Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy (41 page)

Even if you do locate a local museum that covers the particular mine you are researching, it is still worth visiting the relevant national mining museum as well. The National Coal Mining (NCM) Museum for England in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, has put many of its collections online, accessed via http://ncm-collection.org.uk. From here you can view images of equipment used by miners throughout the ages, badges awarded to miners from various collieries and photographs of men who worked in English pits. The museum has a library stocked full of specialist books about the history of mining and individual mines across England as well as some primary material like accident reports, annual reports, reports of the Inspector of Mines, and mining newspapers. The library catalogue can also be searched from the NCM Collections Online website.

National Museum Wales (NMW) has two branches dedicated to the nation's mining and quarrying industries – the National Slate Museum at Llanberis in Gwynedd and the Big Pit: National Coal Museum at Blaenafon in Torfaen. Links to the two museums can be found on the NMW website at www.museumwales.ac.uk. The National Slate Museum is on the site of the Dinorwig quarry, a picturesque location flanked by Snowdon, where you can visit four quarrymen's cottages rescued from demolition. The Big Pit is a real coal mine that can be explored on an underground tour. You can visit the pithead baths and see the mining galleries and museum exhibitions. For those with mining ancestors from southern Wales there is also the South Wales Miners Museum at Afan Argoed Country Park in Port Talbot where there is a large collection of photographs. Visit www.southwalesminers museum.com to find out more.

The Scottish Mining Museum has a website at www.scottishminingmuseum.com where a selection of their photographic collection can be
viewed and fact files about the history of mining can be downloaded. There is a library and archive at the museum that is open to researchers, but they do not hold any employment records. Scotland also has a museum of lead mining in Wanlockhead, Lanarkshire. The Museum of Lead Mining has a large archive with records concerning many of the families who lived and worked in Wanlockhead, Leadhills and the surrounding villages since Victorian times. You can contact them to find out if they hold records concerning your ancestors by writing to:

The Museum of Lead Mining

Wanlockhead

Lanarkshire ML12 6UT

They also have a website – www.leadminingmuseum.co.uk.

Charles Dickens, as reporter for the magazine
Household Words
printed between 1850 and 1859, conducted and published interviews with coal miners who survived accidents and explosions in the North East of England in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Some of these accounts mention names of men, but they are most valuable for their frankness when describing the dangers of working down the pit and the most common causes of many tragic disasters. Carelessness among workers was deemed to be one of the greatest risks to miners' lives, and the employment of very young children in responsible positions made this matter worse, though in reality mine owners rarely invested sufficient funds into maintaining safety in mines. A website set up by a former coal miner at www.pitwork.net has transcriptions of some of these interviews, or copies of the publication from December 1850 can be found at the British Library in London
.

Sadly, the easiest way to find records about a mining ancestor is usually if they died following an explosion or accident in a mine. There are many sources you can consult to find the names of those killed and eye-witness accounts or reports about the events that unfolded that day if you know a rough date for the incident, or at least know the name of the mine where the disaster happened.

‘Sadly, the easiest way to find records about a mining ancestor is if he died in a pit accident.'

Most major mining disasters generated the following types of testimony that a family historian can try to locate – an inquest, an official report of the disaster, a mention in the annual report of the Mines Inspectorate, local newspaper reports and possibly a memorial in the parish church. A local Relief Fund may have been set up, and oral and written memoirs of the event may have been recorded.

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If an inquest took place and a record of it survives, the papers should be held at the local county record office. Alternatively, you may have to rely upon newspaper accounts of the inquest.

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Reports about many major mining accidents were published in the Parliamentary Papers, which are now available online via The National Archives website.

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An Explosives Inspectorate, created by the Home Office, compiled a list of mining accidents between 1896 and 1952 with relevant correspondence and papers kept in The National Archives series EF 2/7.

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There are also reports concerning specific incidents filed in various series at The National Archives in Kew, like the records of the
Valleyfield Colliery explosion of 1939 in Fife, Scotland, filed in BT 103/105–108, and the report of the Tribunal of Inquiry into the Aberfan Disaster of 1966 in Wales stored in series BD 52/154. These types of records can usually be found via The National Archives online catalogue by doing a keyword search for the name of the mine and restricting the date range to the year of the accident.

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General records concerning mining accidents can be located in the papers of the Safety and Health Division and Inspectorate of Mines and Quarries for 1876–1984 in POWE 8, and registered files on accidents between 1887 and 1920 are kept in POWE 6.

Horrendous working conditions, appalling levels of pay in relation to the work undertaken and the constant threat of unemployment gave rise to much tension between miners and their employers, producing trade unions and organized labour movements dating back to the 1700s, which have been consistently active right up to the present day. Early labour movements in the industry formed in response to systems of economic bondage and serfdom, notably in Scotland where coal miners were bonded to their masters in a form of lawful slavery and could face fines or corporal punishment if they attempted to leave their employment. Serfdom and bondage were outlawed in 1799, although they continued in some areas of Britain until much later.

In the coal-mining industry, District Unions were set up to fight for the protection of miners' rights in a business where children as young as four and five were expected to work 16-hour shifts six days a week. The industry was marked by strikes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one of the earliest organized strikes taking place in 1844 under the lead of the Miners' Association of Great Britain and Ireland in a call for better wages. In 1889 the District Unions were replaced by the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, which was a forerunner to the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), established just before nationalization in 1944. If you have an ancestor who was prominent in a trade union movement there should be evidence of this among the papers of the relevant union. Around 5,000 trade unions are known to have existed in Britain over the last couple of centuries, with millions of members supporting them. If you can find out which trade union your ancestor was a member of this can give you an insight into their political motivations and daily concerns. Trade Union Ancestors is a particularly informative website run by an enthusiast at www.unionancestors.co.uk, where you can scour a comprehensive trade union directory and pick up hints about how to trace their records. The papers of most trade unions will have been deposited at local record offices. An exception is a collection of records covering 1936 to 1947 for the Mining Association of Great Britain, which had its own trade newspaper and mining college records, which are kept at The National Archives in series COAL 11.

If you have difficulty establishing whether your mining ancestor was a member of a trade union but you believe he may have supported some of the labour movement causes, you can find out more about the miners' concerns, their actions and the consequences by reading local newspaper reports to find out how strikes affected their area. The National Union of Mineworkers is still very much alive and has a website at www.num.org.uk. The website is a great source for the history of trade union movements within the coal industry from the earliest times right up to the present day. You can look at the dates given for major disputes on the NUM website to work out which ones may have affected your relatives. There are records about mining disputes and strikes at The National Archives, including daily bulletins about the coal strike of 1920–21 kept in CAB 27/79 and PRO 30/26.

The Coal Mining History Resource Centre website at www.cmhrc.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk is home to the National Database of Mining Deaths in the United Kingdom, 1850–1972. The author of the book
Mining Deaths in Great Britain
, Ian Winstanley, compiled the list of 166,000 names currently contained on the database
. His published book contains the name, date, colliery, job and age of over 55,000 miners who were killed or injured. The Durham Mining Museum is a primarily online museum, which has a very informative website at www.dmm.org.uk providing information about mining in the north of England, covering Durham, Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland and the Ironstone mines
of North Yorkshire. The website has statistics and reports about accidents, listing the names and biographical details of those killed. There is also a list of mining disasters across the rest of the United Kingdom, some with lists of those who died.

County record offices and local libraries will be useful for finding newspaper reports about mining accidents and deaths if you know a rough date for the disaster. You can check the location of a repository for many local newspapers, most of which have since been discontinued or renamed, from the regional Newsplan databases supported by local libraries in conjunction with the British Newspaper Library at www.bl.uk/collections/nplan.html. The National Library of Wales, the National Library of Scotland and the National Library of Ireland support identical online Newsplan projects for those regions, details of which can be found on the British Library site.

The Working Class Movement Library in Salford, near Manchester, contains books, pamphlets, journals and newspapers detailing the history of the labour movements since the eighteenth century. Its catalogue can be accessed online at www.wcml.org.uk
.

The deaths of hundreds of thousands of miners over the centuries left a staggering number of widows and orphaned children, many of whom would have required financial support. It is worth finding out if a Relief Fund or society was set up for the colliery where the accident happened to see if there is a record among their papers and meeting minutes of financial support given to your ancestor's family. The archive where the mine's paperwork is filed should be able to assist you with this.

Despite the many deaths that occurred in British mines throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it wasn't until the Coal Mines Act of 1911 that Parliament decreed all colliery owners should have in place a fully trained Mines Rescue Team rather than a voluntary group of mineworkers on call to assist at times when disaster struck. Rescue stations were set up where men could be trained and specialist equipment stored. When disaster struck there were often a large number of men among the dead who had entered the mine after an explosion to help those inside. The Mines Rescue website at www.heroes-of-mine.co.uk contains a wealth of information about these brave men who risked their lives in an attempt to save their colleagues and friends.

‘Membership of a trade union can give an insight into your ancestor's daily concerns.'

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Local mining history societies may be able to help you find out more about your mining ancestor's life. The National Association of Mining History Organizations was formed in 1979 to act as a national body for mining history in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and it has a website at www.namho.org. This website is home to a brilliant list of links to associated websites and member organizations, including many societies, clubs and research groups, some of which you may want to consider joining if you can find ones relevant to your area of research.

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While women were banned from working underground in the pits from the 1840s, they still worked above ground at collieries. You can find out more about your maternal ancestors' roles in the industry from www.balmaiden.co.uk, where there is also a database containing the names of 23,000 women who worked in mines in Devon and Cornwall. There is further information about these Bal Maidens (as these women were known) on the BBC website, at www.bbc.co.uk/ nationonfilm.

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The BBC's Nation on Film website contains archived film footage that can be watched for free. They have two pages full of clips celebrating the heyday of both the coal and tin mining industries, with interviews of miners recalling their experiences and memories, and images of men and women at work in the mines. The clips can be downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/nationonfilm.

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The Mining History Network website, supported by the University of Exeter, at www.projects.ex.ac.uk/mhn/welcome is a fantastic online resource with links to pages about British, Irish and Scottish mining
as well as mining in other parts of the world. There are detailed bibliographies directing you to reliable sources for mining history, a directory of mining historians and their contact details should you wish to seek out professional help, and the site supports a mining discussion forum where you can communicate with other researchers and experts about areas of mining research you are struggling with.

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If you have a burning desire to get a real taste of working life underground, the Arigna Mining Experience Centre in County Roscommon, Ireland, takes its visitors on a 45-minute underground tour to demonstrate what it would have been like working in some of the narrowest coal seams in the western world. The Arigna area was mined for iron from the seventeenth century through to the nineteenth, when coal mining became the region's principal form of employment. You can find out more about the Arigna coal mine from the www.arignaminingexperience.ie website.