LEARNING ABOUT THE RECORDS
Chris Paton’s master-class guide to assessing the what & where of records
There are many factors that can affect how family history research might be carried out, but the greatest enemies that most of us will face within our ancestral pursuits are ignorance and prejudices about the collections we seek to use. One of the most useful skills that we can acquire as aspiring historians is to determine when such obstacles are real, and when they are blockages that we may have placed in the way ourselves, subconsciously, inadvertently, and at times because we simply do not fully understand the records that we are examining.
So many records have been digitised and placed online now that we can be easily seduced into the habit of simply looking for hits on a database, and then conclude that if the information we seek is not found then it must not have been recorded. Alternatively, if we do locate something, we may be seduced into thinking that this is all that there is to be found. This may or may not be the case, but simply trusting that the companies hosting the records have placed everything online concerning a particular topic is a very bad habit to get into. Similarly, for records that are held in archives and libraries which have not been digitised, it can be a folly to trust that an institution holds all the records from a particular source, when there may be other repositories holding additional materials.
Exploring the vital records
Perhaps the most important records that we use to construct our ancestors’ relationships to one another are the vital records of births, marriages, and deaths. In the UK and Ireland we can broadly divide these collections into two categories, being the more recent records of civil registration as gathered by the state from the mid-19th century, and then the earlier records that have been gathered by churches. Consideration of how such records
are recorded, and where they fit into the grander scheme of things, can often affect our research approach.
Again, we need to consider the quality of the information recorded – just because something is recorded by a civil registrar in a record does not mean that it is accurate or complete. When my father recently passed away, I had to inform the local registrar about his death and was advised that I could only record one occupation for him. He had many jobs in his life, but the two most dominant were as a submariner and as a train guard. I selected submariner (retired), because that typified how he saw himself throughout his life, and was the career he held the longest, even though he had left the Royal Navy in 1978. For many years, I had joked with him that when the time eventually came, I might even record him as a ‘farmer’, due to his love of the game Farmville – whilst I did not fall to such temptation in the end, you can be sure that in similar circumstances others might!
When informants are misinformed…
Informants may be constrained in what can be recorded, but it may also be the case that their supplied information is wrong. When my grandfather Charles Paton passed away in 1987, my late aunt told a registrar in Northern Ireland that he had been born in Inverness on 24 May 1904, when he was in fact born on 24 May 1905 in Brussels, Belgium. It was not a malicious misrepresentation, so why suggest Inverness? As a child, Charles had spent some time in Inverness, and attended school for there for a couple of years; at the start of World War II, his mother Jessie and his sister had relocated from Glasgow back to Inverness, where Jessie was originally
Simply trusting that the companies hosting the records have placed everything online concerning a particular topic is a very bad habit to get into
from. Whilst the information given to the registrar was inaccurate, there was clearly still a reason for it, with some understanding of a connection to the city, in itself a potentially valuable clue about his early life. I eventually found the correct date of birth as supplied by Charles himself in the National Identity Register in Belfast in 1939. He was the informant, there was no better man to know!
When it comes to church records, a variety of problems can also emerge. There is again the question of the quality of the information recorded to consider, because even though we might think of parish registers as being ‘primary’ sources, this may not always be the case. In some parishes, events were sometimes recorded into rough notebooks or memorandum books first, and later copied into registers, with errors or omissions introduced.
There is also a popular understanding of each parish having its own ‘parish church’, but the reality is that parishes across both Ireland and Britain were host to a soup of religious denominations that emerged and disappeared across time. Each parish had its state church, accompanied or challenged by a range of nonconformists,
Just because something is recorded by a civil registrar in a record does not mean that it is accurate or complete
dissenters and other faiths. For some denominations there was not even a church for parts of their existence – the Methodist Church for example, having emerged from the Church of England, employed a series of local classes and societies, grouped into ‘circuits’ taking in much wider areas, whilst in Catholic Ireland, during the period of the Penal Laws prior to 1829, there was a particularly hostile climate against the church and poor administration within it.
Which records exist for each area?
To understand what records exist for a particular area, and were recorded by whom, we need to carry out some background research into the history and make-up of that area. The best way to do so is to consult local gazetteers, directories or parish histories, and to then try to look for the relevant record sets for each denomination identified. Such records may be digitised and easily found online, but some may be based in an archive, requiring research into catalogues to locate.
Being based in Scotland, I am often contacted by people stating that they cannot find a baptism or marriage on Scotlandspeople (www. scotlandspeople.gov.uk) before civil registration started in 1855, and they cannot understand why. There could be many possible reasons for this. It may be that the record is there and has been mis-indexed. It may be that the record is there, but not at a time when you expect – a good example of this lies with the fact that the Stamp Duties Act led to many baptisms not being recorded between 1783-1794 because parents would have to pay three pence for the privilege to do so. When the act was rescinded, a flurry of baptismal entries suddenly appear for children born in that period, meaning that a child born in the early 1780s may not have been recorded as baptised until the mid-1790s.
It may be that the record has simply not survived. A way to determine this is to consult the guide denoting surviving coverage of the Church of Scotland’s Old Parish Registers, available at http://familytr.ee/ coverage And just for good measure if you go to the very bottom of this page, you will also note that Appendix 1 contains details of a small number of records of births, marriages and deaths recorded in kirk session records, which are now being released on the Scotlandspeople website at www. scotlandspeople.gov.uk.
Of course, this is simply consideration of the Church of Scotland’s OPRS on Scotlandspeople. What if your ancestor was of another
denomination? There are categories on the site providing access to ‘Catholic Parish Registers’ (CPRS) and ‘Other Churches’, but do you know what these mean, or how complete they are? Whilst Scotlandspeople has about a million entries for the Roman Catholic Church, Findmypast (www. findmypast.co.uk) already hosts twice that amount, with yet more to come. The ‘Other Churches’ category hosts records from some dissenting presbyterian denominations which split from the Church of Scotland and later rejoined, but these are not complete. And on top of all of this, there are entire denominations missing from Scotlandspeople, perhaps the most notable being the records of the Scottish Episcopal Church.
So why does Scotlandspeople not hold Scottish Episcopal records? Quite simply because as the platform providing records from the National Records of Scotland, it can only add records held by the National Records of Scotland – and the NRS holds very little by way of episcopal records. (The Catholic records are an exception because of an agreement with the Scottish Catholic Archives to host them). The point here is that you really need to understand the nature of the platforms on which such records are found, and why some records might appear, and others not.
Newspaper research
This issue of a collection’s completeness can be found in many other sources. Take newspapers as an example. The growth over the last decade of sites such as the
British Newspaper Archive (www.
britishnewspaperarchives.co.uk), as well as the many titles that were previously microfilmed through the British Library’s Newsplan project, has absolutely opened up a huge repository of material for our needs. If a story we believe to have been published in a particular newspaper cannot be found through these means, does this mean that we are perhaps looking in the wrong title, or that it perhaps was never printed?
Not necessarily. Let us first cast aside for now the most obvious consideration that what is online and what has been microfilmed remains a drop in the ocean compared to what the British Library actually holds at its newspaper repository at Boston Spa in Yorkshire (www.bl.uk/visit/reading
rooms/boston-spa), not to mention within other archives. Quite separate to this are other considerations to take into account with the materials that have been made more easily available for access. The following is a good example from some research I carried out over ten years ago for a client.
I was asked to find a specific series of weekly articles from the late 1930s in a Glasgow based newspaper called the Evening Times, entitled ‘Viewpoints of Scotland’, which concerned trigonometry points found at the top of many hills across the country which have been used to help determine their heights, and from which the distance to other notable features in the landscape may have been recorded. My client had one example from a series of twenty articles; could I find the others?
I visited the Mitchell Library in Glasgow and called up the microfilm in question, thinking it would be a relatively straightforward affair to locate them. After two hours of finding nothing, bar a letter thanking the editor for publishing the series (!), I asked the librarian if I could perhaps see the original bound volume of the title in question. I was amusingly advised that this was not necessary, as the records had been microfilmed! After explaining my predicament, I was eventually able to view the volume, and with ten minutes had found all twenty articles in the series.
So, what had been the problem? The articles had been published each Saturday, but when the newspaper was microfilmed, those photographing the collection opted to image only the
Final Editions or Extra Final Editions of copies that had been published from that day. In every case the final edition retained little from the earlier versions, other than the first couple of pages of news, with the rest of the copy subsequently given over to coverage of the day’s sporting events. It transpired that the Viewpoints articles were published in the first run of the paper on a Saturday only, and then removed from subsequent later editions. Thankfully the bound volumes of the newspapers contained every version of the title from that day, and thus I was soon able to locate the desired articles.
This is not the only problem with newspapers. On websites such as the British Newspaper Archive, the story you are seeking may well be where you think it is, but is not being picked up in searches because the technology used to index the content (called Optical Character Recognition) has simply not recognised some of the words when digitised. It is sometimes possible to locate the article in question by using a different search term – an address instead of a person’s name, for example. But even then, some stories are still missed because they have been scanned from a large bound volume, and having appeared right in the middle where the pages curve inwards to the spine, they have been distorted when photographed, with the OCR technology simply unable to make sense of the curved words presented. Sometimes forgetting about doing a search at all can be a better approach, with browsing the full page in question a much more productive strategy, but even then, you may still encounter problems.
Be prepared for potential pitfalls…
This example considering newspaper research typically flags up so many issues found in other documentary collections and types found elsewhere. What is actually included in a collection, how has it been photographed or digitised, and what are the flaws in the technologies that have been employed to try to make them more accessible, and which do not always succeed? Armed with an idea about the potential pitfalls in the processes employed to make records more accessible, you can adapt your approach to carry out different strategies to try to locate particular records of interest, and become a better researcher as a consequence.
In short, interrogate your sources, learn about their strengths and weaknesses, and you will soon be able to better control your research process!