AROUND BRITAIN
Jonathan Scott pays a visit to Cumbria, the third-largest county in England – but one of the least populated
Find your Cumbria forebears
Although most famous for agriculture and the unrivalled beauty of the Lake District, Cumbria was also home to pockets of large-scale heavy industry and working maritime communities. It was created in 1974 from the former counties of Cumberland and Westmorland, plus parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and today consists of six districts: Allerdale, Barrow-in-Furness, Carlisle, Copeland, Eden and South Lakeland.
We last visited Cumbria in August 2013. The county archives, today divided across four centres in Barrow, Carlisle, Kendal and Whitehaven, trace their history back to 1880, when a muniment room in the courts buildings at Carlisle was completed. At this time the work of sorting and cataloguing public records was carried out by a clerk under the direction of the clerk of the peace for Cumberland. In the same year the Corporation of Carlisle also sanctioned the establishment of a muniment room within the Town Clerk’s Office “for the keeping therein of the newly found books and the title deeds of the Corporation”. Then Westmorland’s council established its own archive committee in 1886, which by the late 1930s was overseeing a purpose-built strongroom within the county offices at Kendal.
In 1961 the archives came together – one body overseeing archives for Cumberland, Westmorland and the City of Carlisle, with record offices established in Carlisle and Kendal the following year. Then from April 1974, when modern Cumbria was formed, the archive organisation presided over not only historic Cumberland and Westmorland, but also an area of Furness (‘Lancashire North of the Sands’), and part of the West Riding of Yorkshire around Sedbergh and Dent.
Cumbria Archive Service’s senior archivist Robert Baxter says: “Needless to say we are continually busy – the four offices between them look after some 1,500 cubic metres of original archives (or some 12 miles of records laid end to end), dating from the 12th century to the present day. Even with so much available elsewhere digitally, during 2016–2017 we dealt with over 8,000 visitors, 7,000 email and phone enquiries, produced over 16,000 original archive items and added over 30,000 catalogue entries to our online catalogue!”
All this activity brings us to today, when the record offices are known as archive centres, together amassing records reflecting all aspects of Cumbrian life – churches; schools; businesses; clubs and societies; family and estate archives; photographs; maps; hospitals; Poor Law Unions; and local government, court and taxation records. But obviously with four research venues to choose from, the first important task for researchers new to the area is figuring out what records are held where. So why are there four archive centres?
“The large size of the new county, together with its complex history, local loyalties and geographical challenges – lots of hills and slow roads – almost inevitably inclined towards a decentralised archive service. A branch was opened in Daltonin-Furness in 1976 [relocating to Barrowin-Furness in 1979] and, after several false starts, a West Cumbria Record Office was opened at the old Police Station in Whitehaven in 1996. Most recently, the branch in Carlisle relocated from Carlisle Castle to the new, state-of-the-art Cumbria Archive Centre next to the Grade II-listed Lady Gillford’s House at Petteril Bank, Carlisle.”
And now there are more physical changes afoot. At Kendal
Although famous for agriculture and the Lake District, Cumbria was also home to pockets of large-scale heavy industry
they are having a refurbishment that will result in two new strongrooms, meaning many collections currently held in storage can join the fray, alongside a new searchroom where more manuscript collections will be available; and the Whitehaven Archive and Local Studies Centre is going to be reorganised so that the library, archives, registrars and community learning can all be in the same place.
Kendal closed at the beginning of May for six months, while Whitehaven will shut at the end of the year for 12 months or so.
On the move
“Popular sources, held on microfilm and including parish and nonconformist registers, wills etc, will be relocated to Kendal Library during May where they will be available six days a week including Saturday and Wednesday evenings.”
All four centres have microform copies of some crossCumbrian sources, such as parish registers. Dig a little further down and you’ll soon find specialist collections relating to each area. Cumberland enjoys pretty comprehensive collections of militia lists, for example, which can serve as a proto-census as they include all men between the ages of 18 and 45 “liable to serve”. Whitehaven looks after extensive maritime collections, which include crew agreements.
There are several cataloguing and volunteer indexing projects on the go. Barrow Archive won an award from the National Cataloguing Grants Programme to catalogue the records of
Staff are in the early stages of a project that they hope will see the mass digitisation of name-rich sources
Millom & Askam Hematite Iron Co Ltd and Hodbarrow Mining Co – illustrating the flourishing iron-ore mining and steelmaking industry of Furness in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Meanwhile Whitehaven has catalogued its archives of the Rosehill Theatre, founded in 1959 by industrialist and Hungarian emigré Sir Nicholas Sekers, and an award from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) enabled Kendal to purchase the archive of fellwalking icon Alfred Wainwright.
Robert says: “The project not only enabled cataloguing of the archive but produced a well-used series of educational resources about Wainwright and Lakeland for local schools.”
Finally Carlisle Archives, in just the past few months, has run exhibitions on mental health using the records of the Cumberland and Westmorland Joint Lunatic Asylum, Carlisle (also known as Garlands Mental Hospital); reminiscence events for former employees of biscuit manufacturer Carr’s in Carlisle, based on the company archive held here; and most recently used financial records of the pre-1834 Old Poor Law administrations in Cumberland to create biographies of those named in the records.
If you do a bit more research, you might come across yet more unusual sources, such as mining accident and compensation books, or intriguing entries, such as the marriage register entry for James Wyatt and Mary Steel, which notes that the ceremony was not solemnised because of the “ill conduct” of the drunk bridegroom.
Another odd example, entered for an ‘archive treasures’ event organised by the Archives and Records Association, is a list of peculiar deaths. The document came from the Dickinson family of Lamplugh collection held at Whitehaven (reference DDI/4/53). Robert Baxter explains, “They were an old family from the village of Lamplugh in West Cumbria, and the document purports to be a list of deaths from the Lamplugh parish registers between 1656 and 1663.”
It lists people who died from “Mrs. Lamplugh’s cordial water”, breaking a neck while “robbing a hen roost”, “Kild at Kelton fell races”, “crost in love”, “frighted to death by fairies”, “drownd upon trial for witchcraft”, “led into a horse pond by a will o’ the wisp”, and “overeat himself at a house warming”.
“The causes of death are fairly ridiculous,” says Robert. “And the Lamplugh family – Sir John, the lord of the manor; his wife; and his brother the rector – all come in for a bit of a dig by inadvertently causing the deaths of several villagers! It’s likely the document is a skit, possibly created by a member of the Lamplugh family or someone else with a good knowledge of them in the local community.”
The website and catalogue already have lots of useful guidance and finding aids (see the box ‘Cumbria Online’, page 83). But the best is yet to come: staff are in the early stages of a project that they hope will see the mass digitisation of name-rich sources – parish registers and hopefully more – which would massively improve things for remote researchers.
While there have already been talks with genealogy websites in the past, for now they’re “gathering all the detailed information about our holdings of potential interest to a provider”.
Staff are also working with other archives in the North-West to seek external funding for a collaborative digital platform, similar to Know Your Place West of England ( kypwest.org. uk), Layers of London ( alpha. layersoflondon.org) and Welsh Tithe Maps ( places.library. wales). Such a development would give access to important digitised historic maps and related information held here. They’re currently looking for a consultant to create a bid to submit to the HLF.