BOOKS & DIGITAL PICKS
by Sue Wilkes
This month’s family history inspiration
Pen and Sword, 209 pages, £ 8.99
How do you write about a city? Two cities in fact? How do you bring them (in all their multiplicity) within the grasp of the ordinary local or family historian? How do you render their changing history over an extensive period of time – long before and after incorporation – without confusing or boring the reader? How do you keep track of the way records have been created, stored and moved as societies have altered, boundaries have changed, and authorities have come and gone? This book is how.
What makes cities tick? Roads, canals, railways, buses, airports, gas, electricity, parks, gaols, hospitals, factories, banks, entertainment and sport and much more. Each of these has its own history, and its own records. All are cogently covered in this book. Perhaps your ancestor was an Irish migrant who worshipped in a Catholic Church and helped dig the Manchester Ship Canal, or perhaps she was a suffragette from a Methodist family? At whichever intersection of issues he or she stood, you will discover multiple avenues for further exploration in this book.
While Sue Wilkes necessarily foregrounds the technical nuts and bolts of archival and internet research, she also peppers the text with enough tantalising details of life in Manchester and Salford in the past to constantly whet the reader’s historical imagination. For example, in 1754 the so-called 'flying coach' still took four and a half days to reach London from Manchester. There's also the surprising information that mass weddings and christenings were held in the Collegiate Church (later Manchester Cathedral) in the early 19th century and the better-known but still shocking slum housing conditions of the mid-19th century.
Another great achievement of this book is its sensitivity both to the changing world of the internet and to the speed with which archives are digitising records. It is no mean feat to cover what is currently online while acknowledging that much more is yet to come. In short this is a great 'city' of a book and an absolute must for all historians of the region and anyone with an ancestor who lived in the North West.
Ruth Symes is a writer and historian