Tracing ancestors the Victorian way

Simon Fowler shows that the work of today's genealogists is infused with a more democratic ethos than that of the Victorian and Edwardian pioneers

In the autumn of 1895 Colonel William Shipway engaged a young man, Herbert Davies, to trace his pedigree. Colonel Shipway had always been interested in his family roots, which he believed lay in Gloucestershire. A few years earlier another man with rather humbler ancestry, Edwin Lyne, headmaster of a Dublin art school, had begun to trace his family tree spurred on by rumours that a Mary Lyne of Reading had left £500 unclaimed on her death. Neither succeeded in his quest, but both cases illustrate the state of Victorian genealogy. Dr Davies proved to be a forger, while the difficulty of tracking down his ancestors stymied Edwin Lyne.

There was considerable growth of interest in genealogy during the Victorian period. Yet it remained very much an interest indulged by the landed gentry and professional families, or those who felt, or could be persuaded, that their families came from that social class. One such researcher was Miss Louise Bazalgette Lucas, who during the 1880s wrote two handsome albums containing her family tree. In an introduction to the albums, now with the Society of Genealogists, she wrote: "We used to be big people once, but have gone down in the world. People at whom a hundred years ago we turned up our noses, now turn up their noses at us … We had generally misbehaved ourselves, and in consequences, our many acres had passed into the hands of Manchester gents, with fat smug faces, who wage war of extermination against the letter H and use big words when little ones would have done better."

The genealogical world was a small one. There were perhaps a dozen reputable professional genealogists in London, with a few more in the provinces. There may have been several thousand amateurs whose work often overlapped with local historical and antiquarian studies.

Both professional and amateurs were hindered by the lack of finding aids. A local historian, Cecil J. Davies, undertook some work for Edwin Lyne at the Public Record Office (PRO), but reported very slow progress: 'so many of the [Lay Subsidy] rolls are not well indexed that much time is lost in searching for facts'. An approach to Queen's College, Oxford, was equally frustrating. According to A.H. Sayce who looked after the records, 'There is unfortunately no published calendar of the contents of our muniment room; indeed there is no calendar of them at all except a very imperfect one in MS compiled more than a hundred years ago.'

This lack of indexes led to the formation of a number of record societies dedicated to publishing and calendaring historical texts. The Harleian Society, for example, was formed in 1869 to print 'the Heraldic Visitations of Counties and any manuscripts relating to genealogy, family history and heraldry'. In addition, of course, the PRO spent much time indexing and calendaring the public records in its care.

The work of the record societies was assisted by the introduction of new printing technology. For the first time it was possible to publish small print runs cheaply enough so that individual genealogists, as well as the growing number of public libraries, could afford to buy copies. Indeed the sheer number of genealogical texts published each year was a major reason behind the establishment of the Society of Genealogists in 1911, which had at its heart (as indeed it still does) a reference library of these books for consultation by members.

The impetus for publication was the poor state in which the records themselves were kept. An editorial in The Times in November 1898 argued the case for the printing (or calendaring) of documents to preserve records. It added, rather optimistically, 'Fortunately not a little has been done and we may hope that at no great distance of time the chief parish registers … will be practically secure from the operation of the forger.'

Apart from the Public Record Office, the British Museum and the university libraries in Cambridge and Oxford, there were no record repositories or archives. Parish registers largely remained in the possession of local incumbents. Most of these were happy to go through them for enquirers, and although they were entitled to charge a fee for this work, in most cases this was waived. Edwin Lyne wrote to each incumbent of parishes where he thought there may have been Lynes, asking them to search the registers. In many parishes his enquiries roused a great deal of interest. In Bucknell, Oxfordshire, the Rev. G.W. Pieritz enlisted the support of Colonel Hibbert, the squire of the village, to pour over the registers. Thomas Plumb, the sexton at Little Compton, Warwickshire, took his two daughters 'down to the church this evening' but could not 'find such a headstone as you state'. Even if there was nothing in the registers the incumbents often talked about Lynes in their village. John Hodgson, Rector of Kinver, mentioned that 'There are no Lynes of any position here - the only man of the name, a higgler of coal (George Lines), has resided about nineteen years in the parish'.

Where the rector had little interest in the contents of the parish chest, the records could be carelessly looked after. At the trial of Herbert Davies for forgery at the Old Bailey in November 1898, the daughter of Rev William White of Stonehouse recalled that Davies had examined registers in the rectory dining room, while she and her father went about their business. Because Davies had wanted to consult these documents on a second occasion, the register was left near an open window in sunlight for a couple of days. The alterations that Davies had made to the register remained unchanged while the original ink rapidly faded in the bright sunshine: a crucial piece of evidence at his trial.

Many Victorians placed little importance on historical documents in general. Davies' lawyer argued in mitigation that 'their value could be gauged by the fact that during seventeen years nobody came to Mangotsfield to inspect [the parish registers] ... It should be remembered that the most recent of the wills tampered with was 260 years old and they could not, therefore, have any possible effect on the transfer of property.' This did not impress the judge, who sentenced Davies to three years' hard labour.

The London repositories remained small and almost unknown to the general public. The Globe thought the PRO was the 'least known of public institutions' and that it 'could be mistaken for a lunatic asylum or prison'. Until the mid-1880s conditions inside the public reading rooms were little better. A professional genealogist, Walter Rye, recalled that he 'used to search twenty-five years ago in a long unpleasant room with low tables and high backless forms which cramped the searcher's legs if he were anything above a dwarf in stature. A searcher then had to pay a shilling for each search.' But he admitted in 1887 that now 'it would be difficult to find a place where study and search can be carried on more easily and pleasantly than at the Public Record Office'.

When the first volume of parish registers was published by the Harleian Society in 1878 its editor, W.G. Leveson Gower, wrote in the preface: I maintain that as a genealogical society we are not concerned to find ancestors for families which have risen to the ranks of gentry in recent times: our business is only with the record of those who at the time the entry was made were persons of recognised social position. I am aware … that some important entry may occasionally be omitted; but surely this is a lesser evil than the publication of so many names which have no interest or value at all. Thirty years later those few early members of the Society of Genealogists who researched the lives of ordinary people were usually doing so to find something 'better'.

This snobbery damaged the profession's reputation because it opened family history to abuse by deliberate deceit or by less than rigorous research. Professional genealogists, however, were meeting a demand. As William Rye pointed out, 'One can readily understand that the new man, whose successful trading has taught him that he can - and ought to - get anything by paying for it, should expect that, on paying, a perfect pedigree, Norman for choice, can be turned out for him on demand without the necessity of any research.' For much of the nineteenth century professional genealogists had a poor reputation. The lawyer William Turnbull wrote in 1839 of one genealogist, Thomas Banks, that he was: One of the busy, meddling, troublesome and officious individuals, professing themselves 'Genealogists', who tend so much to perpetuate blunders and misrepresentations in matters of general and family history, if indeed they do not wittingly aid and abet in the fabrications of impostures.

The position improved during the late Victorian and Edwardian period. Genealogists such as Horace Round and Edward Freeman attacked fanciful claims to descent from medieval noble families and helped to establish a more rigorous standard in genealogical study. Another, William Philimore, who insisted that 'there is at present little real obstacle in the way of an unscrupulous adventurer tampering with our ancient records', argued that the solution lay in providing county record offices where parish registers, wills and other documents could be protected and made available to researchers. It was not until the 1920s that the first county record offices were established.

A century ago genealogy was a way of proving one's descent, actual or pretend, from a noble background. The surge of interest in genealogy since the 1960s has turned the study into a democratic hobby. Today we are by and large proud that the vast majority of our ancestors were humble labourers and maids. It is something that would have been unthinkable in 1900.

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