Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy (45 page)

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The National Archives' Research Guide number 125, ‘Sources for Labour History
'

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Organizations and societies that still have links with the industry you are researching and have a thorough knowledge of its history may be able to give you some guidance concerning the location of company archives and research sources.

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Bradford Textile Society, founded in 1893, is still going strong and has a website at www.bradfordtextilesociety.org.uk.

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Sheffield Company of Cutlers is an organization that has been representing cutlery makers in the Hallamshire region for 400 years. If your ancestor was a prominent industrialist in the Sheffield cutlery industry he may have been a member of the Company, perhaps even a Master Cutler. You can find out more by writing to

The Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire

The Cutlers' Hall

Church Street

Sheffield S1 1HG

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The North West Film Archive, part of Manchester Metropolitan University's Library Special Collections, has over 5,000 titles capturing the industrial, working and home life of communities from the North West of England. You can browse descriptions of the archive's collections at www.nwfa.mmu.ac.uk and contact a member of staff to enquire about viewing any moving image files.

The Industrial Revolution spawned a range of occupations closely linked to the expansion of the transport network, particularly railways and canals but also improvements to the roads and highways. The records described in this chapter allow you to piece together the lives and careers of workers in these industries, as well as establish more about the impact the new communication networks had on daily life.

From the eighteenth century a lot of money was invested in improving British transport systems to aid industrial growth. Inland waterways were dug to carry products for export from isolated provincial towns to the docks where they would be shipped by cargo boat. The network of canals constructed from the mid-1600s provided work for travelling labourers known as navigational engineers, or ‘navvies', employed by construction companies. The waterways network, which covered around 4,000 miles by the early nineteenth century, was more cost effective and efficient for transporting goods than the alternative of horse-drawn wagons on roads that were poorly maintained and plagued by highwaymen.

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Britain's communications networks changed our ancestors' environment beyond recognition
.'

Some of the problems of road transport were addressed at the beginning of the eighteenth century when a number of Turnpike Acts were
passed, setting up turnpike trusts to ensure the maintenance and safety of major routes financed by a toll. As more turnpikes were constructed around the country journey times by coach were reduced by up to a half and more people were encouraged to travel further distances as instances of highway robbery fell. Travel was made even more affordable and accessible to a wider section of society with the advent of the railways from the 1830s, allowing ordinary workers the possibility of travelling further afield in search of work and a better standard of life.

Railways were first designed for commercial purposes, transporting finished products at a much faster speed than canal boats so that manufacturers could meet growing demands from consumers. A Cornish engineer, Richard Trevithick, designed the first locomotive-drawn train in 1804, though design failures in the tracks hindered the success of his experiments and it was not until 1811 that John Blenkinsop developed a railway worked by a steam locomotive to transport coal on the Middleton Railway. In the same year William Jessop engineered the Kilmarnock and Troon Railway in Scotland. In 1829 the world's first inter-city line, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, was
built and used to test various locomotive systems in the Rainhill Trials, which proved Stephenson's
Rocket
to be the fastest and most advanced design. This marked a turning point in the history of British transport and established rail as the dominant form of land transport for the next hundred years.

In 1801 London covered a relatively small area, but a hundred years later villages like Leyton and Hampstead had been swallowed up into the mass of suburbs now surrounding the city, a commuter belt feeding the capital with a new class of white-collar workers
.

Britain's communication networks changed our ancestors' environment beyond recognition during the nineteenth century. The statistics extracted from nineteenth-century census returns demonstrate an unprecedented population boom and, coupled with evidence from maps of the countryside and towns, we can see where this burgeoning population was concentrated, giving us an insight into migration patterns. The expansion of Britain's towns and villages, at times merging to form cities, was principally the work of the railways. These allowed populations to migrate more easily and industries to grow quickly and accommodate more workers.

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Railways allowed people to migrate more easily and industries to grow quickly
.'

The British Library has a fascinating collection of London maps that help you to see at a glance how urbanization has spread since Roman times and how communication networks and transport links have been at the centre of these changes. The library's Collect Britain website at www.collectbritain.co.uk has digital copies of the Crace Collection, over 800 maps and plans of the capital from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries collected by the Victorian designer Frederick Crace, as well as a link to the British Library's virtual exhibition, London: A Life in Maps.

Improved communication networks had far-reaching effects beyond the obvious impact on population mobility. With transportation carrying goods faster than ever across a larger geographical area, publishers began printing national newspapers to distribute across the country, raising public awareness of central politics and national issues. With the Education Acts of the nineteenth century improving levels of literacy, the popularity of the ‘penny post' really took off with the help of the railways. In the Post Office's heyday it was possible to send a letter by post and get a reply the very same day.

The development of turnpikes, inland waterways and railways changed the nature of rural life, altering the British landscape and fuelling urbanization. Improvements in transport had an immense effect on the demography of the population, speeding up industrialization and creating jobs for thousands of people, not just in the transport industry but also in the areas to which people could travel more easily, quickly and affordably. The opening of new transport links was often shortly followed by a surge in migration to that area, so if you've been
wondering why your family suddenly upped sticks and moved 20 miles away the answer might lie in the date the local station opened.

Prior to the eighteenth century, parishes were responsible for the maintenance of roads, but their failure to keep them safe and in good condition led to turnpike trusts being formed from 1663 with the permission of a local Act of Parliament. Some turnpike trusts improved the roads that were already there while brand-new turnpikes were also constructed from 1706, which totalled 22,000 miles of turnpike road covering the country by the 1830s. The mid-eighteenth century has been described as a period of ‘turnpike mania' with over 400 Turnpike Acts being passed between the 1730s and 1760s. The new turnpike trusts financed the maintenance and construction of
roads by introducing a toll on road users. Tollhouses were built along sections of the road to collect the toll, which began to deter highwaymen who could no longer escape the scene of a robbery unnoticed.

•  Geoffrey N. Wright wrote a guide to
Turnpike Roads
in 1992, which includes a map showing all the turnpikes in 1750.

•  Records of turnpike trusts and Highway Boards are kept at local county record offices, where you may find maps, plans, agreements between the parish and the owners of any private land a turnpike adjoined, as well as accounts and records of payments to labourers working on the road and merchants supplying construction materials.

•  If your ancestor was a member of a turnpike trust or on the Highway Board their name will probably appear on the committee's minutes. The National Register of Archives at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra has details of repositories for over 600 turnpike trusts across the United Kingdom and Ireland. The advanced search option under the Corporate Name search allows you to narrow down the search criteria by selecting ‘Turnpike Trusts' from the Category list so that you can find records such as those of the Great Western Road Turnpike Trust, whose minutes are held at Glasgow City Archives.

•  The National Archives in Kew holds some stray records concerning turnpikes, kept principally among documents inherited by the Transport Departments in series MT. Use the online catalogue to search for these, which include accounts and reports concerning the Holyhead and Shrewsbury Roads in MT 27.

•  The National Archives of Ireland has a small number of documents concerning turnpikes kept with records of the Office of Public Works, details of which can be found on the National Archives of Ireland online database.

•  The most comprehensive collections of turnpike trust records are held among local collections, however, so use resources such as the Archives Hub found at www.archiveshub.ac.uk to locate records in university and college collections and the Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) at www.scan.org.uk and National Register of Archives for Scotland at www.nas.gov.uk/nras for documents held in Scottish archives and local studies centres.

Generally speaking, it was propertied men who managed the turnpike trusts, and their success in constructing a national road network lay in the quality of the materials used and the regularity of maintenance. A coach journey from London to Bath would have taken around three days before smooth turnpikes transformed the boggy paths and made the journey easier for the horses and more comfortable for passengers, so that Bath could be reached within twelve hours in 1779. By the 1780s every region of England and some parts of Scotland and Wales had a local turnpike network that linked into a national system connecting London with modern industrializing centres like Manchester and Glasgow.

More affordable coach journeys could be made if a passenger was prepared to travel on the open-air top of the carriage, while those who were better off would pay for an inside seat and the very rich would only travel in a private carriage
.

Highway Boards made up of groups of parish authorities gradually replaced the turnpike trusts from 1835.

Descriptions of the administrative and staff records of the Post Office from 1636 to 2000 can be found in The National Archives online catalogue under the POST series, although none of the records are actually held at Kew. Records of employees of the Post Office can be found at the Royal Mail Archive held at

The British Postal Museum and

Archive

Freeling House

Phoenix Place

London WC1X 0DL

The archives date back to the seventeenth century, with establishment books listing senior members of staff from 1742, and appointment books from 1831 to 1952 recording all staff appointments. Files about staff pensions survive for all employees from the nineteenth century, with name indexes from 1921 onwards, and the collection includes a large photographic archive. The British Postal Museum website has an online catalogue with descriptions of 50,000 records from its collections at www.postalheritage.org.uk
.

The Post Office was also responsible for the national telegraph service, with the entire telephone service being taken over by the GPO in 1912. In 1947 Cable & Wireless Ltd was nationalized and absorbed into the Post Office. The GPO became responsible for more fees and licences, particularly with the growth of the television and media industry, which made it too large and complex to manage effectively and so its powers were devolved and in 1969 the Post Office Act made the GPO a public corporation rather than a government branch, splitting it into Post and Telecommunications. In 1981 the telecommunications side of the Post Office became a separate corporation under the name British Telecom, which was privatized in 1984.

Records of the Telecommunications department of the Post Office and earlier private telephone and telegraph companies have been transferred to the BT Group Archives, whose records date from the nineteenth century. The British Telecom Archives have teamed up with the commercial website www.ancestry.co.uk to digitize historical phone books and make them available to search online.

Charles I established the Post Office in 1635, employing postmasters on the main routes between London and the major cities to collect and distribute mail and to collect revenues on behalf of the Crown. The General Post Office (GPO) was established between 1656 and 1660 in the City of London and comprised the Inland Office for all internal mail, the Foreign Office for overseas mail, and the Penny Post Office for local mail; a Postmaster General oversaw the entire department. The GPO building and the majority of its records were engulfed by the Great Fire of London in 1666, so documentation prior to this date is scarce.

The number of routes and towns covered by the postal network grew during the 1700s as the ever-expanding network of turnpikes made it easier for mail to be delivered further. This necessitated regional
administrators to be established, to ensure local post offices were run efficiently. In 1715 regional surveyors were appointed to fulfil this requirement.

The introduction of the world's first adhesive postage stamps, the Penny Black and the Two Pence Blue, in 1840 gave the postal system a huge boost in the nineteenth century. Increased adult literacy also led to a rise in the amount of mail sent and the Post Office became responsible for telecommunications in 1870 and a banking service.

Although the construction of turnpikes from the late seventeenth century onwards increased the speed at which people and small loads of commercial goods could be transported, the roads did not solve the problem of getting large quantities of industrial produce to the ports. Thus, developing inland waterways was seen as a way to overcome the limitations posed by wagon loads on the roads. Canals were the principal mode of transport for commerce during the eighteenth century and only went into decline from the mid-nineteenth century when a vast network of railway track started to cover the British countryside and took business away from canal companies.

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Canals were the principal mode of transport for commerce in the eighteenth century
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Though few records survive proving that our ancestors helped build
these waterways and navigations, there are plenty of records helping us to understand the history of each canal – when construction began, how long it took, how many people were employed on it, how it benefited surrounding areas and how long it proved vital to the local economy. It is possible to find out who invested in canal construction and sometimes the names of those people who worked on the canals as boatmen, as well as information about specific barges and canal boats.