*** this webinar series launched at 8.00pm [London, UK time] on Wednesday October 7th ***

In place of the planned “in person” seminar at Solihull being run jointly by the Guild and the Local Population Studies Society this is a series of weekly ‘tools and techniques’ webinars and features six speakers looking at ways of collecting, analysing and interpreting data collected in the process of one-name or one-place studies, family history or local population analysis.  The data is based mainly on UK records, but records from other countries are cited where appropriate.

Click on the video boxes or links in the topic list to go to individual recordings or scroll down for more details and handouts.

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Programme

20:00 Wednesday	Presentations available online
October 7th	Mortality and Morbidity: a study of National Registration death certificates for two families 1837 to 2009 – Elizabeth E Green
October 14th	One-Place Studies – thinking laterally:  how a one-place study can support surname and population studies – Paul Carter and Pam Smith (Co-founders of ‘Name and Place’)
October 21st	Creating a publicly-available common format database of parish register data on baptisms, marriages and burials – Dr Andy Hinde (University of Southampton)
October 28th	The Ruby One-Name Collaborative Study: how it worked and what I learned – Dr Nikki Brown
November 4th	Looking at single trees and whole orchards: how genealogists and demographers can work together – Dr Eilidh Garrett (University of Cambridge)
November 11th	Identifying business proprietors from the census; and using the online Atlas on entrepreneurship – Professor Bob Bennett (University of Cambridge)

Twitter #GuildCollaboration

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Mortality and Morbidity: a study of National Registration death certificates for two families 1837 to 2009 by Elizabeth E Green

When Elizabeth was born her father was already 40 and his grandfather had been born in 1816. She grew up in the Holme Valley in Yorkshire surrounded by aged aunts and stories of previous generations of the family and has been researching her family tree for more than 45 years.

When her father died in 1976 the family gathered in Cumbria for the funeral and his death was ceremoniously entered into the family bible. Her 14 year old nephew asked who everyone in the bible was so she drew out his first family tree.

Living some distance from London she used to send her nephew off on genealogical errands to Somerset House, Chancery Lane, St Catherine’s House and Portugal Street. Whilst he didn’t initially comprehend the significance of the information he found he soon also became hooked on tracing the family history.

Elizabeth is an educational psychologist by trade and had a career in undergraduate and post graduate teacher training in Lancaster.

Any guidance on putting together a presentation warns against “death by power point” – but that’s literally what we are about to have as Elizabeth tells us about her study of the mortality and morbidity of her – and therefore my – own family.  Please sit back and enjoy.

Table 1, William Farr’s Nosology

from the Fifth Annual Report of the Registrar General of Births, Deaths and Marriages, GRO 1841

• Class 1: Zymotic diseases, epidemic/endemic/ contagious
• Class 2: of Uncertain or Variable seat
• Class 3: of Nervous System
• Class 4: of Respiratory Organs
• Class 5: of Organs of Circulation
• Class 6: of the Digestive Organs
• Class 7: of Urinary Organs
• Class 8: of the Organs of generation
• Class 9: of the Organs of Locomotion
• Class 10: of the Integumentary System
• Class 11: Old Age
• Class 12: External causes, Poisoning Asphyxia, Injuries

Table 2, Social Classes

Classification by occupation

• Class 1: Professionals
• Class 2: Managerial/technical
• Class 3: Skilled occupations
  a, non-manual
  b, manual
• Class 4: Partly skilled occupations
• Class 5: Unskilled

Books

An Atlas of Victorian Mortality by Robert Woods & Nicola Shelton.

 

 

Q&A – Answers to Webinar Questions

Q.  Can I know please what the classifications were and also the book People Count

A. The classifications; the ‘Nosologies’ changed with increased medical knowledge and are still changing ie what is happening to calculation of Corvid deaths

 

Q. Did I understand correctly that the informant on a death is nearly always or always a relative?

A. Yes. The next of kin of the dead one are required, when they can, to report a death. Certificates post 1870 began to detail the relationship

 

Q. Have you looked at family patterns of morbidity and mortality prior to general registration?

A. In my families, pre 1837, the cause of death is missing in the church burial records. The age of the dead one is often not included or a guess. How did people in this social class keep ‘tabs’ on how old they were?

 

Q. If someone died in a workhouse I have found the informant might be someone other than family

A. Informants were required to be ‘present at the death’ or ‘in attendance’

 

Q.  When did doctors first start to take over classification of death on death certificates?

A. When national registration was set up the medical profession must have helped construct the ‘nosologies’ categories of causes of death to be used. From the beginning if people had a medical attendant at death then the doctor would inform the Registrar in a signed statement. But the bulk of the population did not. Three parties were involved here, the original informant using ‘folklore’, the Registrar trying to make that into something acceptable to write on the certificate and the clerks in London who have to put it into a category. The history of death registration shows the medical profession slowly becoming involved but always using the current ‘nosology’ of the ONS. Once we had the NHS everyone had a GP but the informant was still a member of the family.

 

The question of how to record ‘unusual’ deaths was built into the system in 1837. The system of Coroners acting in Coroner’s Court with a panels of jurors has stood the test of time to settle the question of how an individual died where there is no or conflicting evidence. The Coroner issues the death certificate.

 

 

Q. where on the certificate is the social class?

A. It is not included but occupation is, first only for men but now both sexes. The ONS lists these into the social classes.

 

Q. You implied that “Old Age” is no longer accepted as cause of death. However I have seen it on certs within last 25 years

A. This category was originally used in 1837 but soon the statisticians were discovering the ‘catch-all’ nature of this one so it was removed.

 

 

Q. What is the difference between ‘in attendance’ and ‘present at death’?

A. From 1836 it was envisaged that where people had an attendant doctor he would report the death, listing his name and credentials. But the majority of the population did not so ‘present at the death’

 

Q. informants had to be present at death if possible so some are nurses.

A. A nurse looking after a patient would net have been an accepted informant, this would still be expected to be the next of kin. If in hospital the doctor in charge would decide cause of death.

 

Elizabeth Green

October 2020

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One-Place Studies – thinking laterally:  how a one-place study can support surname and population studies by Paul Carter and Pam Smith

Paul Carter, a passionate genealogist and local historian, is a software and web developer and co-founder of “Name and Place”.  In addition to producing and supporting websites for a number of leading professional genealogists and family history organisations, he is the Website Manager for the British Association for Local History.  Paul is a regular contributor of tech tips articles for Family Tree Magazine and gives regular talks on ways to better support family and local history research through technology.

Following his presentation Paul will be joined for the Q+A Paul by Pam Smith who is a local historian and co-founder of “Name and Place”.  She is a former professional genealogist and AGRA member.  Pam manages the One-Place Study of Rillington in North Yorkshire and helped to set up the Historical Rillington Study Group.

So welcome to Paul Carter

Q&A Grouped by topic

Q1: How much does the software cost?

A1: Costs are detailed on https://www.nameandplace.com/pricing

 

Q2: How long is the free trial?

A2: Two weeks.

 

Q3: We have just published a book on our village. We have a group that might be interested in this so how much is it likely to cost for a small group of about 10 people.

Q3: How well does your app facilitate a local group’s collection and publication of a place’s data at frequent, irregular intervals – or does it need one person to control all inputs?

A3: Once the multi-user facility is available, the cost will be detailed on our website.

 

Q4: Can a One Place Study be connected to a One Name Study on a different website?

A4: Depends how you consider ‘connected’. Name & Place is designed so there will be the means of connecting two projects, such as a one-name and a one-place study. A feature to share Name & Place analyses (graphs, maps etc.) on a third-party website is coming in a future release.

 

Q5: Can the software import data from the large genealogical online data sources?

Q5: To what extent can you import and export to/from other programs?

A5: A key feature of Name & Place is getting data in, as we respect researchers of established projects may have a lot of research already recorded. We currently have a CSV importer available, with a GEDCOM importer in the version after next. These large online sources and other programs will enable you to export your data in one or both of these formats, and from there you can import into Name & Place.

 

Q6: Can you handle different spellings for placenames?

Q6: How do you handle different names for roads / houses where they change over time?

A6: Yes, an option already exists for aliases and variant spellings.

 

Q7: Can you have more than one project on Name and Place?

A7: Yes you can. We are finalising details of the packages for multi-project / multi-user accounts (cost and features) but Name & Place can already have multiple projects under one account.

 

Q8: Can you import Excel spreadsheets into Name & Place?

A8: Yes, there is a CSV importer tool v.1.1 onwards. It can be found in the ‘Tools’ menu.

 

Q9: Can you tell us more about the mapping and your hopes for the sorts of analyses we will be able to do with Name and Place?

A9: Mapping as a concept is key to the Name & Place design and functionality. A place may be defined as a house, a church, a shop, a school, a grave, a memorial, a birthplace (town), a street, a ship or any other identifiable location. Each place may be positioned precisely on a map, via coordinates, meaning we know not only where each place is but also distances between them.

Name & Place is then able to layer other information (metadata) on top of the place, whether that is a fact or an event, i.e. a birthplace, a marriage place, a place of work, a place served in the military. This detail creates the building blocks on top of which we can produce higher level maps and analyses, including population levels, migration, mortality, industry growth and decline, even a fleet or military unit at war. 

Q10: Do you know if there is a connection between Piercy and Percy?

A10: Probably, but no proof established.

 

Q11: And do you need another programmer?

A11: We have an excellent team of developers but thank you!

 

Q12: Do you start with a data set like census and go finally to collecting any data that refers to the place? How do you find single pieces of information that don’t seem to have much connection?

A12: You can start with any source because everything interlinks between name, place and sources. A census can be a good start to produce outcomes such as occupations, migration. In between census sources come from many places: newspapers, reminiscence, archival holdings, local history books etc.

 

Q13: For Rillington, have you used the name-place approach for the 1600s and 1700s and, if so, what sources have been most important to you in that timeframe?

A13: Hearth Tax returns, wills, chancery and manorial documents and a variety of sources from the National Archives.

 

Q14: I have been doing a one school study of a private girls school which I attended in Plymouth.  The school started in 1852 and many of the girls were daughters of army and naval officers. I have over thousand names. Would your one name and place be suitable for all the data I have collected

A14: Absolutely! Name & Place works best with managing data for people and places who are completely unrelated such as a ship, war memorial, workhouse and school.

 

Q15: How adaptable is the software/site to non-UK studies, e.g. data import.

Q15: How well can your software handle place data outside England, eg Ireland’s or India’s?

A15: A place is a place no matter where in the world and providing the CSV headings comply with our CSV importer such as names and date of birth etc. Name & Place is designed to be international, and we have spoken to many international researcher and organisations to help establish this.

 

Q16: How easy is it to extract a family tree/GEDCOM from name and place to publish elsewhere? Or to upload one to name and place?

Q16: If one has a body of data ready, will you be able to accommodate a gedcom?

Q16: When we will be able to put a GEDCOM straight into N&P?

 

A:16 The GEDCOM importer will be released in v1.3, the version after next. It is important to us that researchers are able to easily load their existing research.
There will also be a means of exporting your data from Name & Place, initially in CSV format but also some extracts in GEDCOM also. However the complex nature of the software’s database is too advanced to be fully reflected in a GEDCOM as it stands now.

 

Q17: How is your presentation’s content held in your one-place study?

A17: All the content is held in either a name, place, source or media file, with plenty of space for narrative. The names, places and sources are all linked together, reflecting my understanding of how the people lived.

 

Q18: Do/can you include DNA results in a one-place study?  E.g. Enos Piercy’s father is unknown, but you might be able to search for him using Y-DNA tests.

A18: Yes you can include DNA results as a source. We will keep monitoring developments in this area and enable Name & Place to best support this research in future.

 

Q19: 30 minutes into the presentation, I don’t see how this explanation of a one-place study is any different from what would be produced by a research project just into a specific lineage.

A19: The explanation of a one-place study gives examples of some of the notable families extracted for demonstration. This particular study isn’t a collection of genealogies of each family but an example of the types of families which are contained therein, observing some which could form a mini-one-name study. The study focuses on societal change from Domesday to present day taking into consideration population studies against a historical timeline.

 

Q20: Is your database essentially an event-based database, rather than a lineage-based database, and with analytics added?

A20: Name & Place is a relational database recording and analyzing facts and events about a community and its people and places using sources as the glue which binds the community together.

It is not a family history software package, there are plenty of wonderful proprietary software packages ‘out there” which capture genealogical information. Name & Place is far more advanced, with a much broader remit, designed to encompass many types of research projects outside of just family history, whether that is a one-place study, a one-name study or any form of local history project.

 

Q21: How would these studies be presented in print?

A21: By graphs, charts and narrative.

 

Q22: I am toying with the idea of a One Place Study.  I’m conscious that is it might be ridiculous/cheeky doing it from 12,000 miles away in Australia.  What would you recommend as preparatory steps (so as not to tread on toes and ensure best outcomes) before undertaking such a project e.g. contacting local historical societies and/or defining scope.

A22: Definitely define the scope i.e parish, township, chapelry etc. Check https://www.one-place-studies.org and http://www.oneplacestudy.org/ to establish whether a study has already been registered. Purchase a local history book, check https://www.genuki.org.uk https://www.british-history.ac.uk Should you consider using Name & Place and take advantage of a 1 to 1 tutorial with Pam.

 

Q23: I have been looking at social network analysis for a study of a database (name,  people connections and social info), wonder whether Name & Place might provide a more 3 dimensional analysis?

A23: Absolutely!

 

Q24: If you are considering undertaking a one place study, a good place to start would be to look at back copies of LPS, which are freely available on the web, where you will find examples of local studies that have been undertaken. This might give you an idea of the sort of study you could undertake or you could compare your study with one that has already been carried out.

A24: Good idea! Also look at back copies from BALH. We love both equally.

 

Q25: If you studied the parish registers and listed some baptisms for example but those people did not connect to your study would you still put them in the program?

A25: Your study, your rules. However (this is Pam) yes I would! For example many children were baptised from the workhouse but didn’t stay in the village, but by simply being there, they are part of the story. There is a back story behind each one, even if some came from the parishes in a Gilbert Union.

 

Q26: I’m busy researching one of my 4x great -granny’s houses. Once I’ve ‘finished’ it – will I be able to integrate it into wider local history research for my family in the area?

A26: Definitely. The house (history) would count as a place with a community or local history project. Each person (name) or place can be highlighted as an individual or as part of the overall picture. There is no need to have a separate project.

 

Q27: My “one place” went through a number of boundary changes. Can this be managed in name and place?

A27: There is a website page for each project whereby the narrative can be recorded of each change – it also acts as a focus for desired topics and outcomes. The source for the census would take account of any changes in district. Equally changes to a defined place or the hierarchy of places, may be recorded easily in Name & Place (parish changes, local government bodies etc.).

 

Q28: Does Name & Place produce maps that would be of use showing migration patterns?

A28: Yes, this is very much part of our development plan. We will be releasing mapping of higher-level views, such as for population / migration and how these changed over time.

 

Q29: At some stage will you make an instruction book/ handbook available for the software?

A29: Absolutely. Online help guides are already available for all parts of Name & Place, with YouTube video tutorials being recorded. Currently, we are offering a great opportunity for new subscribers, of a 1:1 tutorial session with Pam to help get you started. This is replacing all the demos we were able to do face-to-face at family and local history events.

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Creating a publicly-available common format database of parish register data on baptisms, marriages and burials by Dr Andy Hinde (University of Southampton)

It’s now my great pleasure to introduce tonight’s presenter, Dr Andy Hinde, who will be speaking about a new LPSS project which aims to collect parish register data in a consistent manner convenient for local history studies.

Andy has recently retired after more than 30 years at the University of Southampton where he taught population history, demography and a range of statistics courses.  He was also a member of the Board of Examiners of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries for 15 years.  Before moving to Southampton, he had short spells at Birkbeck in London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Oxford.  He has published around 40 articles on various aspects of population history and also written two books, one on demographic methods and the other called England’s Population: a History since the Domesday Survey.  He is the editor of Local Population Studies, the twice-yearly journal of the LPSS.  In retirement, he hopes to continue research on population history, and also to research and write on the history of Alton in Hampshire and its surrounding area, where he lives.  He tells me that he also wants to improve his church organ playing.

Andy, over to you.

Handout – PARISH REGISTER AGGREGATE ANALYSES Second Edition

PARISH REGISTER AGGREGATE ANALYSES

Second Edition – June 2020

by Roger Schofield and Andrew Hinde

A 45 page booklet including the data on the 404 parishes with their population in 1811

Source: Parish Register Aggregate Analyses

CONTENTS

Introduction to the second edition 6
The data 7
The quality of the data 11
How the data can be used: seasonality 13
How the data can be used: fluctuations in the series of baptisms, marriages
and burials 14
How the data can be used: crisis mortality 16
How the data can be used: long-run population trends 18
APPENDIX 24

List of tables

Table 1 Parish characteristics in data base 10
Table 2 Alphabetical list of parishes showing their populations in 1811 25
Table 3 List of parishes ordered by county 34

List of figures

Figure 1 Geographical distribution of the aggregative analysis parishes 24

 

If you would like to download the excel datasets and supporting files then they can be found here: Local Population Studies Society Parish Register Project

The web site lpssparish.com includes a downloadable spreadsheet with details of the first and last years of the baptism, marriage and burial series for each of the 404 parishes.

Questions & Answers

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The Ruby One-Name Collaborative Study: how it worked and what I learned by Dr Nikki Brown

The Ruby gemstone is associated with 40th anniversaries, so as part of the celebration of the 40th Anniversary of The Guild of One-Name Studies, The Guild undertook a one-name study on the surname Ruby.

The name had many different country and cultural origins, and so was ideal for the Guild’s international scope.
The study was unique in that the idea behind it was that it would be carried out by The Guild itself, with members of The Guild working collaboratively, and would last just one year.
One of the primary goals was to provide Guild members and members of the public with an example of a collaborative one-name study, and to share different experiences.

Nikki was born in London and grew up in Essex and London (Nikki didn’t move, the boundary changed!). She attended University College London Medical School and obtained her MB.BS in 1984. She specialised in Accident and Emergency and worked mainly in East London until her retirement 10 years ago.
Nikki began working seriously on her family tree about 20 years ago, being taught the basics by an experienced first cousin twice removed. She joined The Guild of One Name Studies approximately 6 years ago and is undertaking a study on her paternal grandmother’s maiden name, Pullum. She was part of the team of Guild members who undertook the Ruby One-Name Study.

 

Ruby One-Name Study Presentation Notes by Dr Nikki Brown

 

Q&A

Question	Answer
How are you storing the all the records?	I don’t know. Paul Howes managed the project. I like the other team members, worked on a family then sent the GED file to Paul who gave feedback, then added to the on-line tree.
Are the current owner(s) of the Ruby study interested in further data which probably wasn’t completely reconstructed into families at the formal end last year?	I’m sure they would be, like any of us would if someone found new data for our ONS. You may be interested in the blog from Michael Ruby: http://rubyons.blogspot.com/2019/09/dry-genealogy-and-word-from-new-ruby.html
Did you all use your own FH software to do the reconstruction and then generate the gedcoms, or did you all use TNG? if the former were there problems with disparate gedcom fields?	Yes, rather than asking people to learn a new system (and buy it?) we all used our own software and sent a GEDcom to Paul Howes. The Ruby tree is TNG. I know of a few problems with dates and places for example.
No mention of wife of Ruby’s parents – yet wills often mention grandchildren. If you don’t look at these how can you comply with commitment to look all occurrences of a surname?	I assume you mean the parents of a woman who married a Ruby. They were not included on the tree but it does not necessarily mean that documents relating to them were not examined and notes added. Also, their parent’s wills could mention grandchildren too i.e. the wife of a Ruby, who by then was a Ruby. Her brother’s and sister’s wills could also mention her. It was a matter of deciding a place to stop adding people and expanding the tree sideways. The commitment to look at all occurrences of a surname is required for a one-name study but this was the work of only a year and it was decided that the priority would be family reconstruction. Other pieces of the study can be added later.
How many Ruby RUBY people did you find? Its known as tautology.	During the question time someone said https://ruby.one-name.net shows one Ruby Ruby. I could only find Rose Ruby Ruby
How many different spellings were found? e.g RUBIE & RUBY	RUBAY, RUBENSTEIN, RUBEY, RUBI, RUBIE, RUBIEN, RUBIER, RUBINOVITZ, RUBINSTEIN, RUBLY, RUBYE, RUUBY. (The Rubensteins include Jack and his 2 younger brothers, who legally changed their name to Ruby. I believe that other individuals altered the spelling of their name on emigration)
Nikki mentioned a Legacy website in Australia – can you expand on this a bit more	It is an online searchable network of obituaries & death notices https://www.legacy.com/ According its advertising “The largest collection of obituaries and condolences, hosted by Legacy.com in partnership with funeral homes and newspapers.”
What was the meaning of the surname? Did it relate to colour or to the gemstone?	From Paul Howes’s final blog “Passing the Torch” which summaries the project. “We have made some progress in finding the roots of the surname. The oldest occurrences we have found are in Switzerland, but there are apparently separate families in Denmark, England, France, Ireland and Portugal. As some of our blog posts indicate too, many immigrants to English speaking countries whose home country names meant something like “red stone” also selected Ruby as their surname.”
What is the origin of the name Ruby? Is there any link with gemstones?!
How far did you go back with the Ruby name? What was the origin of the name?	From https://ruby.one-name.net front page: Ruby families around the world “This family first appears in 1525 when Ulrich Rubi gets married in Grindelwald, Interlaken-Oberhasli, Switzerland.” So, to the 1400s.
How far back did the study go?

 

How many different Ruby trees did you end up with? Is there a plan to try to join them up?

One tree Ruby 13 Branches Ruby | Descendants of Antoni Rubi of Switzerland Ruby | Descendants of Christian Ruby of Switzerland Ruby | Descendants of David Ruby of Ontario Ruby | Descendants of Edward Ruby of Cornwall Ruby | Descendants of George C Ruby of Roscommon Ireland Ruby | Descendants of Jen Pedersen Rubye of Denmark Ruby | Descendants of Lewis Ruby of Ohio Ruby | Descendants of Richard Ruby of Oxfordshire Ruby | Descendants of Thomas Ruby of Devon Ruby | Descendants of Thomas Ruby of Ireland Ruby | Descendants of Ulrich Rubi of Switzerland Ruby | Descendants of William Ruby of Devon Ruby | Descendants of William Ruby of Kent I don’t think the branches are connected yet. It would lovely to join them up. The project has been passed on to real Rubys.

 

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Looking at single trees and whole orchards: how genealogists and demographers can work together by Dr Eilidh Garrett (University of Cambridge)

After leaving university, Eilidh spent a year training to become a professional genealogist at the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies but then decided instead to pursue a PhD in which she used census data to ‘reconstruct’ the family groups of Keighley, West Yorkshire to measure fertility decline between 1851 and 1881.

Since then, she has pursued a career as a population historian and is currently based in Edinburgh. She says she has been lucky to have been able to combine her interests in genealogy, demography, population history, family history and community history while also ‘playing with maps’; much of it at, or closely associated with, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure.

As well as writing a number of academic papers, Eilidh has co-authored or co-edited two books, ‘Changing Family Size in England and Wales: Place Class and Demography’ and ‘Infant Mortality, a continuing social problem’. More recently, she has contributed to the website PopulationsPast, carrying out the underlying analyses and helping to design the content.

She has been a member the Local Population Studies Society since the 1980s and last year was elected its Chair.

Questions & Answers

Q.  Do demographers use the GRO birth index which now gives mother’s maiden name – this often gives details of children born and died between the census returns

A.  While the GRO website contains an index to the certificates available and has mothers’ maiden names which are very useful indeed to make sure you have the ‘right’ family when  reconstructing families, it is not set up in a way which makes it very easy to use when undertaking an ‘orchard’ approach, as we would want to look for the children of all the couples in the ‘orchard’ at a particular time or for the children of a particular marriage cohort. Unfortunately the GRO index does not include marriages, which would usually be the starting point of a ‘family reconstitution’ approach. This may explain why there are relatively few demographic papers using this source.

 

Q.  Where would you start the conversation?

Q.  How do we start talking? Do demographers have specific projects that they would like family historians to contribute to? If so, which websites?

A.  I would bring a group of individuals interested in finding out more about each other’s work together to discuss how they undertake their studies and use the sources. They also need to explain to each other the questions that they are trying to answer, and how they judge that the answers they reach are ‘trustworthy’. We all need to come together with open minds and be ready to approach subjects from angles/perspectives that we are not used to, or at least see them from the place that the other person/discipline is standing. No approach is ‘wrong’, but it may be best suited to the problem being tackled. Understanding how another person/discipline approaches their subject greatly would greatly help us to move forward together.  I would be interested to hear a talk, for example, on the reasons why GoONS members undertake their ‘one-name’ studies. That would greatly help me and other demographers to see how we might contribute to their aims and objectives.

 

Q. A comment on whether gens can trace the number of children for movers: one problem is that wives often go home to their mother’s to have the baby, and the bapt may be in the mother’s parish. So analysis by parish isn’t a record of where they lived, unlike burials.

A.  This is a very pertinent, valid point; women did often return to their mothers to give birth, particularly when it was their first baby.  People were not always buried in the parish they lived in, though. In the Scottish death records for 1855 (which collected a great deal of data) the place of burial was given, and also a statement about how long the deceased had lived in the place where they died.

 

Q.  Are there similar resources for the US or Australia?

A.  On thinking about this question I realised that I wasn’t sure which sources were meant. I am not aware of resources quite like populationspast for Australia or the US – but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist! You could try https://usa.ipums.org/usa/ to see if it provides the sort of information you are seeking, but it is often in the form or ‘raw’ data. Unfortunately different counties started registration at different times, and did not always collect the same information, keep the information in the same format or make it available to researchers on the same terms. So availability can depend on many things.  The website: www.digitalpanopticon.org/Australia_1787-1901 might give some useful pointers on Australian history and sources.

 

Q.  Do Demographers ever look at the number of twins born in a single parish, within a fixed period of time to see whether there may be an unusually high number of twins being born in one place? Twins tend to run in families, so could there be a relationship between the parents of the twins

A.  There are studies of twins as about every 40th birth in a population results in twins. You could have a look at the following article in LPSS http://www.localpopulationstudies.org.uk/PDF/LPS3/LPS3_1969_29-38.pdf on ‘Multiple births in Shropshire, 1401-1800’ which looks specifically at twins, although other papers mention them. It is possible that some communities have higher rates of twins, but it is quite important to know whether the twins are identical or non-identical as the reasons for the two types are rather different. Some authors have argued there may be environmental factors involved in the rate of twin or multiple births too. We would have to construct the genealogies of all the couples having children in a particular are to test whether there was a genetic relationship between couples producing twins, and if we wanted to compare whether this was a factor in one area having more twins that another we would have to construct the genealogies of the couples in both places.

 

Q.  Average family size in 1851 – does that reflect completed families ie 50 year olds families or what a family started 30 years before had on average?

A.  For a very brief explanation of how total fertility and total marital fertility rates (a measure of ‘average family size) are calculated on the populationspast website at https://www.populationspast.org/about/. Andy Hinde gives a more detailed explanation in Chapter 8 of his book Demographic Methods (Arnold, 1998)

 

Q.  Have there been any attempts by historical demographers to aggregate information from genealogists? Or any attempts by historical demographers to build family trees to answer questions like the ‘missing marriages’ in your family reconstitution example?

A.  There have been several attempts to use ‘aggregated’ genealogies, but mainly by economists and economic historians. Not all of these have been successful, and this is sometimes because the authors have misunderstood the biases introduced into their calculations which arise from the fact that family trees tend to be built ‘backwards’ through time, whereas demographic processes run ‘forwards’ in time. Where collaboration has been successful is when genealogists have collected data which allow events  (births/baptisms/marriages/deaths/burials) to be counted so that peaks and troughs in the numbers of events can be seen and related to social or economic events.  Historical demographers have tried to build family trees to answer question such as the missing marriages (I conducted a study on vaccination registers in Ipswich with this in mind), but it is very difficult to do this in the late 19th century because information is needed from the civil registers (we really need the names of the children, and the parents, plus the father’s occupation to make sure we are rebuilding the ‘true’ family) and that is very expensive if you have to buy each certificate, or a view of each certificate from the GRO. For the early 19th century we can use ‘family reconstitution’ to create the genealogies, but then we don’t have censuses to compare them against.

 

Q.  Can trees/orchards be used to define the extent of ‘home migration’ due to occupation declines?

A.  I am not quite sure what is meant by ‘home migration’, but it is possible to start with an ‘orchard’ population at a particular census say, and measure the occupations of those present, and then look at the same ‘orchard’ in the next census to see whether individuals/families in a particular population can still be found in the area, and how numbers in particular occupations have held up over the decade. It might be more difficult to find those who have moved away as they may have moved abroad or died, but with a lot of digging it is often possible to follow certain family groups across the country, now that we can search national census databases. Apologies if I have not answered your question.

 

Q.  How many 1911 images do you want? And just those we think are wrong?

A.  It is useful to know that information is ‘wrong’, and if so in what way it is wrong, but to be really useful we need to see what proportion of instances of that kind of information are ‘wrong’. So ideally, for a study of the ‘inaccurate’ 1911 census entries, a really ‘robust’ study would take all the couples in a particular place (town/village/parish) and work out all their ‘family building histories’ and see how many of these matched their 1911 census entries and how many did not.  If we could compare different ‘areas’/’places’ to see whether/how they differed in the proportion of 1911 entries that were inaccurate that might give us an indication of some of the reasons why people gave ‘inaccurate answers’. For example if we see a higher proportion of ‘wrong’ answers in Scotland (or in communities within Scotland, but not in England/English communities then we might suppose the errors were down to the enumerators who still filled in enumerators books in Scotland in 1911, as in 1911 in England the forms we view were filled in by the individuals being surveyed themselves.  However, as ‘whole populations’ are difficult to come by, if you could supply genealogies of all couples you see in your study in the 1911 census, both those family building history matches their 1911 answers, and those who do not, that would begin to form the nucleus of a study. If several people were willing to do this, I am sure we could build this into an article. Thank you very much indeed!

 

Q.  In my own study, I note curiosities, such as cousins marrying, phantom fathers, twins, bigamists and so on.  How interesting is that kind of thing to you?

A.  These kind of things are always of interest, but remember that the demographers’ basic question is ‘how usual is this’. So to be really interesting to demographers the ‘curiosities’ need to be placed in the context of ‘how often do they happen’. If you have x number of marriages, in a place within a given time period, how many of them involve cousins/a bigamist etc?  How many children born within a place at a certain time do not have a father noted on their birth certificate. If this information can be found for more than 1 place (parish/county/country) then it is always interesting to compare and contrast the different experience of the places and try to work out whether they differ and if so why.

 

Q.  Why are demographers interested in such old history, rather than what is happening now?

A.  There are many kinds of demographers; historical demography is only one branch of the subject. There are a great many (more) demographers working on present day population behaviours all around the world than there are historical demographers.

 

Q.  I’m interested in the difference between things I’ve found in the UK and the US, such as age of death of women, number of marriages, literacy etc. Are there any such comparisons?

A.  I think you might find the North Atlantic Population Project (NAPP) of interest nappdata.org/napp/intro.shtml and there is also the ourworldindata website which has a page on historical changes in literacy and life expectancy. I suspect it will easier to find studies on these questions in each of the countries you mention, comparative studies tend to be rarer, but that does not mean they are not out there!

 

Q.  I am thinking of the Parish of Easby near Richmond in Yorkshire, where I was struck by the number of twin baptisms

A.  It is worth checking to see whether the register really notes these as ‘twin son’ or ‘twin daughter of’, or whether parents ‘saved up’ and had two (and sometimes more) children baptised at once, on the same day, making them look as though they were ‘twins’, when in fact they were born several years apart. This might happen particularly in large rural parishes where families had large distances to travel to church, or it might be that the older child had been poorly when the time came to baptise it and the parents didn’t take it for baptism until their next child came along, or it could be that the vicar had a ‘baptism drive’ to round up families who had been remiss about bringing their children to church for baptism.

Eilidh Garrett

November 2020

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Identifying business proprietors from the census; and using the online Atlas on entrepreneurship by Professor Bob Bennett (University of Cambridge)

Bob is currently Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Cambridge, where he is a member of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure and a Senior Associate at the Judge Business School. He has held previous positions at University College London and the London School of Economics and has been a visiting professor at the University of California Berkeley and elsewhere.

His research focuses on analytical economic geography, business management and public policy, with recent focus on historical developments of entrepreneurship, local business associations, and small and medium sized firms. He has contributed to contemporary public debates on small business policy and has advised business support organisations in the public and private sectors. He is the author of ‘Entrepreneurship, Small Business and Public Policy: Evolution and Revolution’ as well as of a number of recent historical studies of Chambers of Commerce. His current major research projects focus on business structures in Britain from c.1851 to the present.

Questions & Answers

Q. Does this data only cover England & Wales or is Scotland covered as well?

A. Yes, the BBCE fully covers Scotland and is available from UKDS. I-CeM also covers Scotland though it needs the data to be cleaned, as does I-CeM E&W. The Atlas does not yet have the mapping software for Scotland but this will be added, hopefully in the next year. Our publications cover Scotland and have some of the mapping – see especially the WPs which are online (e.g. WP 20).

 

Q. I am developing a research project about Italian Confectioners who ran businesses in London between 1890 and 1920. Are there any specific tools in the Atlas on Entrepreneurship which might help me to locate, identify and quantify these? I am particularly interested in documenting the patterns of informal ownership and transfers of operation which existed within this community. Thank you!

A. Answered more fully verbally; go to recording. Summary: first look for confectioners, which is one of the I-CeM 797 occupation codes; then look for London; then look in the birthplace string for Italians. However, the birthplace only gives the original birth (if recorded) so a second generation person would not show up (unless living with a first generation parent).

 

Q. The atlas data on Bedfordshire made me sit up and think! I tend to associate entrepreneurship with being positive but in fact the Bedfordshire straw plaiters were self employed but on poverty rates. Do you have any thoughts on the use of the word “entrepreneurship”?

A. We have a definition of entrepreneurship on the BBCE website, and extensively discuss this in Ch 2 of ‘the Age of Entrepreneurship’ book. We took a definition that would be understood by contemporaries, and historical writers; e.g. Cantillon, Say JS Mill, Marshall (though often termed ‘undertaker’).  The term ‘entrepreneur’ has been hijacked by all sorts of modern interests now (government policy people, and academics who want to promote specific definitions of their own). But it has been historically rather more generic. Modern business studies (rather than economics) uses the term as we do – all self-employed. For straw plait makers and others that were contracted outworkers we spend some time discussing in the book; all depends on how freely they could set prices as to whether they were truly independent self-employed or de facto workers – not dissimilar from Uber and gig-economy issues today. The census and most aggregate sources do not allow identification of these distinctions to be very fully followed through. But we took those in Beds etc. to be mostly self-employed – and indeed many were very independent as shown in some personal archival records (see e.g. my comments on the Luton chamber of commerce that tried to police standards of trade such as plait length etc. – in my history of chambers from the 1760s onwards: ‘Local Business Voice’, OUP, 2011).

 

Q. Can the Atlas be combined with ‘bankruptcy’ levels in each period?

A. Yes, but only at aggregate level to give a rate of bankrupts vs. all businesses in a locality. If you want to trace a given person then you are probably better using the genealogy websites like FMP, Ancestry and The Genealogist

 

Q.  Your presentation has been so enlightening…may I ask, are there sub categories within the general term of Merchant, especially as applies to importer/exporters…thank you

A. Merchant is very difficult. I-CeM 797 occupation codes cover it in various ways, reflecting how the census itself treated people. There is a hangover of the C18 idea of the entrepreneur gatherer and putter out, leader in international trade and so on. But most merchants in the period from 1851 on were usually ascribed to something specific, and this is usually coded; e.g. ‘timber merchant’, ‘brick merchant or dealer’, ‘India trade merchant’ etc.

 

Q. In linking employers between censuses how did you deal with those who died or sold their businesses?

A. The dead cannot be traced (except genealogically from death certificates); the people who gave up their business can be traced and their new occupation identified. Tracing the business is difficult unless there is a parent-offspring link you can trace. The census was not asking questions about the business but about the person. This is why we adopted the term ‘census of entrepreneurs’ – the census is uniquely better at identifying the people involved, but is usually not good at identifying the business (unless it was eponymous!).  For this you have to link with other records, as we have done for the Directory of Directors, and locally in case studies to trade directories (but of course these are also imperfect in various ways; see other answers on women, e.g. local directories tend to under-record women by a large amount if they were working on own account mainly from home; also many directory entries only have initials so that gender is unclear).

 

Q. How do you find out which are the reg districts which have data missing 

A. See WP 23; it is identified by matching the e-records of the population now available, against the published census numbers by parish, then aggregated to RSD level. Compensations for coding errors to place, and other possible deficiencies in the digital records have to be made. Our numbers are estimates, but we believe them to be generally good.

 

Q. Would a person with an apprentice be regarded as an employer?

A. We would say yes, but obviously there may be productivity issues; similar issues are often argued to arise with women and children in employment – this is a complex and controversial field!   More said in the recorded answers

 

Q. Extend to Scotland?  Any differences in ability to recreate?

A. Scotland has interesting similarities and contrasts; we have done this: see WP 20.

 

Q. I have seen lots of women with no occupation listed, but other sources (mainly newspaper reports) show they DID work

A. Yes, there are a lot of blanks in the occupation cols of the censuses, and this is more common for women. We have compensated for this statistically by a supplementation method.  This is no more than an estimate, but we give 2 versions: one for the aggregate of all women (and others) who were likely to be employers and own account estimate (NUM), and a second which attempts ot apply this it individuals (IND): see BBCE Guide and the WPs. Of course this is subject to lots of potential errors and is only a guide, but it is the way in which modern censuses and other surveys try to compensate for non-response. More of this needs to be done by historical scholars who have tended to ignore modern methods of post-survey processing. Thanks for your positive confirmation from other records.  I think we all know when we look at detailed records that many women were recorded; a lot of the academic work on earlier periods is subject to strong selection biases in the way the data was recorded. We can now see from 1851 onwards that women were at least 30+ % of all proprietors, probably more, and this is a challenge since they were unlikely to be lower proportions in earlier periods. I would like to see some academic studies use the 1851/61 censuses to reconstruct what the numbers might have been on the same definitions in earlier decades