the burial reference ID of 11,365 and is interred in Grave number 3837. She died on 9th March 1860 and was buried on 14th March. Sarah was 75 when she died and was the wife of John Wade, gentleman. They lived in Stonegate, York, but the number of the property is not given. Cause of death was pneumonia. The informant was Edwin Wade of 4 Coney Street, York. The final column is the name of the officiating minister.

There is more to this information than meets the eye. Sarah is the wife of John Wade. This means he is still living. You can see that the entry above Sarah’s describes the deceased, Emily Johnstone, as ‘Relict of the late Spearman Johnstone, Gentleman’. A less formal term would simply be ‘Widow’.

The second and third entries in this extract are both men. One is a Captain in the Militia; the other a Fishmonger. Men, then, are described by their Trade, Occupation or Profession. Women are described by their marital status, or ‘condition as to marriage’. The top entry is a child. Children are described as ‘Son/Daughter of’ followed by the father’s name.

The informant is not John the husband, but another man with the surname Wade, therefore probably related. He is in fact the oldest son of Sarah and John, and he is clearly used to signing documents with a flourish!

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The next record is from Beckett Street Cemetery in Leeds.  The cream line just indicates where I have removed several lines from the page because it’s only Annie E Cass that we’re considering here.

Extract from a burial register dated 1926. The original image has been edited to remove several entries, leaving only the top one, plus the headings for each of the columns, and the record of Annie E Cass who was buried on 17th December 1926.
Burial record of Annie E Cass, 17th December 1926, Beckett Street Cemetery, Leeds.
Source: ancestry.co.uk Leeds, England, Beckett Street Cemetery, 1845-1987

In this record we see that Annie E Cass, bottom entry, was buried at The ‘Leeds Burial Ground’.  This is the same as ‘Beckett Street Cemetery’.  She was buried in the consecrated portion on 17th December 1926.  Address at time of death was 76 Institution Street, Leeds.  Annie was 76 years old and a Widow – again, we see that the top entry, a man, is described by his profession.  Annie in fact ran a business after her husband’s death 28 years earlier, but this is not mentioned.  The penultimate column is for the signature or name of officiating clergyman or minister, and finally we have the Grave plot number, which is 9419.

There is not as much information as on the Fulford Cemetery entry above.  We don’t have an informant or date of death, and the late husband’s name is not included.  We also don’t have a cause of death.  To cover all bases on this one we might want to purchase the Death Certificate. What we do know, however, is that Annie was buried in the Consecrated Portion of the cemetery. She was therefore Church of England. (I already knew that as I have her baptism record, but sometimes every little helps!)

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Gathering information from several documents and platforms

Now I’m going to home in on Annie, or Annie Elizabeth Cass to use her full married name. I want to see if I can add to my knowledge and understanding of her life and family by looking closely at all the records I can find relating to her burial.

The information from FindAGrave (below) is a transcript compiled directly from Annie’s burial entry above. You can see that all the information is accurate, but the marital status is not included, and it is not clear whether Annie died on 17th December or was buried on that date. This is why seeing the original is always preferable, but if that’s not possible, a transcript is infinitely better than nothing. In fact I do already know that Annie died on 14th December, because I did previously buy a copy of her Death Certificate. I also know that she was in hospital when she died, not at her home in Institution Street; and I know which of her children was the informant, and his address at the time – which in turn tells me he was still living in December 1926.

Screenshot from FindAGrave showing information about the burial place of Anne E Cass, including the location of the plot and a transcript of information from the original burial register.
Extract from FindAGrave showing burial information for Annie E Cass. © FindAGrave

So why did I bother looking at FindAGrave?
In this case I had two reasons for doing so:

  • I wanted to see if there was a photograph of the gravestone;
  • I was creating a list of all my ancestors and their children buried at Beckett Street Cemetery, and since I already had information from the GRO online register about the deaths of each, the search process on FindAGrave is much quicker and easier than searching on Ancestry. The resulting list is below:
A table created in Word with a list of people, all with the surname 'Cass', and other information about each of them, specifically about their place of burial.

By compiling a list of all my ancestors and their children at this cemetery I was able to see which ones were buried in the same plots as other family members. Here, I identified six members of the Cass family, all in Plot 9419. I made similar lists for all my family members at various public and municipal cemeteries. This will make it easier to navigate the cemeteries when I visit.

The fact that Annie Elizabeth and her husband John William Cass were able to purchase a family plot tells me something about the financial situation of this family. Many of my ancestors at this time couldn’t do so. I already knew they had a family business so this was not a surprise. I expected, too, that there would be an inscribed headstone. However, although many of the entries at FindAGrave are accompanied by a photograph of the grave, this one isn’t.  My plan was to take a photograph when I visited myself.

Additional information on Friends of Becket Street Cemetery website
This was the point I had reached when I wrote my last post, about Municipal and Public Cemeteries; and that was when I found the fantastic Friends of Beckett Street Cemetery website.

Using the public search facilities on the Friends website, and bearing in mind I already had a lot of information about this family, including the plot number where they are buried, I was able to do the following:

  • View the cemetery register. I already had access to this register via my subscription to Ancestry.co.uk. so there was nothing new for me personally here.
  • Locate the grave on a map of the cemetery.
  • Locate the grave on a spreadsheet. Here, it is recorded that in fact there is no headstone for the family plot. This surprised me.
  • The spreadsheet also provided a tantalising promise of some extra information. I found there were seven people buried in this plot, rather than the six I already knew about. However, to see the list of people (and more) I needed to become a Friend of the cemetery. This costs £10 per year. Bearing in mind the number of ancestors I have in this cemetery, and the good work the Friends do, this was worth it.
  • Having paid the membership fee I could now view the names of all occupants of this plot, and use various methods of searching the dedicated Beckett Street Cemetery database, which yielded better results than searching on the huge Ancestry database.
  • There is also a virtual walk along the various paths so that you can locate and see the plot you’re interested in.

**Obviously, every ‘Friends Of’ group will provide different search facilities.**

Here’s the new information I got about this family, and how I was able to use it

The first thing to note is that the ‘Person ID’ on the FindAGrave website is a ‘FindAGrave’ ID. The cemetery Person ID/Reference is different, so I have amended my lists to include both.

Next, I was anticipating the the unknown additional person could be a missing child. My research showed that Annie Elizabeth lost four of her children in infancy, but on the 1911 Census she wrote that she had lost seven children and had six still living. I knew this to be inaccurate, because seven of the children were still living in 1911. However, this still suggests two missing babies. Might one of them be buried in the family plot?

Alternatively, could the extra person be Annie Elizabeth’s oldest daughter. Aged 40, she was still living with her mother in 1911 but was nowhere to be found in 1921. Had she died? It seemed inconceivable that she wouldn’t have been buried in the family plot.

The extra person turned out to be Annie Elizabeth’s mother-in-law, Elizabeth Cass. Elizabeth died in 1878. She is the mother of Annie Elizabeth’s second husband, John William Cass, and they are not my ancestors. Although I had her name and some brief details from a census record I had not researched her. This record provided her burial dates and also her address, which was the same shop and living quarters above the shop that I knew to be the home of Annie Elizabeth and husband John William Cass in the 1870s.

This prompted me to look for a burial record for Elizabeth’s husband, William Cass, located quickly on the Friends of Beckett Street Cemetery website. He too had died at the same address, five years earlier. Using death certificates and baptism records for several of Annie Elizabeth’s children, I was able to calculate that she had moved into the shop with her husband and children after the death of Elizabeth’s husband/ John William’s father. The possibility that they had taken over an existing family business was not something I had previously considered.

As for the missing deceased children – the little ones are still missing. I suspect Annie Elizabeth may have included stillborn children in her totals. I have long suspected that women did this on the 1911 Census as a way of commemorating their children who never had a proper burial.

However, this new information also prompted me to renew my efforts to find Annie Elizabeth’s oldest daughter. I found she had married shortly after the 1911 census and in 1921 was living with her husband and a daughter, whose life I will now have to follow through.

How strange that all this should be resolved as a result of examining cemetery records! Plus I am now a member of the Friends of Beckett Street Cemetery!

It all goes to show we should examine closely, keep an open mind, follow all leads and cross-reference. I hope you’ve found this useful, and that it might prompt you to look again at some of your mysteries.


Ancestral Tourism 3: How to read a cemetery

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Ryde Cemetery, Isle of Wight. © Janice Heppenstall

This is the third in my ‘Ancestral Tourism’ series, and follows on from posts about preparing for visiting Churches and Churchyards and Public & Municipal Centuries featuring in our ancestry. In those previous posts, the focus was on knowing the history, finding the records and then finding any maps of the churchyards and cemeteries. In this post we’re going to be ‘reading’ the burial ground. What can we deduce from the location, the headstone (or absence of a headstone), the symbolism and anything else that will give us clues as to our ancestor’s life and social standing?

Please be prepared before applying what follows to your own family that there is a possibility that not all your ancestors will have well-kept headstones in peaceful and picturesque settings within the churchyard or cemetery. Some may have been buried with unrelated people in common graves, with or without a headstone. This is part of their story, and the story of the times in which they lived, but it can be upsetting to find.

Consecrated or Unconsecrated?

As outlined in my last post, from the middle of the nineteenth century the Burial Acts required that half of any new Municipal or Public cemetery was to remain ‘unconsecrated’. The other half would therefore be ‘consecrated’. What does this mean?

Consecrated

  1. Dedicated to a sacred purpose; made sacred; hallowed, sanctified.
  2. Dedicated, ‘sacred’ to a tutelary divinity.
  3. figurative. Sanctioned by general observance or usage.

Oxford English Dictionary (Online)

Although the online Oxford English Dictionary gives the above definition, in relation specifically to burial grounds in England and Wales it is a centuries-old term referring to land that has been blessed and set apart for Christian burial according to the rites of the Church of England (in Wales now, Church in Wales). ‘Unconsecrated’ referred to any portion not blessed or made sacred according to those rites. Before the mid-1800s, when most burials took place in the graveyard of the parish church, the official burial had to be conducted by an Anglican clergyman in accordance with the Church of England prayer book service. This applied even to those who had, in life, followed different religious practices. However, such people were not eligible for burial within the Consecrated area of the graveyard. They were buried in a separate Unconsecrated section. This applied also to babies who died before they were baptised and, before 1823, to suicides.

Also mentioned in my last post, the development of the new Public Cemeteries from the 1820s and Municipal Cemeteries from the 1840s coincided with a greater acceptance and recognition of different religious practices. Here, the term ‘Consecrated’ was kept but now, in the ‘Unconsecrated’ portion of the cemetery, the burial service itself was likely to have been carried out in accordance with the rites of the deceased’s religion. Today there is greater recognition of the different rites and practices developed by different religions and cultures in commemorating their dead. Although some dedicated cemeteries exist, there are also separate areas for specific faiths within public cemeteries. However, back when our ancestors were being buried it was simply ‘Consecrated’ or ‘Unconsecrated’, and eventually over time the terms ‘Anglican’ and ‘Nonconformist’ came to be used. Although in England and Wales today we use the latter term for Protestants who are not part of the Church of England, in earlier times it was used for anyone whose religious beliefs differed from the established church, the Church of England. It therefore referred also to Roman Catholics, for example. As can be seen from the image above and that below, separate registers were kept for these two sections of the cemetery.

Follow the clues

Finding your ancestor in one or the other may come as a surprise. If so, this is extra valuable information about your ancestors. Precisely what it tells you will depend on the context. For example, all in the same cemetery:

  • My Irish-born 2x great grandfather’s burial is recorded on the very page you see above. He was buried in the Unconsecrated part because he was Roman Catholic.
  • My 4x great uncle’s burial is also in the Unconsecrated part. This is because he and his family worshipped at the Wesleyan chapel.
  • I had a question mark about the denomination of an ancestor from Ulster. He was buried in the Consecrated portion of the cemetery, but his first child with his English, Anglican, wife was baptised in the Roman Catholic church. His burial seem to settle the question… or did it? There remains the possibility that he was simply not a church goer, and by the time of his death his adult children just didn’t know he was actually Roman Catholic.
  • The burial of another 2x great grandfather in the Anglican part of the cemetery in 1898 was interesting because he took his own life. This gave me a reason to research the burial of suicides. Suicides had traditionally been buried at a crossroads, sometimes with a stake through the heart. The Burial of Suicides Act, 1823, banned such practices. It permitted burial of suicides in consecrated ground, but only at night and without a Christian service. With the passage of the nineteenth century came a greater understanding of mental health, and the term ‘Of unsound mind’ came to be used by Coroners. In 1882, the 1823 Act was repealed, and replaced with the Internments (felo de se) Act. This permitted the burial of those who had taken their own lives at any hour and with the usual religious rites, including in a churchyard at any hour. However, suicide would not be decriminalised until 1961.

Burying in style!

There were great differences between the funeral and burial practices of rich and poor. For the wealthy, this could be a no-expense-spared event from start to finish: an opportunity to be seen to be ‘doing things properly’ according to the etiquette that had grown up around funerals. Obituaries in the newspapers will give you an idea of the size and scale of a grand funeral.

In the cemetery there are more clues. These include the location of the grave. A prime position with good views cost more. It may also have been possible to pay extra for a nine foot deep grave rather than the usual six feet, although you won’t be able to see that from the grave itself. A deeper burial was thought to help preserve the body.

A range of funerary monuments were also available, ranging from mausolea, cenotaphs, tomb chests and sculptures to headstones and more simple marker stones. Historic England have produced a guide to Caring for Historic Cemetery and Graveyard Monuments which includes descriptions of the various types.

If you’d like to know more about a whole range of roles, customs and traditions linked to death and funerals, Friends of Beckett Street Cemetery in Leeds have compiled an excellent overview of Victorian funeral traditions and etiquette. Some of these would have been de rigeur amongst the wealthier folk but others applied more widely. Even when I was growing up I remember people closing the sitting room curtains after a death in the home.

Symbolism

Victorians loved symbolism, and the various monuments and gravestones were the perfect canvas for this form of expression. On their website, Arnos Vale Cemetery, Bristol, make the point that when larger public cemeteries started to appear, much of the population was not literate. The symbols found on graves made them more meaningful for someone who may not be able to read the words. Even today, if we understand the symbolism, a whole new layer of understanding opens up to us as we walk amongst the gravestones. Perhaps there might be clues on the gravestones of some of your ancestors, letting you know what was important to them and their loved ones. You might even come across some symbolism pointing you to membership of the Freemasons or similar, which would then open up a new line of research for you. The Funeral Directors association and Family Tree Magazine have also published useful lists of symbolism and meanings.

It was a surprise to walk around Ryde Cemetery after reading them and to note the symbolism on a lot of the stones and monuments. This ‘broken’ column represents a life cut short, and the anchor symbolises EITHER hope, steadfastness, and the secure connection to God or eternal life OR a seafaring life, perhaps with the Navy – or perhaps both. Since Ryde is on an island, either is possible and now I’m thinking I should have spent longer and read the inscription to find out more…

Symbolism of elaborate headstone in Ryde Cemetery, Isle of Wight. Image © Janice Heppenstall

Different types of grave

For those with the ability to pay for a private grave, there were:

  • single plots, intended for one person in a coffin
  • companion plots, intended for a couple, perhaps side by side
  • family plots, where several members of the same family can be buried together.

A certificate or “grave paper” documented the purchase. (I have one of these, purchased by a 2xG grandfather on the death of his wife in 1875.)

A purchased plot does not necessarily mean our ancestors will also have purchased a headstone, so you may need to navigate to your ancestor’s final resting place with the aid of only the plot number and a site map. The location of such plots, amongst others with headstones, should enable you to differentiate them from the common graves detailed below.

One of the motivations for the publicly-funded Municipal Cemeteries was the ability to provide for all social levels, including some lower cost options so that the labouring classes could afford to bury their dead with dignity.

A Common grave was a plot that belonged to the cemetery, not an individual or family, and was used to bury unrelated people. There were several different types of common grave, and the costs for the different types varied:

  • Lock-up graves: these were the cheapest type of grave. They were filled over the course of a few days as more bodies became ready for burial. Between each burial the soil was not replaced. Instead, a wooden ‘door’ was locked in place over the grave. When the grave had the required number of deceased people, the earth was piled on top. These were also called Open graves.
  • Public graves: like lock-up graves, these were filled up as newly deceased unrelated individuals became ready for burial. The difference is that these graves were refilled with earth after each new burial. They were therefore a little more expensive.
  • Note that ‘Pauper’s grave’ was not an official term and probably more rightly refers to the burial administration rather than to the grave itself – a Pauper’s burial. Essentially, before 1834, paupers were buried at the expense of the parish, and after that at the expense of the Board of Guardians. There was no unnecessary expense. The actual grave would have been one of the above types of common grave with no inscription, probably a lock-up grave where that was an option. Local authorities remain responsible today for the burial of a deceased person leaving no funds for a funeral and no one else to arrange it.
  • Inscription graves: For a small additional fee, a deceased person could be buried in a common grave but with a headstone inscribed with the name, date of death and age of every occupant. Some of the headstones may have had bodies arranged on both sides with inscriptions on both sides of the stone. These are a feature of the municipal cemeteries in Leeds – in fact every reference I have come across online relates to Beckett Street or another of the Leeds cemeteries. Here, they are known as ‘Guinea Graves’, that being the original cost of burial in one of these Inscription graves. If you are aware of this type of grave (Inscription or Guinea Graves) elsewhere in the country, please leave a comment saying where and by what term they are known – thanks.
Guinea Graves at Hunslet Cemetery © Stephen Craven at Wikipedia Commons

Some notes

For overseas readers (or very young British readers, perhaps!), a guinea was a British coin, originally minted in 1663 with a value of £1 (One Pound). Eventually it came to have the value of £1 – 1 s (One pound one shilling, i.e. 21 shillings). Even after the guinea coin ceased to circulate, the term remained as a unit of account worth 21 shillings. As late as the 1970s it was used for the quoting of professional fees and luxury items.

I have previously written about how to ‘read’ a Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery [here].

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I have become rather more fascinated with municipal cemeteries than anticipated! My next post will be about getting the most from different cemetery records, before returning in the post after that to Ancestral Tourism: houses and places our ancestors knew.

Ancestral Tourism 2: Public & Municipal Cemeteries

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Ryde Cemetery, Isle of Wight. © Janice Heppenstall

This follows on from my last post: Ancestral Tourism 1: Churches and Churchyards. It focuses on locating and visiting graves of our ancestors whose final resting place is in one of the large municipal or other public cemeteries in our towns and cities rather than in a church graveyard.

First, a bit of history

The emergence of large public cemeteries is an interesting part of our social history, connecting with several other developments of the nineteenth century that will be familiar to local and family historians. The migrations and population booms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created not only a lack of housing for the living but also of burial grounds for the dead – and all the more so in the growing industrial towns and cities. The historic churchyard burial grounds posed problems on several fronts: they were generally small, overcrowded, often laid out in a haphazard manner; and as knowledge of hygiene and sanitation developed, there were concerns about the spread of disease, particularly since in towns and cities these small burial grounds were generally alongside the church and surrounded by closely packed housing.

The initial response to this problem was to turn to the private sector. Throughout the 1820s and 1830s a number of ‘garden cemeteries’ were established to serve big industrial towns, including Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle and later, London. These cemeteries were private commercial ventures set up under individual Acts of Parliament. They were large, well-planned spaces, often designed by the same architects and landscape designers who created public parks. Some of these garden cemeteries may be well-known to us. They include Highgate in London, Undercliffe in Bradford and Arnos Vale in Bristol.

Some of the early cemeteries were developed by and for Nonconformists. As outlined in my last post, the general practice was for Nonconformists to be buried in the parish churchyard and the service officiated by the Anglican vicar. Many prominent philanthropic capitalists were Nonconformists, and by this time were able to use their wealth and influence to bring about changes including, here, the freedom to bury their dead and conduct services according to their own beliefs and traditions. Well-known Nonconformist cemeteries include Chorlton Row Cemetery in Manchester, which opened in 1821, Low Hill Cemetery in Liverpool, opened 1825, and Woodhouse Cemetery in Leeds, 1835. It is interesting to note that it was around the same time that the State removed control of recording births (or rather baptisms), marriages and deaths (or rather burials) from the Church of England and placed that responsibility with a new General Register Office: the introduction of Civil BMDs in 1837.

Generally speaking, though, these cemeteries were money-making enterprises, serving the upper and middle classes. There was no increase in provision for the labouring classes. The response from some local authorities was to develop more cemeteries but funded by public money. Early examples are St Bartholomew’s Cemetery in Exeter, which opened in 1837, Beckett Street and Hunslet Cemeteries in Leeds, both opened 1845, and Southampton Old Cemetery, 1846. This was the beginning of the Municipal Cemeteries – publicly funded, and owned/ managed by the local corporation.

The Metropolitan Burial Act of 1852, and other Acts of Parliament that followed, empowered local authorities to establish public cemeteries and close previous overcrowded burial grounds. The new cemeteries would have uniform hygiene standards and procedures for burial, would cater for all social levels, including some lower cost options for decent burials, and would offer burial options with dedicated areas for people of all religious affiliations. Half of any new cemetery was to remain unconsecrated, allowing for burials without the Church of England service. Later, in 1879, the The Public Health (Interments) Act made it a duty of local health authorities to provide cemeteries if local conditions required it.

Historic England have produced a List of Registered Cemeteries, arranged in date order. Information is provided for each, including design, designer, whether private or municipal, and important or interesting features.

There is also a nationwide map published by the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management which includes every cemetery and crematorium in the land. I’ve checked out all the ones I know and they are all present and correct.

Since there is a similarity in records of these different types of public cemetery, the following notes about how to plan for your visit is intended to cover all of them. There are in any case differences from one cemetery to another, regardless of how they came into being.

Planning your visit

Allow plenty of time for this – there is a lot of research and planning to do!

Locating the records

  • Needless to say, the first thing you need is to know the cemetery in which your ancestor is buried. We’ll start by looking at who holds the records, moving on to which of them might be online.
  • Since Municipal Cemeteries are managed by the local authority, it is they who hold the records for these cemeteries. Often, this team is known as ‘Cemeteries and Crematoria’, or ‘Cems and Crems’ for short. You can find them online by using either of these phrases as search terms and adding the name of your town or city of interest.
  • Some local authorities offer a look-up service. For example, Leeds Cems and Crems provide a list of all cemeteries, together with opening date. They require the name of the deceased, the date of burial and the cemetery, and will ‘check the records and if the information is correct […] let you know the grave number and section or where in the grounds the cremated remains were strewn.’ Some Cems and Crems teams charge for this service; others do not.
  • Some local authorities have databases available online so you can check for yourself. For example, Birmingham Cems and Crems have separate online searchable databases for each of their twelve cemeteries.
  • Privately owned cemeteries keep their own records. Information can be accessed via their websites. For example, at the time of writing, Highgate Cemetery charges £40 for a search. However, they also state that copies of all their records are free to consult at Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre.
  • That said, digital images of the records of some cemeteries are available online. You might find records from your cemetery of interest on your genealogy subscription website; or try looking on FamilySearch. From the home page navigate to Search > Images > insert the name of your place of interest and then select the appropriate era from the drop-down list. From here, you will have to scroll through to see if the records you need are included, and if they are, you will need to browse through the images of the records. Knowing the death date or at least month of death will speed things up. I found all the records from York’s Fulford Cemetery on here – and they are excellent!
  • Transcripts of the records of your cemetery of interest may have been included on FindAGrave (free to use). I have found on there most of my ancestors and their families who were buried in a municipal cemetery, but it is primarily run by volunteers so is inevitably a work in progress.
  • There is also DeceasedOnline, which helps burial authorities and crematoria to convert their register records, maps and photographs into digital form and bring them together into a central searchable collection. There is a fee to see the individual records, and I have not used this website, but it is there as an option should you wish to use it.

    • Locating a Map of the Cemetery

    The cemetery records will hold certain essential information about your ancestor: name, address, date of burial, occupation. There may be more information, but this little lot will enable you to identify the person and be sure it’s your ancestor. There will be one other very important piece of information: the number of the grave or plot where your ancestor is buried.

    Armed with this, what you need now is a map. And on this point it’s a question of digging about online. Here are some places to look:

    • The cemetery’s own website, if they have one. Example: York’s Fulford Cemetery provide section maps on their website.
    • Local authority Cems & Crems may have pages for each of their cemeteries, possibly including maps. Example: Isle of Wight have plot maps of all their cemeteries available for download, for a fee.
    • A lot of the cemeteries have ‘Friends’, and these often have a website with maps. Examples: Friends of Beckett Street Cemetery have an astonishingly good series of online tools to help you locate and navigate your way to your ancestor’s plot. These include locations of plots, numbers and names of occupants in each, whether there is a monument or gravestone, and whether this has been photographed. A different approach is taken at Friends of Southampton Old Cemetery. They provide assistance in locating graves and request a small donation towards their conservation work. Some ‘Friends’ groups have even carried out research into the lives of those buried in the cemetery.
    • Local history or heritage groups may have websites with maps. One the best set of static maps I have found to date is for Ryde Cemetery by Ryde Social Heritage Group. Every plot is shown with the names of the occupants.
    • The local Family History Society may have mapped the cemetery. Example: Isle of Wight.
    • There may be a site map at the cemetery itself, but you will need to know this in advance to avoid disappointment.

Going alone or with a companion
In the course of researching this post I have located every one of my ancestors and all of their children buried in Municipal and Public Cemeteries. Armed with this information, including details of family plots, plus a better understanding of the significance of each of the cemeteries, I feel sufficiently well-informed to be able to make a decision as to whether to inflict a visit to any of them on my nearest, dearest, yet genealogically disinterested. Based on this, I consider one cemetery in Leeds with a single family plot of interest to be acceptable, and another in York with just three relevant family plots. The rest have far too many plots that I would need to visit; and although one – Beckett Street Cemetery in Leeds – may be acceptable on grounds of social history, I simply couldn’t put anyone else through the monotony of locating and visiting the number of graves. Definitely, these will have to be solitary trips for me.

Part of the problem leading to this decision is that although the nineteenth century cemeteries were intended as public landscapes, and are of great historic and heritage value, lack of funding means that many of them have now become neglected. It is here that ‘Friends of’ the individual cemeteries provide a valuable service, carrying out conservation and environmental work and delivering ecological benefits – but not every cemetery has a Friends group, and some are less active than others.

You might find that the ‘Friends of’ your cemetery of interest provide tours from time to time. It might be possible to arrange your visit to coincide with that, then stay on afterwards to visit your family’s graves. Interesting for you and they will appreciate the income.

If you can’t go

There is so much information to be found online. By doing the research outlined above, making full use of online material and even, where possible, via the ‘Friends of’ website, FindAGrave or a Facebook page, requesting a photo. You can also search online for images of the cemetery. Adding “wikimedia commons” to your search term will return a selection of images that are free to use provided you credit the photographer.

Be forewarned though that the inscription on images is not always legible. This could be because of sunlight conditions on the day, severe weathering over time, or possibly just because of the quality of the image when reduced for web use. The following wonderfully clear image is from FindAGrave, but some of the images of my family’s gravestones cannot be read at all.

Image © Rachel79; source: FindAGrave

*****

I hope this has given you some ideas for how to plan for a visit to a Municipal or Public Cemetery. Researching it has certainly focused my mind and I’ve found it fascinating. So fascinating, in fact, that I will be slotting in an extra couple of posts about cemeteries before progressing to finding about former homes and business premises of our ancestors in the post after that. 🙂

Ancestral Tourism 1: Churches and Churchyards

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For many of us, there comes a time in our ancestral journey that we want to know more about the places where our ancestors lived. For the truly obsessed, this can take the form of a One-Place Study. However, for the majority of family historians, and indeed for many of our ancestors, simply visiting the place where they lived will be enough to provide that extra insight we’re looking for.

Bringing a companion

What might, for us, be termed ‘Ancestral Tourism’ could simply be an enjoyable day out for any family and friends accompanying us. The little stops and circuitous routes wouldn’t be too burdensome on companions, and might be thought to add dimension to a place.

I say this from a position of experience, since I’ve done quite a bit of visiting the ancestors over the years, often accompanied by my husband and dog. The trick is to intersperse the family history with other sightseeing and activities and, above all, to know where to draw the line. There are certain family history activities I would not expect anyone else to put up with. Obviously, visits to the archives and local history libraries fall within this bracket. I would also make a distinction between a small, picturesque churchyard and a huge, sprawling, possibly unkempt municipal cemetery. I would definitely walk alone around inner city industrial or derelict areas where ancestors used to live in streets and houses that no longer exist. For all of those, if I can’t make the time to go alone, I don’t go.

A bit of ancestral tourism can involve an hour’s diversion, or a full or half day during a week away. But whether we’re going alone or with companions, there are things we can do to plan ahead to ensure we make the most of our valuable time there.

What to see

There are certain buildings and features I home in on when visiting an ancestral town:

  • the churches or chapels where my ancestors were baptised, married or buried;
  • the churchyard;
  • municipal and/or public cemeteries;
  • former homes and work/business premises;
  • historic buildings and landmarks, and just getting to know the area;
  • pinpointing where an ancestral home that no longer exists used to be;
  • if I’m alone, probably the local County Record Office.

Perhaps you have more suggestions or useful experiences? If so please do leave a comment.

Today’s post will deal with churches and churchyards. The rest will be covered in future posts.

The church

Most of us will never see a photograph or portrait of any of our ancestors beyond the generation living in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.  I have long thought of the parish church as a stand-in.  

I take several photographs of the church from outside, and then if possible move inside to sit awhile and take more photos.  I have a particular connection with baptismal fonts. It seems very personal to me to know I’m standing exactly where my ancestors once stood, right before the font where their child, also my ancestor, was baptised. It’s almost like a portal to that long-ago time.  I also photograph the altar and any other significant features. Some of the churches are of wider historical significance, and beautiful to see. You may also find monuments on the walls or around the church honouring the memory of your ancestors, or possibly inscribed flagstones.

Before you go

It cannot be emphasised enough that you need to allow plenty of time for this research stage. You may need to spend quite a bit of time tracking down this information.

  • Chances are you already know which churches are important in your family history, since you’ll have records from the parish registers, but what we now need to do is look online to see if the church has a website. The Church of England has a site called A Church Near You which includes a page for each church. Some also have their own website with history and lots more information. There may also be information on a local history/ heritage website, or even a Facebook page.
  • For other denominations, Roman Catholic churches may be listed by diocese at The Catholic Church. Baptist churches may be found via The Baptist Union of Great Britain. Quaker Meeting Houses can be located via Quakers in Britain, and so on. Alternatively, you can do an online search for a specific known church or chapel. Again, what we need from all this is the website.
  • Really importantly, check when the church will be open.  Some are open for visitors to walk in any time, but many open only on certain days or certain times of the day, like for a regular lunch or coffee morning. The website may specifically give times when visitors are not welcome to wander around, and clearly we must be mindful of services and private prayer. Obviously, we can photograph the exterior even if the church is closed, but it’s always disappointing not to be able to go inside – and all the more so if you could have organised your visit for the following day when it would have been open.
  • Check that it is in fact the same church your ancestors used.  It may have been completely rebuilt, or at least renovated or had later additions.  Based on this information you may decide not to go – perhaps an image of the original church might be better for your needs.
  • Baptismal fonts, too, may have been replaced.  Again, it’s good to check this before you go. 
Twelfth century baptismal font carved of stone and set on a stone plinth in a church.

St Mary’s church at Kettlewell in Yorkshire’s Upper Wharfedale has been rebuilt twice since the original Norman church was founded in 1120. Of that original twelfth century church, all that remains is the baptismal font. My 7x great grandfather was baptised at this very font (but in the original Norman church) in 1678.

Image: © Janice Heppenstall

A quick tip!
When visiting a lot of places on one trip you can easily forget which photos came from which church/ churchyard. I always take a photo of the noticeboard outside featuring the name of the church and other information.

If you can’t get there – or if the church has been rebuilt

  • Even if you can’t visit yourself, much of the above information is still useful and interesting. I always feel more of a connection if I’ve taken the photographs myself, but you will generally be able to find images online. Searching for your church (or any building of interest) and adding “wikimedia commons” to your search term will return a selection of images that are free to use provided you credit the photographer.
  • Paintings, sketches and engravings of a former church may also be located in this way, and while researching you might find other interesting information. Some of my ancestors were amongst the early dissenting worshippers at the Unitarian Mill Hill Chapel in Leeds. The present chapel was rebuilt around 1849, but images of the original chapel are to be found online. While following a link for one of these images I found [this article] and learned that some of the pillars of the original chapel were removed to a park in north Leeds. I will now have to try to work a visit to that park into a future ancestral tourism trip!

The churchyard

Strictly speaking, the cemetery alongside or adjacent to the church is referred to as the ‘churchyard’, ‘graveyard’ or ‘burial ground’.  Before around the mid-1800s, most burials – and not just burials of Anglicans – took place in the graveyard of the parish church. Although other denominations kept their own records of deaths/burials, the official burial had to be conducted by an Anglican clergyman in accordance with the Church of England prayer book service. You will therefore find burials of ancestors of different faiths in the Church of England parish registers – and you may also find additional records in the registers of their usual places of worship.

The parish register will give the name of the deceased, date of burial and possibly some additional information, such as date of death; if a child, the father’s name; if a woman, the husband’s name; and possibly the cause of death. What it rarely says is where, exactly, the person is buried and that’s unfortunate because that’s what we need right now. I have seen references on parish registers to ‘in the churchyard’; and my 8x great grandfather’s burial record states that he is buried in the ‘South Ile’ [South Aisle] at Wakefield All Saints. There would once have been an inscribed flagstone, but these have long been replaced and no map survives. When I visited I walked up and down the aisle a few times, certain that he was there somewhere but not knowing exactly where. So to be sure of finding our ancestor’s resting place, what we need is a map.

Extract from burial register, 1663. The extract is in seventeenth century handwriting and reads 'South Ile Will[ia]m Clareburne de Westgate buried eodem die'
Will[ia]m Clareburne burial 6 Jul 1663, Wakefield All Saints.
Original data: West Yorkshire Archive Service; Reference: WDP3/1/3

Before you go … and this could take some time!

Find out if a map of the church and churchyard burials exists, and if so, where. Many thanks to friends/ colleagues at the South Central branch of AGRA for help with compiling this list:

  • An original map could be held at the church or at the local County Record Office
  • If at the Record Office, it is likely to be found under ‘Miscellaneous’ records for that particular parish.
  • If an official original record doesn’t exist, there is the possibility that volunteers may have compiled something
  • Some County Record Offices have maps compiled by their volunteers.
  • A map may have been drawn up by ‘Friends of’ a particular graveyard.
  • Often, the local Family History Society may have mapped a graveyard. You may need to be a paid member of the Society to access the information on their website; or you may find a map inside the church itself – it’s worth checking this before you visit.
  • There is the possibility that a map may be incomplete
  • An original map/record may be only partially complete.
  • For maps created by volunteers, unless they were working with an official/ original list of plots and names, there is the possibility that they may only be able to include occupants of plots as seen on headstones, and that remains in unmarked plots may not be included.
  • Even if the precise location of your ancestor’s grave is not known…
  • based on parish registers, time periods, and denomination, a church official may be able to tell you in which section of the graveyard your ancestor was buried.
  • Check if anyone in your family has a photograph of the headstone – making it easier to identify when you’re walking around the churchyard. Even a photograph of the unmarked grave may have clearly identifiable gravestones close by, thereby enabling you to work out the precise location of that unmarked grave.
  • You may find information online at FindAGrave. Although FindAGrave does not have maps, it gives precise plot information. My experience is that they tend to have more records from municipal cemeteries and that parish graveyards are perhaps at this stage an ongoing project.

In the future, it may become easier! The Church of England has created a digital map and database of all burial grounds in England. This does not include specific burial plots. However, the National Burial Grounds Survey (which I wrote about HERE) is under way and will eventually build into a detailed map and record of all burial plots for all Church of England dioceses signing up to the scheme. You’ll find a map of progress HERE and more information elsewhere on that website.

If you can’t get there

You may still be able to get plot information via one of the above resources, and possibly a photo of the gravestone. A general photo of the churchyard may be available online.

*****

I hope this has given you some ideas for visiting ancestral churches and churchyards – or indeed an ‘Ancestral Staycation’. My next post will look at visiting public and municipal cemeteries.

National Trust Birmingham Back to Backs

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A row of houses built in the 1940s. At the left corner there is a shop window on the ground floor with the shop sign 'Backs to Backs' over the window. Above the window is a road sign which reads 'Inge Street'. To the right of the shop there are three houses, each with three storeys. Between the first two of these houses a passage is visible leading to the back of the houses.
Image: Janice Heppenstall, 18 July 2025

I’ve wanted to visit the Back to Backs Museum in Birmingham for several years, and finally last week had the opportunity to do it.

Maintained and operated by the National Trust, the museum is located at the junction of Hurst Street and Inge Street, about ten minutes’ walk from New Street Station. On the map below – surveyed in 1887 – I have outlined the exact location and extent of the museum.

The ‘museum’ is actual nineteenth century housing. Building commenced in 1802, and by 1831 what we see on the map was complete. The three houses fronting onto Inge Street were numbers 51, 52 and 53, although the numbering seems to have changed over time. Initially known as Wilmore’s Court, the courtyard is accessed via a passage between two of the houses, and would become known as ‘Inge Street, Court 15’

Map showing the location of the National Trust Back to Back Museum in Birmingham. The map was published 1890. It centres on the junction of Hurst Street and Inge Street, and the exact location and extent of the National Trust properties are indicated.
Ordnance Survey 25 inch Warwickshire XIV.5 Surveyed: 1887, Published: 1890
Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland
CLICK HERE for link to original on nls website

Back to back housing is a particular interest of mine. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all of my family lived in back to backs. The difference was that as the nineteenth century progressed, there had been an acceptance that the arrangement of back to backs around courtyards was unhealthy – particularly as such housing was generally of poor quality and included very unhygienic shared toilet facilities. Hence back to back housing in Leeds came to be built in rows of parallel streets, making a huge difference in terms of airflow and the health benefits flowing from that.

If you have ancestors living in urban areas, particularly in the rapidly-growing industrial towns like Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool and of course Birmingham, you can tell if they lived in back to back housing by looking at a large scale map – the 25 inch to a mile, like the one shown above is best. Using census records and, later, precise addresses on other documents, you may be able to work out the exact location on a map. Back to backs are identfiable by the line across the middle of what would otherwise appear to be one house. Each unit between the various lines was a separate dwelling. So you can see on the above map that almost every house in this part of Birmingham was a back to back. You can also see that some of the properties fronted on to the streets. These, being healthier and less malodorous, had correspondingly higher rents. However, far more of the properties were built in the courtyards: Birmingham had 20,000 of them.

The Public Health Act of 1875 allowed, but did not compel, municipal corporations to ban construction of new back to backs. By this time back to backs made up 45 per cent of Birmingham’s total housing stock, housing 170,000 people. Building new properties to replace them would have been a huge undertaking. It was not until 1909 that Birmingham actually prohibited the building of new back to backs. As new housing estates were built, the old housing was gradually demolished. The area around Inge Street and Hurst Street was designated for redevelopment in 1930, and gradually the courts were pulled down. However, Court 15 remained, and was inhabited right up until 1967. By the 1980s this little group of houses at the corner of Hurst Street and Inge Street was recognised as an important part of the social history of Birmingham – and indeed the country – and in 1988 the court was listed as a Grade II building.

It was not just the back-to-back formation and the cramped, unhealthy courtyard arrangements that made this type of housing problematic. It was also the number-of-family-members to number-of-rooms ratio; and this combined with the tendency for householders to take in lodgers, who often shared rooms or even beds with family members. Court 15 regularly housed as many as 60 people at one time. On top of this, there was the fact that the buildings themselves were quickly and cheaply built. There were no nationwide building regulations in 1831, and even when they did come into force in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, they did not apply retrospectively.

In fact back to backs are nothing unusual to me. My home town of Leeds still has about 19,000 such properties – about one third of the original number; and they are very popular with people looking for starter homes or on a lower income and preferring their own ‘house with a front door’ rather than a flat. I have been in many. The difference is that these 19,000 remaining back to backs are the better quality specimens. Some of them have small gardens, some have cellars and attics, and all are of sound construction. I wanted to understand the problems of the presumably 38,000 that were demolished. It was for this reason that I wanted to visit the National Trust Back to Backs ‘museum’ at Court 15.

Visitors to the site must pre-book on a guided tour. You can find out more and book tickets on the National Trust/ Birmingham Back to Backs website. The tours last about 90 minutes and you have to be able to climb (lots of!) very steep, cramped stairs with sharp bends and narrow, pointy treads. For people with limited mobility there is an alternative ground floor tour which lasts around 60 minutes and takes in the ground floors of each property.

My tour did not disappoint – and in fact lasted two full hours. Our guide had grown up in similar housing a few streets away in the 1940s and 1950s and had actually known one of the residents of Court 15. He was generous in answering questions about life in the courts and even had a photograph of his family with a huge damp patch on the wall behind. There was nothing ‘nostalgic’ about the presentation: these were terrible places, life was hard and the streets were dangerous. We learned about sleeping with a pole to crush the bugs, we saw the most awful damp attic and the cellar where sometimes children slept, and we learned about actual families who lived in these houses and the lodgers who sometimes shared their beds. It was exactly what I needed to know to help with my Shackleton’s Fold One Place Study as well as my nineteenth century ancestry in Leeds and – just a short distance from Court 15 – in 1850s Aston.

You can take as many photos as you want while walking around the court and houses; and I did. However, this is a National Trust property, and it wouldn’t be right for me to include any of them here other than these two views that you can see from the street. So instead, I recommend that you visit! If you have ancestry in Birmingham or Aston, or anywhere else where back to back housing was considered ‘the solution’ to the rapidly increasing populations of the nineteenth century, I’m sure you would learn something from a visit to the Birmingham Back to Backs.

A red brick building built in the 1830s. It is a corner unit. On the ground floor there is a shop with the sign 'National Trust'. Above the shop window the road sign is 'Hurst Street'.
Image: Janice Heppenstall 18 July 2025

Additional Source:
National Trust publication: Back to Backs Birmingham, 2004 available at the NT Birmingham Back to Backs reception.

Meeting the people of Shackleton’s Fold

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In Leeds last month, I spent two days in the Local History department of the wonderful Leeds Central Library. I had a big task to complete, started last year, that will help me progress my Shackleton’s Fold One-Place-Study.

Comprising only nineteen properties, Shackleton’s Fold existed for less than a hundred years. It was built around the mid-1840s, precise year not yet known; and from 1895 until demolition circa 1938, was populated by quite a lot of my family members.

There are various strands to this One-Place-Study. First, the properties themselves – poor quality Back-to-Backs, or rather ‘Blind Backs’, since Shackleton’s Fold comprised just two rows of houses, each with the door and windows only on the front. The back of the house, instead of joining onto another identical property with the windows and doors on the other side, was simply a solid wall. No windows, no doors, and no other house. My study will include contextual information about Back-to-Backs, the industrial era working class housing for which Leeds is famous. Next, there are of course the people who lived there: the family members who lived in each of the houses during the time they stood. I’m interested in their stories, as well as what their lives reveal more generally about the lot of the labouring classes in this part of Leeds, during the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.

Before I can delve into their stories I need to find out who they are, and that’s what I was doing in the library: compiling a list of everyone on the Electoral Registers and Ward Lists. The objective was to use these to fill the gaps between the decennial censuses. This would enable a fine-tuning of the periods of residence for each household. If a named head of household was present for the 1861 and 1871 censuses but not the 1881, the registers could allow me to pinpoint the exact year they moved out.

Cataloguing the voters of just nineteen houses for around ninety-five years didn’t seem like such a big task, particularly since at the beginning of the period none of the residents had the vote. However, it has taken three full library days for me to do it – and even now I’ll need to return to check a few omissions and discrepancies.

A scene from a library. A red book with the title 'Leeds Register of Electors, West Division, 1896' and showing the catalogue number, is being held upright. On the desk is a handwritten notebook with lists of dates, and a laptop. Other desks and library users are visible beyond

Throughout the nineteenth century the population of the Borough of Leeds grew rapidly. In 1861 it was 311,197, rising to 503,493 in 1891 and by 1931 – the last Census for which Shackleton’s Fold was inhabited – the population stood at 646,119. This meant that the arrangement of the registers had to change. The sheer numbers of voters in these various registers meant they had to be divided into manageable chunks. Navigating these was a huge task. For example, a volume might bear the title ‘Borough of Leeds Ward Lists 1881 Part 2’, but with no indication as to which parts of Leeds were in Part 1, Part 2, etc; and this meant each ‘Part’ had to be browsed until the area needed was located. There was no guarantee that the following year would be similarly arranged, so the whole process had to be repeated.

Header page for electoral register, bearing the title 'Borough of Leeds Polling District Number 31, Township of Wortley, Number 3 Division'. A note below indicates that the list that follows is of people entitled to vote in any Parliamentary election throughout 1870

If you’ve worked with Electoral Registers you’ll know that they are further divided into specific polling districts. The only way to work out which one you need is to look at the most likely ones until you find streets with names you recognise as local to your place of interest. Once you’ve done that you might think you’ve cracked it, and you’ll be able to whizz through the rest in no time. However, these polling districts also change. For example, in 1870, Shackleton’s Fold was in Polling District No. 31. In 1894 it was in West Division Polling District No. 28; changed to District No. 32 by 1899; then District 33, later to 39 and so on.

Front page of The Ward List for the Holbeck Ward, Township of Wortley, Number 1 Division, for the year 1876-77. The beginning of a list of people is visible below the header

It gets worse! Electoral Registers list only those people entitled to vote in Parliamentary elections; and part of the appeal of a One-Place-Study for Shackleton’s Fold is that it existed throughout a period of great social change, including the move towards universal adult suffrage. During this time, some people were entitled to vote in Municipal but not Parliamentary Elections, and it’s interesting to chart the changes and know that behind each gain there was an important piece of legislation granting the vote to another group of people. This will definitely be covered in my One-Place-Study. However, since those entitled to vote only in Municipal elections could not be included in the Electoral Registers, there had to be another series of registers to list them. Therefore, alongside the Electoral Registers, there are also Ward Rolls, sometimes called Burgage Lists. Here, alongside the men included on the Electoral Registers, we find women and other men whose situation entitled them only to this local level of voting. Consequently there are (at least) two volumes of voters for every year. And guess what… the Polling Districts in the Ward Rolls have different names to those in the Electoral Registers! Shackleton’s Fold starts out in 1860 in ‘Holbeck Ward, Township of Wortley’. By 1874 it is the ‘Holbeck Ward Township of Wortley No. 3 Division’, and a couple of years later it’s No. 1 Division. By 1881 we have ‘Polling District No. 23 New Wortley Ward, Township of Wortley’, then ‘New Wortley Ward Polling District No 28’, and so on. By the 1920s even the township changes, to ‘Armley & Bramley’ and briefly to ‘Polling District MM Township of Leeds’.

As if that wasn’t difficult enough, it wasn’t until 1880 that voters were arranged by address. From this point forward, voters in Shackleton’s Fold are listed together, from number 1 to number 19. Before that year, locating each person involved line by line examination of every entry in the appropriate Polling District – once that had been found – and looking for the magic words ‘Shackleton’s Fold’, then making a note of the name of the person shown. Numbers of individual properties are not given, and since people often tended to move from house to house as their needs changed, there is no way of knowing for sure where each person resided other than at the decennial Census check-ins. Certainly from 1880 onwards the process was quicker, allowing for the speedy capturing of names and addresses with photographs of the relevant pages… at least, provided the Polling District hadn’t been renamed.

Top of page in Burgess List indicating that the named people who would follow were entitled to be enrolled as Burgesses, but not to be Registered as Parliamentary Electors

That said, for quite a few of the years, even after 1880, the women are listed in a separate part of the book, at the end of the entries for that polling district. Special mention must be made of the ‘Borough of Leeds Ward Lists 1872 Part 4’ in which, possibly because of a misunderstanding on the part of whoever compiled it into the one bound volume, locating the information involved examining every line on all 190 pages.

Extract from Burgess List showing the women who were entitled to vote in local elections. These women were separated out from the male householders who, since 1867, had the right to vote also in Parliamentary elections
Women voters only. The men, who were now entitled to vote in Parliamentary as well as Municipal elections, were listed in the main part of the Ward Roll.

If you’ve ever worked with Electoral Registers, I’m sure some of the above will be familiar; but I suspect not so many of you will have been tracing the families of an entire street throughout a ninety-five year period! My advice to anyone planning on using Electoral Registers and Ward Rolls is: to allow far more time than you expect you’ll need; to understand the difference between the two, and their layout; and to make notes of the different Polling District names for each as you progress. This was a lesson hard learned for me, and explains why I now have a list of queries, and even a few volumes I now realise I missed.

That said, doing this is an essential foundation for everything that will follow. In addition to the decennial censuses from 1851 to 1921, the Electoral Registers and the Ward Rolls, I have information from The Borough of Leeds Poll Book. This was the first general election to be held after the passage of the Reform Act 1867, which enfranchised many male householders. Poll Books differed from Electoral Registers in that whereas the latter list who is entitled to vote, the former list not only who did actually vote, but also for whom they voted. It would not be until 1872 that the Secret Ballot was introduced, and so for many of our ancestors this is a once-only insight into their political affiliations. Other useful name-rich listings may include Directories and even addresses included on baptism and marriage registers. Luckily for me, for much of this period, all Church of England registers for Leeds are available on Ancestry.co.uk. – but not Roman Catholic or most Nonconformist registers.

These lists of people will form the basis of a database of every household, arranged alphabetically by surname. What I had really intended was simply to use these voter lists for fine-tuning periods of residence. I had anticipated that the real sources of information about the families would be the censuses. However, some residents lived in Shackleton’s Fold for only a very short period of time; and since all I have is the name of the head of household, there is no way of finding out more about them. The identity of a Thomas Brown, for example, who is listed on the Electoral Roll of 1871 and nowhere else – not even on the Census of that same year – will forever be unknown. However, Isaac Lord, also resident just briefly in 1870, turns out to have a sufficiently uncommon name for me to be able to track him down. Similarly, the juxtaposition of the head of household with his wife’s name on the Ward Lists may be sufficient to track a couple down via a marriage record.

My brain hadn’t flagged up that the lists themselves would also, with very little additional research required, witness the expansion of suffrage. It will be interesting to compare each increase of names with the relevant legislation. The lists even chart the final years of Shackleton’s Fold, helping me to narrow down the likely year of demolition. In 1938 only one resident remained, and by the following year he, too, was gone. Soon, Shackleton’s Fold would be no more.

If you want to follow progress on this One-Place-Study, you’ll find all blog posts and other information [here].

BYU Early British & Irish Census Project

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Towards the end of last year I was contacted by a Professor from Utah’s Brigham Young University. She told me about the Early British and Irish Census Project at the university, which is being carried out by students on the Family History bachelor’s programme.

Although we tend to think of the first UK and Irish census as 1841, this is not strictly true. It is the first name rich census, with increasing amounts of information being collected about household members with every passing decade. However, before 1841, there were four additional censuses, in 1801, 1811, 1821 and 1831. The precise questions asked varied over the four censuses, but essentially, each parish was required to return numbers of inhabited/ uninhabited houses, numbers of families occupying them, numbers of people (male/female) with a very basic breakdown of their occupations, and information about numbers of baptisms, marriages and burials.  Initially, some parishes declined to participate, and there were therefore always gaps in the data collected. However, over time there was a better understanding of the benefits to the nation of having this information and support, along with completion rates, grew.

Unfortunately, it is believed that only 791 returns for individual parishes have survived. These are listed in a publication published by University of Essex Department of History, which is available free of charge online:
Authors: Richard Wall, Matthew Woollard and Beatrice Moring
Title: Census schedules and listings, 1801-1831: an introduction and guide
The document includes the whereabouts of all known surviving returns.

At Brigham Young University, the Family History students have started to extract the data from the surviving returns from these four censuses. They are using this to create a free, searchable database of all the pre-1841 census returns that contain named individuals: the Early British and Irish Census Project.

It’s still early days for this project, and this is why I postponed writing about it for a few months. However, there’s enough information on there now for us to be able to see how we will be able to make use of it. There are presently two different websites. The original is https://ebc.byu.edu/ . Reflecting the inclusion of Irish data, this will become https://ebic.byu.edu/ . However, at the time of writing both websites are online, and actually there is currently more information on the original version.

As I write this, the following records have been transcribed:
Number of Parish Extractions: 425
Number of Parish Verifications: 384
Number of Households Today: 172,129
Number of Individuals Today: 271,623

This is across all four censuses, so there is a long way to go. However, you can try your own searches and see if any of your parishes have been included.

You can search by First name; Surname; Census Year; Parish/Town; County; and Household Occupation, which is Trade, Agriculture, Neither or Not Given. The name you will search for is the head of household: that is the only name included.

You don’t need to complete all fields. Given the gaps in coverage I’ve found it works well for me simply by searching by County and then scrolling through to see if any of my parishes of interest are included. You can click on the parish to find out more about it, the route taken by the enumerator, and about the condition of the documentation.

Search terms must be exact, so you may need to try several different spellings.

For example, I searched for “Middlesex”, leaving everything else blank. Since I wasn’t sure if my family of interest remained within one parish, I then narrowed down the county level returns not by parish but by surname. The surname in question was “Groves” but I’ve seen it as “Graves” and also without the final “s”, so I needed to do four separate surname searches: “Groves”; “Graves”; “Grove”; “Grave”. I didn’t find my family. It’s possible that the students on this project haven’t yet got around to the relevant parishes, but it’s equally possible that the data for the parishes where this family lived didn’t survive.

Another of my searches was for “Yorkshire”. I then simply scrolled down the parishes (there are a lot more on the earlier version of the website) and looked at all the ones where I have known ancestry. In Huntington, in 1821, I found the family of my 4x great grandfather Thomas Cass.

As you can see, there is very little information, but I can see there is one family in the household, and this comprises 2 males (not all ‘men’) and 4 females (not all ‘women’). The only name given is Thomas Cass, the head of household. Comparing this to my tree, I see this is Thomas and his wife Ann, plus four of their children: Thomas, Hannah, Ann, Sarah. The children are aged 1 to 6 years, so definitely not adults. Two more children are yet to be born, and these include my own 3x great grandmother. Armed with this small amount of information, I can confirm that this is the household of my 4x great grandfather rather than my 5x great grandfather of the same name. However, there is one discrepancy. In 1823 Thomas is listed in the Baines Directory as the victualler of the White Horse inn in Huntington, yet here his occupation is given as ‘Farm’. Did Thomas farm land alongside running the White Horse? Or had he not yet taken on the inn? That’s something to explore if I get the opportunity. Which just goes to show that even a sparse document might have a tiny piece of information that, together with everything else you know, might develop your knowledge.

I hope you find this useful – both now, and certainly into the future. The University of Essex online book (Wall et.al., linked above) is of course an excellent resource, but for the many of us who live some distance from our ancestral places of interest, popping in to the relevant archives or library takes a lot of time and advance planning, so Brigham Young University’s Early British and Irish Census Project will be a welcome addition. Fingers crossed we will all have at least one parish whose 1801-1831 census listings have survived!

A few experiments using AI for genealogy

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Several weeks back I wrote about getting started with using AI for genealogy. Today I have a couple of examples of my own experimenting with using Artificial Intelligence. As emphasised in that previous post, I have some definite red lines: I have mixed feelings about AI and am unhappy about its use in faking information. I’m also not interested on any level in having AI do the writing for me. I enjoy the writing part; but you may not, and that could be something for you to explore.

Generating an image from a physical description
My first experiment is to use a very detailed physical description of a long-deceased family member to try to create an image. Ideally, I would have both a very detailed official physical description and also a photograph of the same person so I can compare. A number of men in my direct line and siblings of direct line served in the British forces, and I do have photos of most of them. However, the physical descriptions are quite sparse. I also have physical descriptions of two ancestral family members who were in prison. One of these is accompanied by a photo dated around 1870 but again the physical description is quite minimalist. However, the physical description attached to the file of an ancestral cousin who was transported is amazing. His name is Benjamin Lucas. The description was written in 1834 and Benjamin died in 1840, so there is unfortunately no photograph to confirm or otherwise the accuracy of any resulting images.

This is Benjamin’s description. It is the fullest description I’ve ever seen on any prison or army record.

Physical description of a transported convict named Benjamin Lucas. The form is filled in by the hand common in 1834 and includes height, age, complexion, colour of hair, eyes, etc.
Tasmania Convict Records 1800-1893. Description List CON18/1

This is the text I used to generate the image: “Poor man age 43, dressed in clothes of 1834, with fresh complexion, small head, reddish hair and beard, oval face, medium high forehead, very light eyebrows with wrinkles between, grey eyes, large nose, medium wide mouth, small chin.”

I intended to use several free ‘text to image’ AI generators but found some difficult to navigate or unable to process such a lengthy instruction. I didn’t want to pay for any app at this experimentation stage. Eventually I achieved two initial images using Adobe Express. See below.

What do you think? I think the first one looks like Jean Valjean long after he was prisoner number 24601, when safely installed in Montreuil-sur-Mer as the mayor, but facially, and in poorer clothes – perhaps he could be my Benjamin.

Image of a man aged about 43, with a red beard and grey hair, wearing clothes of around 1834. The image was generated using AI.
AI generated image using Adobe Express

Or this one?

Image of a man aged about 43, with grey hair and beard, wearing clothes of around 1834. The image was generated using AI.
AI generated image using Adobe Express

I then changed the wording slightly to separate out the reddish hair and the reddish beard, leaving all other text the same. This was the result. I think he looks too young and, based on my research, lacks Benjamin’s disenchantment with life and his smoking and alcohol habits.

Image of a man aged about 43, with red hair and beard, wearing clothes of around 1834. The image was generated using AI.
AI generated image using Adobe Express

In my mind, before doing this, my image of Benjamin looked like these self-portraits of Vincent Van Gogh, only with less obviously red hair. Vincent was only 37 when he died, so just six years younger than when Benjamin’s physical description was noted. There is a ‘furtive’ look here that I like.

Self portrait by Vincent Van Gogh painted 1887. The image is painted using definite lines of colour. The man is wearing a grey felt hat and a blue jacket.
Vincent Van Gogh: Portrait with grey felt hat. 1887. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

In this second self portrait by Van Gogh I homed in on the ‘haunted’ expression. Earlier, practising with a different app on my iPad, I asked for generation of an image based on this portrait ‘but with less defined cheekbones’. I was told my request contravened user standards! Oh dear…. I feel like a marked woman!

Self portrait by Vincent Van Gogh painted 1887. Everything but the face is painted using large dots of colour. The face looks worn-out and world-weary.
Vincent Van Gogh: Self Portrait 1887. Chicago art Institute

I don’t know what to make of this, and I don’t really see a use for it in my own research, but perhaps you will. See, what I really want is the face of Jean Valjean at the top, wearing the clothes of Van Gogh and his grey hat, and with the furtive look of Vincent #1 and the world-weariness of Vincent #2.

There’s a Canadian programme we’ve been watching via ‘Walter Presents’ on UK Channel 4 called The Sketch Artist (original French title ‘Portrait-Robo’) who achieves impossibly accurate images of perpetrators using AI, targetted questioning and her own artistry, and I was hoping for similar results, but there you are… she is a fictional TV character and I can’t compete. 🙂

Using AI to transcribe historical documents
I will admit to having high hopes for this, but my initial experimentation came to nothing! Neither of the two seventeenth century documents I uploaded could be transcribed. 😦
This is going to take more research on my part, and I’ll return to it in a future blog post when I’ve done that. In the meantime, if you’ve had success with using AI for transcriptions, any website or App recommendations will be very useful and much appreciated.

Finally, an example that turns using AI on its head
As part of a project called The Material Culture of Wills, a team at Exeter University is inviting volunteers to work alongside them in the transcription of 25,000 wills dating from 1540-1790. The research aims to explore how ownership of and attitudes towards objects changed during this period of economic transformation. However, the opportunity is also being seized to ‘train’ AI to read archaic handwriting, creating a huge data sample that will be available to the public. Volunteers are invited to proof read the work of the AI. You can find out more about it [here] and get started with proof reading. At the time of writing this, progress is well under way but very little on the earlier documents.

You can see [here] an example of what volunteers are being asked to do. The line underscored in red has been transcribed, and that transcription is shown below. You are asked to check the transcription and either agree it or amend it. If you can’t do it you simply refresh the page and get a different image. It’s quick and easy to do and you can do as many or as few as you like in whatever time you have available. The system gives the same image for checking to several volunteers, so there’s no need to worry about making an odd mistake. This is not using AI for yourself, but rather in helping AI to create better transcriptions (e.g. it is currently having trouble using capital letters) you will be practising your own paleography skills.

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I’d be very interested to hear if you have successfully used AI for your own genealogy research, or if you’ve had success with different apps and packages from the two I’ve mentioned above. Please leave a comment if you have.

Using AI for genealogy

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I’m still not able to use my left arm for very much following breaking my wrist several weeks back, so today’s post is deliberately ‘typing light’. It’s a beginner’s level introduction to using Artificial Intelligence for genealogy.

I have to admit to having mixed feelings about Artificial Intelligence. I’m unhappy about its use in faking information, and about products of AI being passed off as someone’s work, for example using it to create an image, a video or a text without making clear that’s how the piece was created. In photography, for example, this seems to be devaluing genuine talent, when accusations of ‘fake!’ are called for an image that a fellow photographer can clearly see has been achieved through skill, planning and use of top-notch equipment.

That said, as genealogists working online, we already benefit from aspects of AI. Hints, Stories, Thrulines and Theories of Relativity, for example, are all brought to us courtesy of AI. Based on these, what we can say is that AI is useful but it is only a starting point. It must be used with caution. We must analyse and verify the information presented to us, but having done so it can be a great help.

The following FindMyPast video with Blaine Bettinger is a good introduction to how we might use AI more widely in genealogy. In the video, Blaine and Jen Baldwin introduce ways we can use it. They also set down a few guidelines:

  • AI is not the same as ‘Google’. It deals with words, not facts
  • In research, it’s useful as a starting point – for brainstorming
  • It’s like a torch, shining a light to guide us towards relevant information; our job then is to decide what’s relevant, what’s not, and where we need more information
  • Since it’s a new area, there remain concerns about its use: bias, ethics, plagiarism and copyright issues

Although that video is a good introduction to the themes, we need more information about practical ways to use it. In the follow-on video the same people discuss useful ‘prompts’. A prompt is what is written to outline the precise output the user is seeking. Prompts can be refined to move closer to the desired outcome. Through these example prompts, Blaine gives us an idea of how we could use AI. Some of them may not appeal to you at all; others might. It’s about each of us finding how AI could work for us – how it might help.

Those two videos are more than a year old, and it’s clear that a year is a long time in AI. However, they are useful starting points.

If this is something you’d like to explore there are two Facebook groups you might like to join:

AI Help for Genealogy (UK) is, obviously, UK based. It’s run by the same people who run DNA help for Genealogy (UK)

Genealogy and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is Blaine Bettinger’s group and is US based.

You will quickly realise that everyone on the groups is still learning. Some are further along the line than others. A lot of the posts seem to be from people reporting on an experiment they’ve carried out to see how well AI can cope with a particular prompt or a particular approach.

There is also a podcast series: The Family History AI Show with Mark Thompson and Steve Little comes highly recommended and is bang up to date with the latest developments.

In my next post I’ll include some small experiments of my own. I’m very much at the starting point here. I’d like to find ways to make AI work for me, but I have some definite red lines, and other areas where I’m not sure how the output would be any better than simply doing it myself. I, for example, would never use AI for writing; and there are some research tasks in which I believe the time spent working on a document help me to get an in-depth understanding of a family. Simply reading a list of statements about its content wouldn’t give me that deep-dive familiarisation.

Have you used AI? Do leave a comment with your experiences.

‘Records about our ancestors should be free.’ Discuss!

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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!