Tracing Your Trade and Craftsmen Ancestors
By Adèle Emm
(Pen & Sword, 224 pages, £14.99)) Anyone who has ever had the need to find out more about their r forebears in any profession will bee familiar with the problem of extracting specific information from the ever-growing galaxy of often confusing websites. Trade-related books can sometimes be just as bewildering, making it difficult to sift out the specific facts that we need to make sense of ancestors and their trades.
There’s long been the need for a single written reference source that eliminates the time-consuming task of hopping from one website to another or searching through numerous books but now Adèle Emm has succeeded in providing such a resource.
This very readable illustrated book brings together virtually everything a family historian might need to pin down and research vital traderelated genealogical facts.
Not only are the contents helpful and informative but the book is well-structured – you can either read it from cover to cover or alternatively just dip into it when the need arises. It’s packed with lots of useful suggestions, including the best websites that might prove useful in finding all the vital records referring to an individual trade. More to the point, the author presents essential hard facts interspersed with fascinating anecdotes, interesting stories, historical notes and general information – a format that is rarely found in other genealogy books.
Whether you need to know about an ancestor’s working hours, wage scales, pension facts, union membership or even holiday periods, this book will provide many of the answers you need. Regardless of whether our forerunners were gentleman mercers, gifted craftsmen, trade apprentices, ordinary shopkeepers or humble labourers, this well thought out guide deserves a prominent place on any family historian’s bookshelf.
Colin Waters is a social historian and
freelance writer.