Ever since genealogist and historian Janet Few’s book Tracing Your Marginalised Ancestors: a guide for family historians, was published earlier this year, I’ve been looking forward to having the time to read it. I finally got around to it this week.

Our ancestors may have been marginalised for several reasons. Janet deals with the possibilities across eleven chapters: Poverty; Criminality; Immigration and Ethnicity; Prostitution; Illegitimacy; The Inebriate; Sickness and Disability; Mental Ill-Health; The Romany and Traveller Community, Witchcraft; and Other Marginalised Groups. Almost all of us are sure to have ancestors that fall into at least some of those groups.

The Introduction sets the tone of the book. This is not about sensationalising the antics of our ancestors; it’s about understanding what might have been going on in their lives or in the wider society to bring about the situation they found themselves in. For many of the issues, attitudes have changed considerably over the decades/centuries. Indeed, even the language used in relation to groups of people has changed, so that for some of these marginalised groups our own discomfort may be more about the words used and the treatment of individuals than about their lifestyle, condition or behaviours that were so unacceptable in past times. We have all seen, for example, the columns in the earlier censuses for the enumerator to tick if an individual was an ‘Imbecile, Idiot or Lunatic’ – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Janet deals with this very thoughtfully, to the extent that her text was read and edited for ‘sensitivity’ by an expert prior to publication.

This need for sensitivity extends to us too, and to what we do with the information when we’ve discovered it. Older generations may be uncomfortable, embarassed or ashamed when learning of certain ancestral behaviours, and all the more so if they knew the people involved. In the case of my own parents, I realised long ago that, if they were still living, some of the discoveries I’ve made about their ancestors would be off limits for them.

Each chapter/ topic commences with an overview of the issues including the attitudes of the day. Poor people, for example, were blamed for their own poverty and considered lazy. Prostitution was considered a necessary evil, but the women were punished while their male clients were not. Even ill health – which of course led to poverty – was not excusable, since it was considered to be a result of an imbalance of the four humors, and since keeping these in balance was the responsibility of the individual: a belief that was sanctioned by the Church. All of this is important, since we need to understand that the world our ancestors inhabited was often very different to the one we know. We cannot judge them or their society from our standpoint, and the more we learn about their times, the more we will understand their lives.

Following from the above, there is then an overview of the kinds of records that you might find. In general, books published by Pen & Sword for family historians are pitched at a certain level. As beginners we tend to be led by what records are available on our subscription website of choice (Ancestry, FindMyPast, MyHeritage, TheGenealogist…). However, as we progress, we realise that even though the number of records on these websites increases constantly, it is still only a limited amount of what is actually available – and is there only by licence from the relevant archives. We have to turn our thinking on its head. It is no longer a case of ‘I found this on Ancestry’, but ‘These records are lodged at XXX archive and are available on FindMyPast’. It is the location of the originals that is the most important part of our citation, even though we should add that what we viewed was the digital image on a named website. So of course, this is how Janet refers to the types of records available. Sometimes the records are part of a national set and lodged at The National Archives, in which case Janet provides references for the sets. Others, such as Quarter Sessions records, are of uniform application but will be lodged at local county archives. Certain incidents or events will also have been reported in newspapers, which may be available online or locally. Other types of records of a more local nature may or may not have survived, but Janet gives specific examples of the types of records that may hold the information we seek. Knowing what might be possible is then our starting point for browsing the archives’ online catalogues or speaking to the archivist.

Each chapter ends with a case study of an individual whose story has been traced through the relevant records. Some of these case studies demonstrate that sometimes the full story cannot be found – for example in the case of a woman whose range of pseudonyms prevented the location of a definite baptism.

Covering such a range of societal issues, the book is inevitably a starting point for each one. If you want to go further, there is a list of further reading for each chapter, and of course more in-depth books will be found via those.

To conclude, this is a very useful book suitable for anyone who has moved or is ready to move away from the comfort of the subscription website and prepared to look wider and actively seek out records that will help you to progress. The individual chapters are interesting, sensitively dealt with, and the lists of record sets within each chapter will be a useful resource for the future should a particular type of marginalisation come to light within your own ancestry.

Click the image below to find this book on Amazon.co.uk.

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