Expert’s choice
Michelle Higgs, author of Tracing Your Medical Ancestors and Life in the Victorian Hospital
“If you’re researching an ancestor who worked as a nurse, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) website is well worth checking ( rcn.org.uk/library/ services/family-history). You’ll find some extremely useful and detailed guides about tracing various types of nurses at different periods, for example pre-registration before 1922 and during wartime, which can all be downloaded in PDF format.
“Another excellent area of the website is the Special Collections section ( rcn.org.uk/library/books-and-journals/specialcollections). Here you can read digitised historical nursing journals, which are rich sources of information about the evolution of the profession. The most valuable sections for family historians might be those that list appointments, retirements, marriages and deaths. You can also find out more about working conditions at the time your ancestor was nursing, issues of the day, and nurses’ pay and pensions.
“The RCN Archives has digitised the whole of the Nursing Record/British Journal of Nursing covering the period 1888–1956 ( Nursing Record was first published in 1888, becoming the British Journal of Nursing from 1902). Family historians can search the database by name or by keyword, and each issue can also be browsed page by page.”