Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy (51 page)

Suggestions for further reading:

•  My Ancestor Was an Agricultural Labourer
by Ian Waller (Society of Genealogists, 2007)

•  The Village Labourer
by Barbara Hammond and John Lawrence Hammond (Nonsuch Publishing Ltd, 2005)

•  Lord and Peasant in Nineteenth Century Britain
by Dennis Richard Mills (Croom Helm, 1980)

•  Farmworkers: A Social and Economic History 1770–1980
by Alan Armstrong (Batsford, 1988)

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The National Archives' Research Guides – Legal Records Information 1: ‘Manorial Records in The National Archives'; Domestic Records Information 59: ‘Agricultural Statistics'; Domestic Records Information 74: ‘Common Lands'; Domestic Records Information 86: ‘Enclosure Awards'; Domestic Records Information 106: ‘National Farm Surveys of England and Wales, 1940–1943'; Research Note 7: ‘Hedgerows
'

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Anyone with ancestors involved in farming may want to consider joining the British Agricultural History Society. The BAHS was founded in 1952 to promote the study of agricultural history and rural society, and works hard to preserve documents of national importance. Its website can be found at www.bahs.org.uk where digital copies of recent issues of
Rural History Today
can be downloaded giving tips about developing research resources and where interesting articles about agricultural history can be found. The society holds regular conferences and
Rural History Today
publishes details and dates of talks held at institutions around Britain that may cover one of your areas of research.

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In 1911 Barbara and John Lawrence Hammond wrote a pioneering study of the village labourer and the role that industrialization played in crippling the poor labourer and smallholding farmer. At the time their work was viewed as highly controversial, not least because of their unfashionable theory that the Industrial Revolution created social misery for the poorer classes and their critical analysis of the class struggle taking place in the 1830s. The study has been published several times since then, and it can be found under various titles. However, transcriptions from the 1920 edition,
The Village Labourer 1760–1832: A Study of the Government of England before the Reform Bill
, are available online via the University of Melbourne's Archive for the History of Economic Thought (HET) at http://archive.org/details/villagelabourer100. This book is crammed with extracts from original sources analysing the impact of enclosures and industrialization and takes a detailed look at the Swing Riots, giving the names and fates of some of the main ringleaders.

Britain's industrial wealth grew dramatically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and this boom created a multitude of job opportunities in business and the professions for the burgeoning middle classes. Merchants, insurance agents, lawyers, bankers and accountants all flourished in the private sector, and often left a wealth of evidence for family historians to explore. It is these records that we'll examine here; records for civil servants, doctors, schoolteachers, clergymen, etc., will be looked at in the next chapter.

When researching the lives of professionals bear in mind that there will often be evidence of their work in more than one field. For example clergymen and people in the legal and in some medical professions usually studied at a college or university. Records you find concerning their career may mention where they were educated, which will help you to locate university records.
Alumni Oxonienses
and
Alumni Cantabrigienses
give biographical notes about Oxford and Cambridge graduates from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and similar publications have been produced for graduates of the major universities in Scotland and Ireland. People employed in public sector services could supplement their salary by taking on a separate job in the private sector, and men who were highly respected businessmen in the private sector were sometimes rewarded with a position in government. For
example lawyers were also likely to be Members of Parliament or to work as civil servants, so records for those occupations may be worth searching too. Some people with highly respected positions are listed in Kelly's
Handbook to the Titled, Landed and Official Classes
, which gives a potted biography of entrants from 1883 to 1977. Very often family businesses were handed down through the generations, which can make locating records over a long period of time a bit easier.

‘
Many occupations have their own professional bodies, guilds or associations – which keep records of members
.'

A large number of Oath Rolls for the period 1673 to 1889 are kept in The National Archives series C 213 to C 215 and KB 24/1 to KB 24/2. More detailed information about series numbers can be found in The National Archives' research guide Domestic Records Information 4: ‘Oath Rolls and Sacrament Certificates after 1660'
.

Lawyers, judges, civil servants, schoolteachers, clergymen, freemen of the City of London livery companies, Members of Parliament, some medical practitioners and university members all had to declare an oath of allegiance to the Crown and the Church of England from the 1660s until the nineteenth century, and their names may be found on Oath Rolls kept at The National Archives. Roman Catholics and non-conformists who refused to take Holy Communion in a Church of England ceremony were barred from holding official positions between 1661 and 1828. After this date non-conformists could submit a declaration, found in The National Archives series C 214, and could then take an oath of allegiance.

Most of the occupations described in this section will have their own professional bodies, guilds or associations, which members of that profession could join, so it is worth seeking out the organization that covered their geographical and occupational jurisdiction to establish what archives and records survive. Official trade magazines and newspapers for many professions contain advertisements posted by competitive companies and may contain biographical information
about influential individuals in the business. Professionals were also likely to leave some property and equity after their death, and so it is always worth searching for a will or letters of administration.

There are general records that will be useful for whatever type of business you are researching, and these can be found in a range of repositories and libraries.

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Trade and business directories are an invaluable source, listing the names of directors, where the company had its offices, and helping you to trace how long the company was in business.

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Advertisements found in newspapers and directories add a bit of colour to the company's background, giving a vivid description of exactly what type of products and services your ancestors provided. Directories sometimes have an index to their advertisements to save you having to flick through the entire volume.

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The
London Gazette
and major broadsheets such as
The Times
contained a lot of business news, like notices of bankruptcies, the dissolution of partnerships and businesses that had ceased trading.

For a general overview of locating and using business records, John Orbell's 1987 publication
A Guide to Tracing the History of a Business
is still a useful source. If you are researching the profession of an Irish ancestor then consult the chapter on occupations in John Grenham's
Tracing Your Irish Ancestors
. This is a reference guide to sources available in Irish repositories for researching professionals in many occupations, including attorneys, barristers, policemen, apothecaries, surgeons, doctors, teachers, clergymen and more.

Complete business records containing personnel files rarely survive, but if they do they are generally deposited at the local record office or are still in the company's archive. County record offices often hold the records of small, local businesses, the location of which can be found by a search of the company name using both the Access to Archives and the National Register of Archives databases. The NRA has a specific Corporate Name search engine containing the names of over 29,000 businesses from across the UK and Republic of Ireland, with descriptions of their archives and where they are deposited. Eric D. Probert has written a guide to
Company and Business Records for Family Historians
, in which he gives examples of the types of business records found in local record offices and reviews the
London Gazette
index to the notices of partnership dissolutions between 1785 and 1811, as well as the indexes available at Companies House.

Company registration records do not contain a great deal of information interesting to family historians, but they may be of use to the descendants of those people who formed the company or were a director or major shareholder, giving financial information about how well the business did. The names and biographical details of many company directors have been published annually since 1879 in
The Directory of Directors
.

The Companies Acts have allowed for companies to be incorporated by registration since 1844, prior to which a company could only be incorporated by Royal Charter or by statute. Businessmen usually chose to incorporate their businesses so that any debts were liable to the company and not to them personally. Registered companies needed to file administrative records with the Registrar of Companies, including details of the company's shareholders and directors, an annual summary of accounts, and a register of mortgages granted by the company. Over one million companies were registered between 1856 and 1976 and the records of those that are still in business in England and Wales are kept at Companies House in Cardiff. Companies House has a London search room at 21 Bloomsbury Street, where microfiche copies of these records can be viewed, and The National Archives in Kew has indexes to the companies incorporated between 1856 and 1920, and to those on the register in 1930 and 1937.

The Companies House website at www.companieshouse.gov.uk has an online index where you can search for the names of current limited companies and those dissolved in the last 20 years. The Registrar holds on to the files of dissolved companies for 20 years after which time a sample is passed to The National Archives and the remainder are destroyed. Those that make it to The National Archives are stored in series BT 31 and BT 41, and there are brief details about the dissolved companies whose records were destroyed in series BT 95, arranged chronologically by incorporation date. BT 31 has an alphabetical index to company names giving each one's company number so that it can be found in numerical records. The index is on the open shelves at Kew, dating from 1855 to 1976. Companies House in Cardiff has an index to the names of companies dissolved prior to 1963 with the date they dissolved and a note about whether their records went to The National Archives. An online guide can be found on The National Archives' website entitled Domestic Records Information 40: ‘Registration of Companies and Businesses'.

Companies registered in Scotland are subject to the same laws as England and Wales, but their records will be found with the Registrar of Companies in Edinburgh. Companies House at 37 Castle Terrace, Edinburgh, EH1 2EB holds records relating to over 50,000 companies with a registered address in Scotland as well as those of some dissolved companies. More records of dissolved companies in Scotland can be found in the National Archives of Scotland.

The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI) in Northern Ireland has a Companies Registry section where Northern Irish companies register their details. To find out about locating registration documents for a Northern Irish company telephone 0845 604 8888 or email them at [email protected].

The registration of a company in the Republic of Ireland is similar to the process in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Companies need to register their business at the Companies Registration Office in Dublin. To find out about locating registration documents for a company in the Republic of Ireland contact the office by email on [email protected] explaining what you know about the company, when it was in business and whether it has been dissolved.

Major record offices within the UK and Ireland tend to hold some form of records for businesses. The National Archives in Kew is home to a collection of amalgamated business records in the form of documents that were required to be filed with the Board of Trade and its successive government departments. It has produced several research guides covering this field, including Domestic Records Information 122: ‘Sources for Business History'. The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland has one of the largest collections of business records in the UK, from small companies' papers to the records of huge firms responsible for making Ulster's fortune. PRONI has produced an information leaflet, leaflet number 18, about its business records dating back to the seventeenth century, found on the website under ‘Family history'.

In addition to collections held by local and major record offices, there are a number of specialist business archives and repositories that are worth consulting.

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The Guildhall Library in London is home to a rich collection of business records. Joan Bullock-Anderson has published
A Handlist of Business Archives at Guildhall Library
listing the names of around 800 businesses whose records are stored there, including those of fire insurance companies and City of London merchants. The Guildhall has also put an index online to the trades they hold records for and the names of each company within those trades. Visit www.history.ac.uk/gh/busimnu.htm to find the Subject Index, from accountancy firms to wool manufacturers.

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The Business Archives Council (BAC) works hard to promote the preservation of company archives. It does not hold any business records but may be able to help you locate the records of large and
medium-sized companies. The BAC published a
Directory of Corporate Archives
compiled by Lesley Richmond and Alison Turton in 1997. The BAC Business History Library is now located at its sister site, the Centre for Business History in Scotland, based at the University of Glasgow, which you can make an appointment to visit by telephoning 0141 330 6890.

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If you are researching the history of a Scottish company then the Scottish Business Archive, backed by the Business Archives Council of Scotland (BACS) and run by Glasgow University Archive Services, may well house the company's records. Contact the duty archivist by telephoning 0141 330 5515.

The middling and professional classes were at constant risk of falling into debt, particularly if they had invested a lot of money into setting up a business. These were people who worked hard to attain a good standard of living, yet didn't have the financial security of the upper class and were in constant fear of sliding down the social scale. One option for business people in debt was to declare themselves bankrupt. However, until 1844 bankruptcy could only be claimed by traders who bought and sold goods and owed over £50, after which time companies could also claim bankruptcy. It was not a criminal offence to declare oneself bankrupt, but a trader's creditor could file a legal petition to declare someone bankrupt in an attempt to settle the debt in court. Once the court case was resolved the debtor was no longer a bankrupt, though his reputation may have been damaged.

Bankruptcy and insolvent debtors

John Hurt's great-great-grandfather, William Richard Browne, a respectable customs officer in the Port of London and reputed descendant of the Marquess of Sligo, found himself in a complicated financial arrangement with creditors. Unable to pay his debts or come to a reasonable agreement with his creditors, he was imprisoned in the King's Bench Debtors' Prison on two occasions in 1828 and then again in 1836. There are records of his petition to the Court for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors in series B 6 at The National Archives and very long pleadings regarding the case in both the Court of King's Bench and the Court of Chancery where the case was eventually settled
.

Insolvent debtors on the other hand were individuals who could not claim bankruptcy. Being an insolvent debtor was a criminal offence, punishable by a prison sentence until the debt was paid off. If your ancestor could never afford to pay off the debt then he risked spending the rest of his life in debtors' prison. The professional classes were in a precarious financial position, at risk of being thrown into debtors' prison because their status enabled them to borrow sums of money and material goods on credit, which they might not be able to pay back if they didn't manage their money carefully.