Your Projects
Rosemary Collins finds out more about the work of a project uncovering the forgotten records of early workhouse history
Uncovering the records of early workhouse history
Those of us who have traced our ancestors to the workhouse probably associate it with the fate of the paupers, who were so destitute that they were forced to rely on the parish authorities for charity. But thanks to the work of volunteers, a major research project is now shedding light on a lesser-known aspect of workhouse history – the local tradespeople who provided the houses with goods and services.
The Poor Law: Small Bills and Petty Finance 1700 to 1834 project ( thepoorlaw.org) is uncovering the overlooked stories found in overseers’ vouchers. Under the Old Poor Law, which was in force until the reforms of 1834, the workhouse overseer would write down a record whenever the parish incurred a debt, creating a valuable pre-census resource for the names of the midwives, tailors, workhouse mistresses, butchers and other local businesspeople whom the parish relied on.
Prof Alannah Tomkins of Keele University, the project’s founder, realised that the vouchers were an “untapped mass of material” during her PhD studies, but it wasn’t until 2015 that she began the first phase of the project at Staffordshire Record Office, establishing a group of volunteers to help transcribe them. In 2018, she secured funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to extend the project, teaming up with the University of Sussex and starting additional volunteer groups at The Keep in Brighton and Cumbria Archive Service in Carlisle. Alannah chose these record offices not just because they all have surviving collections of vouchers but to ensure a representative geographic spread.
“We have the South, the Midlands and the North covered, and we have coastal and inland communities,” Alannah says. “We have towns versus little rural places. I could have chosen Surrey or Kent, which both have thousands and thousands of vouchers, but I didn’t want to base the decision solely on the vouchers’ survival and trample the same old ground. Instead, I wanted to give other places a look-in as well.”
Every week, groups of volunteers have been getting together at each record office to transcribe the data in the records. Many of them have taken their research further by looking up the individuals in other genealogical sources, and sharing the fascinating stories of their lives on the project’s blog.
One set of records from Cumberland, for example, reveals the story of Joseph Shields (1795– 1858), a yeoman, schoolmaster and grocer. The vouchers show that he was paid to tutor four boys of the parish and three girls from the local factory between 1835 and 1836.
Alannah describes one case uncovered by her colleague Dr Louise Falcini of the University of
‘We have the South, the Midlands and the North covered, and coastal and inland communities’
Sussex: “She has been unpacking the receipts of a parish called East Hoathly which benefits not just from having all these little scraps of paper but also having a diary that was written by a man called Thomas Turner, who was both a shopkeeper and an overseer of the poor for stretches of time in the 1760s and 1770s. So she’s been able to pair the receipts with his diary to tell some really rich stories.
“For example, she’s got a case of a pauper marriage taking place. If you just looked at the accounts you’d think, ‘This poor woman! She’s got pregnant, and she’s been made to marry the man who she had sex with.’ It could look like she was simply the victim. But when you put the diary and the receipts together, it’s quite probable that this couple were together anyway and wanted to try to get the maximum out of the parish at the point of their marriage. They do actually get a ring, a licence, loads of beef… there’s a material exchange where they keep saying yes and then no. It’s a whole saga.”
The Power Of Volunteering
Alannah also stresses that the project wouldn’t have been possible without the work of volunteers. “It’s just become an excellent project for establishing a three-way dialogue between the archives, the volunteers and the project. The archives essentially get two benefits: footfall and additions to their catalogues. The volunteers, who unpack all the stuff in the records that is fairly dense and impenetrable, know that whenever they’re transcribing they’re contributing to what we’re writing about the Old Poor Law. And this is the kind of project that we couldn’t have done without crowdsourcing – the volume of material would be unmanageable otherwise. It would probably drive you completely mad if all you did for three years was put these bits of data into a database. So it’s a treble win really.”
Thankfully, this important research continues despite the coronavirus lockdown. Alannah and the other project staff were able to prepare by photographing the documents so that their volunteers can transcribe them from home, but they all miss the social element of volunteering: “We used to sit round a table, and chat about other stuff as well as what we were doing for the project. We could also compare notes, so if we couldn’t read something, we’d pass it round the room and ask, ‘Can anybody work out what this says?’ Of course, you can do it at one remove online by emailing somebody for a second opinion, but it’s not the same as being able to chew over it together in person.”
Although there is a risk that Covid-19 will delay the project’s completion, Alannah is still hoping to make the transcribed records, containing more than 50,000 lines of data, available to search by the end of the year, and there are plans to publish the records on a major genealogical website. “You might get an entry in a trade directory and then a burial, and think, ‘Well, what happened in between?’ Our records provide the missing piece of the puzzle.”