What follows is derived from my own trials and tribulations, joys and Eureka! moments as both a student historian and as someone researching their own family history. My hope is that what I have learnt from using historical sources can in some way help others also happily absorbed by the past doings and beings of their families. My posts on this subject will concentrate on the difficulties that we all encounter at some point. For many of us, several "walls" arise to block our forward - or backward - progress, some of which seem absolutely impenetrable. I have at least four such blockages along the main lines of my family. The frustrations are real and derive from really existing problems in the sources and in the ways our ancestors lived their lives.

Over the next few posts I intend to examine some of the problems that beset family historical research, particularly as it relates to English and Welsh records (they are the family records with which I am most familiar). However, the issues I raise are surely not restricted to the historical records of these geographical areas. First I want to take an overview of general historical records as they have related to the majority of the population. Then in this post I'll examine the specific information in BMD certificates and its potential unreliability. Next time I'll look at the Censuses.

Where to begin? Well, when it comes to finding written records about most of our ancestors, the best sources available to us come not, unfortunately, directly from their own pens but from those of the Upper and Upper-Middling Classes. Until the latter half of the 19th century in England and Wales, most amongst the Labouring Classes were illiterate, or, at the very least, could not write. Children of both sexes began their labouring lives as early as eight, even after legislation prohibiting it. (The legislation focussed on factories and mills; small and family workshops where many also children worked were hardly affected.) Moreover, there was no system of publicly funded elementary education; and such schools as existed (dames' schools, for instance) were cheap but not free. Labouring families were in a bind: without the income earning labour of their children they could not afford the cost of the schools. So at best many children had only a few months of schooling in which they may or may not have picked up some reading skills before their life of work began. And at many schools in rural areas the children were learning a "trade" such as strawplaiting rather than the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic. In the official records of the day, the signatures of our uneducated or semi-educated ancestors were 'X' followed or suprascripted by the registrar's provision of their names. Even where an ancestor has signed his or her name there is little guarantee that that indicates full literacy. As we shall see, the lack of literacy on the part of those whose births, marriages or deaths were being registered or whose existence was being counted in a census affects the records.

As early as the late eighteenth century in Britain, Gentlemen had been making it their business to test the temperature of the populace at large. The French Revolution and its influences on English Republicanism, the growing disturbances in rural areas and small manufacturing areas (often one and the same place) in the forms of Ludd and of Swing, and later, of Chartism, the evolving industrial revolution with attendant developing gender sensibilities among an emergent manufacturing class, all caused the the few with money, power and in authority to be wary of the unwashed multitudes. The first decades of the nineteenth century saw several Parliamentary enquiries into What the Labourers were Up To and What Could Be Done About Them and Their Behaviour. Consequently, Parliamentary Papers provide rich pickings for historians who seek to know not only about how rural workers in, say, Gloucestershire lived, but also what some of them had to say about their work, living conditions and the labour of others. Of course, these sources are hardly unadulterated or unfiltered, if for no other reason than that the vast majority of the labouring classes accents and dialects would have been unintelligible to the visiting investigators. For the family historian these invaluable sources hold little direct evidence on individual people, unless one of your forebears was among those whose interviews were included in a report. Nevertheless, the reports do provide much background colour and depth for the family historian trying to understand how their ancestors lived and worked. Some reports, for example, contain much collateral information on the living and working conditions of certain groups of workers, particularly in the fields of mining, textiles and agriculture.

Many of these Parliamentary Reports are available in bound volumes, held in places like the National Archives, the British Library and its adjunct institutions in other parts of Britain and possibly in major Public Libraries like the one in central Manchester. It may well be possible to borrow individual volumes through InterLibrary Loan, even through a Public Library. I know that members of universities, students and faculty alike, can gain access to such records via this facility. Other reports are available on microfiche or microfilm; for instance, the 1841 Poor Law Commission: Report of the Special Assistant...on the Employment of women and Children in Agriculture is definitely available in university libraries in the USA on microfiche. If you can get hold of them or copies of them - do. They make for truly fascinating and riveting reading.

Most family historians approach their task by looking for and at familiar records: birth, marriage and death certificates. These public records are the essential building blocks for creating a family history. In England and Wales they only go back to the summer of 1837, when Civil Registration began. Before Civil Registration was initiated the only record of individual life and death events was held in Parish Registers and later in Dissenting sect records. Whether Civil , Parish or Non-Conformist register - the records are incomplete as to content and as to event. And the Parish records only reach back as far as the sixteenth century in a few places, not so far back in most.

Let us deal with Civil Registration first because that is where most of us can and should start. In the first decades of its existence, registration of a Birth was not even compulsory until 1875. Nor was it initially the parents job to report but rather the onus was on the local Registrar to seek out the births. Illness, temperament, lack of communication, poor roads - all could influence any given Registrar's ability to fulfil his duties. As for Marriages, if performed by a minister of the Church of England, were registered automatically because he could and did act as a Registrar. Other denominations' ministers could not. Moreover, among the Labouring Classes unofficial marriages continued to take place; these unions were legitimated by custom and community but not by officialdom. Those who married by common law have left no paper trail of their union, inadvertently denying their descendants a vital piece of the family history jigsaw puzzle. Deaths were supposed to be registered, but not all were. Thus Civil Registration records cannot be completely relied on to provide a full picture of a family's birth, marriage and death history - even when all of the information recorded on those that do exist is accurate.

As for what the certificates themselves can tell us, we need to be aware of two categories of error that can and not infrequently do afflict the certificates. The first category of error belongs to the those men (and they were assuredly men and of the middling to upper-middling sorts) who made the original entries and subsequent copies. And the second category derives from the "registrees" themselves: they frequently lied to the registrars about their ages, about their fathers' names and occupations and the addresses they provided were often those of "convenience" (for the purpose of Banns, for instance).

Let's examine the first category. Remember that many of the people registering births and marriages (we'll ignore deaths for the moment) were illiterate or only semi-literate. The registrars and other registry office workers were not; and they were of a higher social class. Their way of speaking - enunciation, accent, dialect - would rarely coincide with that of the local Labouring Classes. Names could be misheard or misunderstood; different officials could hold (and clearly did hold) varying views about how any given name was spelt. The result was a fairly wide variation in name spelling over the years and across the records. The illiterate registrees would have had no idea how their names were spelt; and the registrars would not have consulted them, in any case, assuming that they anyway knew best. This problem only gets compunded for the poor family history researcher! The photocopy of a certificate that we get from the General Register Office is but a copy of a copy of the original registry entry. At each stage the room for error increased. No handwriting is always and to everyone completely legible. And for some names the range of possibilities seems almost infinite: Reeves is one such name! Think about how many ways you could spell it and you'll see what I mean. It has been, and still can be, exceedingly frustrating and at times has led me to yelling robustly at the website I'm using.

The second category is potentially the more serious for the family historian: the lying or misleading that our ancestors engaged in when giving personal information to registrars. Age first, I think. (This problem also plagues the Censuses.) First and foremost, many people did not know exactly when they were born - that literacy thing again! If you were illiterate, you could not even keep a family record in a Bible, if you owned one. Nor could you have read your own birth certificate, should you have had one and should it have survived the travails and shifts of your life. Secondly, during the 19th century our ancestors did not think it a Good Thing when there was a great age difference between a couple. Quite how many years difference constituted a Bad Thing, I don't know, but maybe five or more and certainly ten or above. It really did not seem to matter to our great-grea-grandparents if the woman or man was the older partner; what mattered was how great the age difference. So people raised or lowered their ages to comply with the prevalent social standard. And of course those of minor age marrying without their parents' knowledge raised theirs to avoid legal constraints.

Name and Occupation of fathers only - here was an another opportunity to lie about or improve upon your background. For those who were born out-of-wedlock, and who had no clue about who their fathers were, not infrequently provided him with a name and a death. Others (like one of my great-grandmothers) created for their fathers what was to them a "posher" occupation (for her: "Coachman") than their real ones (in his case: "Iron Foundry Labourer"). I don't know who my great-grandmother was trying to impress, her husband or the registrar, but the result for me was months of futile searching for a Coachman who fitted the other parameters of his existence. Not that she was responsible for my deciding to dig around the back of the family closets!

The Addresses as given on the marriage certificate can also be fairly unreliable, at least as regards actual origins or residence. To be able to marry in a particular church (and in the 19th century that was where most marriages took place and nothing about the belief patterns of our ancestors can or should be construed from this ubiquity of church weddings; most of the lower levels of the English working classes had long been at the very least secular if not actually atheist) meant having to have an address in the church's parish. Some churches, Manchester Cathedral being one, were cheaper places to hold your wedding in than others; but the same rules of "residence" applied. Hence addresses of convenience - a dwelling which could be named as your place of abode for marriage purposes.

Many among the Labouring Classes did not marry by official means, probably for any number of reasons. The commonest reason for most of these marriages was the virtual impossibility of getting divorced. Common Law marriage allowed Labouring couples to engage in serial monogamy without running into legal problems. Not that all official marriages were between two single people - by no means! Bigamous marriages were not unusual in the 19th century, for the same reason that common law marriages were indeed common. Again in my own family, I can point to a (different) great-grandmother, who married three times; the first time officially, the second time unofficially and the third bigamously, her first and only "legal" husband being still alive in another county. (My link to her is through her second, unofficial marriage.)

So - are we to throw up our hands and say: "There is nothing we can trust!" No. For us as family researchers, we must always be wary of accepting at face value what any of the records tell us. But we are not without tools. Here is where learning something of local, social and national history - with all its complexities of gender and hierarchy and ethnicity - will help a lot. Such a broader and deeper understanding of the general histories of our families' pasts will help us to situate our specific ancestors and thus to better comprehend their lives and sometime lies.

Till next time!