Not so long ago it would have been impossible to find out anything about your ancestors without leaving your house and travelling to a range of different archives, libraries and record offices all over the country. I remember that time, particularly visiting St Catherine’s House (pictured right) in my lunch hour in the 70s and how frustrating it was if you didn’t have the time or the funds to visit local depositories! Whether you are an amateur or professional genealogist, you have to admit that we are lucky to live in an age when information is available at the end of your fingertips.
Even so, there are still thousands of records that can only be accessed by visiting local record offices or archives, and even though the big online genealogy website entice us by announcing the release of many more records (as both Ancestry.co.uk and FindMyPast have both done within the last fornight), there may only be a few documents online that give us much information about a specific ancestor.
So what can you do to enrich your knowledge of an ancestor without travelling to a local archive or paying for someone to do it for you?
Last week I decided to have a look at FindMyPast‘s recently released Manchester Collection. Both my mother’s and my father’s family have lived at some time in Manchester, so I hoped that I might find something on here pertaining to both sides of my family tree. However, the only document that I could definitely link to an ancestor was the registration document for my maternal great-grandmother’s entry into the Manchester Workhouse.
I knew that Ann Reid (nee Jepson) had spent some time in the workhouse because I had found her there on the 1901 census, and I knew from my mother that she had had a very bad time after the untimely death of her husband, and that the younger children (including my grandmother) had gone into foster homes. The information contained in the registration document was fairly dry – it told me nothing more than the dates of entry and discharge, her religion and age. There was not much here that I didn’t already know, but I used up some of my FindMyPast credits to see the original document.
The date of her entry was interesting because it was 28th December 1900. This was my grandmother’s 8th birthday, and I immediately thought what a horrid birthday that must have been for her, with her mother entering the workhouse, and having to go and live with a foster family. It was also interesting that the creed register gave her religion as Church of England, as she had married into a Roman Catholic family from Ireland.
I then looked to see if I could find any more information about this workhouse, including any photographs. The wonderful website Workhouses.org.uk gave me this page full of information about the old workhouse, and the building of the Cumpsall workhouse (where my great-grandmother stayed) in 1855-7. According to a report in 1866, it was “…one of the best managed work-houses that I have ever inspected. It is in thoroughly excellent order t
hroughout, and generally in such a state as to reflect the highest credit on all concerned in its management and care.” This was good to know, considering the terrible things I have read about most workhouses, and I was glad that Ann Reid was in such a well managed place. This website has plenty of photographs, which I have not copied here as they are under strict copyright, but I did find a photograph of an old sign about visiting hours dated 1879, and I wondered whether the rules still applied in 1900!
This may not seem like a huge amount of information, but it certainly enriches what I know about my great-grandmother’s life, and gives me a bit of insight into the year she spent in the workhouse. Somehow, this kind of information brings our ancestors much closer.
Of course, more details are no doubt to be had by visiting Manchester archives, and I hope to deepen my research further at some point by doing this – but my point today is that there is still much you can find out about your ancestors by looking at relevant resources on the internet, and it is always worth following up any information you find by using google searches or online maps.
