Around Britain
Jonathan Scott returns to Lancashire, a county preparing for reopening
A complete guide to researching family in Lancashire
We caught up with the team at Lancashire Archives in mid-June, when, despite the lockdown, staff were still helping the family history community with all sorts of remote research. Indeed archivist Keri Nicholson had just been dealing with someone struggling to confirm a possible baptism match for the name Stephenson from the late 1700s.
She managed to prove a connection thanks to a quick search in the archive’s quartersession court records, which include a removal order from 1801 for one Edward Stephenson, a ropemaker, his wife Mary and their five children from Skerton to Sutton, three miles north of Hull.
A Burden On The Parish
“Under the Old Poor Law, financial relief was based on place of settlement,” she explains. “If a family needed poor relief but did not have a legal settlement where they were living, the overseers of the poor would order their removal back to their place of settlement. So it appears the Stephenson family may have attempted to start a new life in Lancashire, but were sent back to Yorkshire when they ran into financial difficulties. Edward remained there for the rest of his life, initially following his father into the ropemaking trade.”
Lancashire’s quarter session records are a rich source for researching people and places. For example, land tax records (1781– 1832) list all those paying taxes in a particular township; petitions give details of those asking the authorities for help of different kinds; documents list oaths taken by Roman Catholics and nonconformists; there’s a report of an early football riot in 1679; a register of fashionable citizens paying a tax on hair powder in the late 18th century; and lists of residents in private asylums.
Going back to basics, a good free starting point for remote researchers is Lancashire BMD ( lancashirebmd.org.uk) which gives access to local indexes to civil registration records of birth, marriage and death, in many cases also including links for online ordering. Transcriptions of parish registers can also be accessed free of charge via the Lancashire Online Parish Clerks project ( lanopc.org.uk), while images of many of the county’s parish registers are available via both ancestry.co.uk and findmypast.co.uk.
“We’re working closely with FamilySearch ( familysearch.org) and Ancestry to make more of our collections available online. New additions over the next year or so should include marriage bonds for the Archdeaconry of Richmond (Lancashire north of the River Ribble, as well as parts of Cumbria and Yorkshire), electoral registers and records of the Home Guard in the Second World War.”
As of mid-June the archive had no confirmed date for reopening. However, plans are already in place for the post-lockdown world including a new advancebooking system, separate morning and afternoon research sessions, and preordering of documents. In the future visitors will have to use the new Archives Card from the Archives & Records Association,
‘FamilySearch and Ancestry are putting more of our collections online’
the archive will close over lunch so that desks can be cleaned, and all archival material will be quarantined for a time after use. Also, the number of researchers who can view archive material simultaneously will be restricted.
Meanwhile archive staff, mainly working from home, have been digitising sound recordings, typing up manuscript catalogues and transcripts of oral recordings, uploading volunteer spreadsheets to the catalogue, and improving descriptions of church registers.
Archiving Lockdown Life
“The information about our collections has never been better,” Keri reports. “We have also launched a Lancashire Covid-19 collection and are receiving lots of diaries, poems and photographs from local people.”
Lancashire holds some amazing resources for family historians. Church of England parish collections date back to the 16th century and include registers, churchwardens’ accounts, Poor Law documents, apprenticeship records and parish magazines. As a diocesan record office it also has church court records, marriage bonds and probate material covering the ‘old’ (pre-1974) county of Lancashire to 1858.
“This contains details of over 300,000 testators, and many wills reveal information about beneficiaries and other relations.”
Other name-rich collections include records for the six Lancashire asylums from 1818 to the 1990s; a collection of crew lists for ships registered at Preston, Lancaster and Fleetwood; coroners’ records; records of police officers and criminals; school records; and manorial records.
“Many of these names are indexed and listed in our online catalogue, LANCAT ( archivecat. lancashire.gov.uk). Thanks to the valiant efforts of our dedicated volunteers, more names are
added regularly so it’s always worth checking the catalogues. We’ve also completed our will index, which contains about 300,000 bundles of probate papers dating from the early
1500s to 1858.
“Whittingham Hospital was not only one of the largest asylums in Europe, but also one of the largest employers in the Preston area. Staff records survive, and indexes are about to appear on our catalogue thanks to volunteer projects.”
Unique to Lancashire is the archive of the Honour of
Clitheroe – records of the old manorial system that lasted into the 20th century. “Huge volumes detailing land transactions are accompanied by indexes of names, which are now listed on our catalogue making it possible to trace families in East Lancashire through many generations.” Among the other collections are the records of Platt Saco Lowell, which made machinery used in textile manufacturing; Abbott and Co., whose stained glass adorns churches from Lancashire to the Indian subcontinent; Baxi, a boiler manufacturer founded in Chorley in 1866 by Richard Baxendale; Simpson’s Gold Thread Works of Preston; Star Paper Mill of Blackburn; and Fryer and Co. of Nelson, which made Victory V lozenges.
As historic Lancashire was larger than the current administrative area, many parts of ‘old’ Lancashire – including Manchester, Liverpool, Oldham, Rochdale and Bury – have their own archive service, as does part of southern Cumbria now covered by Cumbria Archive Service.
Finally, those with Irish roots should check a collection of local records of ‘vagrants’ on Ancestry.
Keri says: “During the early 19th century, large numbers of Irish migrants were forcibly removed from different parts of England and Wales, back to Ireland. Liverpool, then in Lancashire, was one of the main ports through which they left. We have registers for the period 1801–1835 which give details of these Irish deportees.”