Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy (50 page)

A Tithe Commission was established to survey the extent to which tithe commutation had already taken place as a result of enclosure. Enquiries were sent to all the parishes in England and Wales, the results of which can be found among the Tithe Files at The National Archives in series IR 18, though the content of these files varies from parish to parish.

Those parishes that were still liable to pay tithes were then assessed property by property and plot by plot to establish how much rentcharge they should pay. These assessments are known as Tithe Apportionments and can be found in county record offices for the local area, with duplicates kept at The National Archives in series IR 29 and corresponding maps in IR 30. They are of use because they name the owners of land and property as well as the tenants and give a description of the property.

If your ancestor lived in a parish that had been enclosed then Tithe Apportionments and maps will not have been produced. To find out whether tithe records exist at for your ancestor's parish you can search The National Archives online catalogue by entering the name of the
parish and restricting the department or series code to IR 29. The reference for the maps will have the same ending as that for the apportionment, but will begin with IR 30 instead of IR 29. If you know the location of your ancestor's house you can find it on the map and use the plot number to locate the apportionment entry, otherwise you will need to scroll through the whole table of apportionments for that parish until you find the name that you are looking for. Duplicate copies can usually be found at the relevant county record office.

Ireland had a similar system of tithe payments that was reformed between 1823 and 1838. To make the collection of tithes easier the government sought to substitute payments in kind for monetary payments with the Tithe Applotment Act of 1823. All the agricultural land liable to pay tithes therefore needed to be surveyed to establish how much they should pay, a process that took 15 years to complete. The tithe tax was so unpopular, partly because people of all religious denominations were expected to pay tithes to the Established Anglican Church of Ireland, that a ‘Tithe War' broke out between 1831 and 1838, when thousands of people refused to pay and held protests, some of them extremely violent.

The Church of Ireland clergy recorded the names of tithe defaulters in 1831 so that they could claim for tithe arrears from the government's Clergy Relief Fund. Many of the 29,027 people recorded in the index of defaulters taken from 232 parishes in Carlow, Cork, Kerry, Kilkenny, Laois, Limerick, Loth, Meath, Offaly, Tipperary, Waterford and Wexford Counties were the same generation of people affected by famine and emigration a decade later. The Tithe Defaulters Schedules list the names, addresses, occupations and some observations and genealogical information about the extended family of those people who did not conform. The Schedules are held at the National Archives of Ireland among the Official Papers Miscellaneous Assorted (OPMA) files and there is an index containing the names and addresses of those listed in the Schedules. The Schedules can be purchased on CD from the Origins Network online store at www.originsnetwork.com, where you can also access the index online by purchasing a subscription.

In 1838 the Tithe Rent Charge Act was introduced in Ireland to absorb tithe payments into ordinary rents payable to the landlord in an attempt to pacify protestors.

The Tithe Applotment Books compiled between 1823 and 1838 for every parish in Ireland, except any land owned by the Church and any
land that was of such poor quality a charge could not be levied, are held at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and the National Archives of Ireland for their respective areas. The books are arranged by parish and give the names of occupants, the area subject to tithe, a valuation of the property, and details of the quality of the land. They are the last agricultural survey available prior to the Great Famine of the 1840s. The National Library of Ireland produced a Householders Index listing the occurrence of surnames in the Tithe Applotment Books for all the counties in Ireland. Copies of the Householders Index can also be found at PRONI and the National Archives of Ireland.

The Second World War increased the importance of agriculture in Britain as food imports were drastically cut and self-sufficiency was vital if the country was to have a strong, healthy population with which to defeat the Nazis. The Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries for England and Wales established County War Agricultural Executive Committees whose duty it was to increase agricultural output. The Committees could direct what should be grown, inspect farms, seize control of land, and mobilize groups of labourers. Their first job was to organize large expanses of grassland to be ploughed up, which instigated a farm survey in June 1940 to establish the extent of farms and their productivity as well as the efficiency of the farmer. Between June 1940 and early 1941 around 85 per cent of the agricultural land in England and Wales was surveyed, including all but the smallest farms. Once food production had increased a second more thorough National Farm Survey was planned to record the conditions of tenure and occupation, condition of management, the crop acreages and livestock numbers, the fertility of the land, the adequacy of the utilities, and a map of the boundaries for any farm over 5 acres. The findings of this survey are held at The National Archives in Kew.

The National Farm Survey began in the spring of 1941 and was completed in 1943 after 300,000 farms had been visited. Each farm surveyed has its own file in MAF 32 with maps in MAF 73. The records in MAF 32 are arranged by county and then alphabetically by parish. If you know the parish of the farm your ancestor worked on you can find the correct reference on the online catalogue by typing in the name of the parish and restricting the Department or Series Code to MAF 32. The farm record will contain the name of the farm, the farmer and his address. It will not list the names of everybody who worked on the farm
but should state how many labourers were employed, how efficiently the farm was run and what was produced there. Controversially, the farm needed to be classified from A to C (A meaning the farm was run well, B meaning it was run relatively well and C meaning there was poor management). Only 5 per cent of the farms surveyed were C classified, while 58 per cent were A classified. Farms that were classified lower than A due to ‘personal failings' have additional notes as to what these failings were.

‘
The National Farm Survey in 1940 recorded all but the smallest farms
.'

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If you want to find a specific farm using the maps in MAF 73 then consult the index map sheets in MAF 73/64 kept on open shelf in the Map and Large Document Reading Room, arranged in alphabetical order by county.

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No individual farm records of the earlier survey taken in 1940 appear to survive but county summaries can be found in MAF 38/213.

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Parish Summaries of Agricultural Returns can be found in MAF 68.

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A statistical analysis of the data was published in 1946, and a proof copy of the report can be found in MAF 38/216 with county-by-county statistical analysis kept in MAF 38/852–863.

The National Farm Survey 1941–1943: State Surveillance and the Countryside in England and Wales in the Second World War
by Foot, Watkins, Short and Kinsman reviews the National Farm Survey with illustrations. A similar but more limited farm survey was also carried out in Scotland between 1941 and 1943 and the resulting Farm Boundary Maps and records of the Scottish Agricultural Executive Committees can be found at the National Archives of Scotland. An abridged report to the Farm Survey in Scotland can be found at The National Archives in Kew in MAF 38/217.

‘
Court records in county record offices will have information on participants in the Swing Riots
.'

It can be tricky trying to ascertain whether or not your ancestor's family was directly affected by some of the major political and social events that have made it into the history books. This type of research will require you to study a variety of material, much of it secondary sources, and very often only circumstantial evidence will give you a clue as to the answer. Here we will look at methods of researching the effects of the Swing Riots, the Scottish Highland Clearances and the Great Irish Potato Famine.

If your ancestor was an agricultural labourer in the south of England, particularly in Kent and Sussex, they may have joined in the protests during the Swing Riots of 1830 to 1832. The best place to find out is at the county record office where snippets of information about ancestors tried for riotous behaviour can be found in records of Quarter Sessions. Kent, Sussex and the south were not the only areas affected by the riots. The Family and Community Historical Research Society has researched the Swing Riots to determine the true extent of their effect throughout England and have concluded that their influence extended over a wider geographical area than was previously thought. The FCHRS findings have been published in Michael Holland's book
Swing Unmasked
, which can be purchased on the FCHRS website at www.fchrs.com. The website also contains a list of all the counties where Swing Riot activity is recorded.

Newspaper reports are a rich source of information, such as that dated 28 February 1831 found in the
Guardian: ‘
The Rev Wm Bowerbank, of Mansfield, has been committed to Nottingham gaol for sending “Swing” letters to John Coke, Esq., the high sheriff of the county
.'

A number of books have been written about the Swing Rioters and their concerns, including E. J. Hobsbawn and George Rude's
Captain Swing
, David Kent's
Popular Radicalism and the Swing Riots in Central Hampshire
and Mike Matthew's
Captain Swing in Sussex and Kent
. It is worth consulting these books before attempting to locate original documents because they will give you an idea of exact dates when uprisings affected the area you are researching and you may even be lucky enough to find your ancestor's name is mentioned.

The Scottish Highland Clearances began around the 1760s and occurred in waves until the 1870s. If your ancestor was evicted during the Highland Clearances then the estate records may give some information about this. The National Archives of Scotland has a Highlands Destitution series in HD and also holds records of Crofters and Clearances, which can be search via the Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) on the NAS website, and via the Scran Trust website.

In 1883 a Royal Commission on the Highlands and Islands (also known as the Napier Commission) was set up to hear the evidence of 775 crofters and cottars who were living in a state of serious destitution as a result of the Clearances. Details of the names, addresses and families of the labourers from 61 places were recorded in a manuscript now available at the NAS in series AF50, and the commissioners' report has been printed as a separate document with other parliamentary papers. Some tenant farmers were forcibly put aboard ships heading for Nova
Scotia (or ‘New Scotland'), Ontario, the Carolinas and Australasia. Ships' passenger lists can help you to find out about ancestors who emigrated as a result of eviction and you can find out more about locating these in
Chapter 23
. An index to passenger lists of the Highlands & Islands Emigration Society that assisted around 5,000 people to leave western Scotland for Australia between 1852 and 1857 can be searched in the National Archives of Scotland's search rooms or on the SCAN website at www.scan.org.uk/researchrtools/emigration.htm.

More general research around the topic may be the only way of gathering circumstantial evidence as to the extent of the Clearances in your ancestor's region. You might be able to find out how and whether the Clearances affected your ancestor's parish by comparing the first and second editions of the
Statistical Account of Scotland
, the first edition produced between 1791 and 1799 and the second written in 1845, available online from Edinburgh University's EDINA website at http://edina.ac.uk/stat-acc-scot.

To find out more about the impact of the Highland Clearances visit www.theclearances.org. The Clearances project is designed to tell some of the stories of the millions of labourers directly affected. It has a search engine to find the names of people mentioned on the site, as well as a search facility for place names, parishes, ship names, ports and destinations.

There is no centralized data for the period of the Great Irish Famine of the late 1840s and with many parishes not having kept burial registers prior to the 1850s, combined with civil registration not beginning until 1864 and those records being lost in 1922, it is impossible to calculate the precise scale of the death toll. Historians have arrived at estimated death and emigration figures for the period by comparing statistics from the few population surveys available just before and just after the famine, such as the Tithe Applotment records of the 1820s and 1830s and Griffith's Valuation of the 1840s to the 1860s.

The Famine Immigrants: Lists of Irish Immigrants Arriving at the Port of New York 1846–1851
, published in seven volumes in 1983, can be found on the shelves of the Public Search Room at the Public Record Office for Northern Ireland (PRONI) and at the National Archives of Ireland and the National Library of Ireland, but for information about researching emigration to other destinations you should consult
Chapter 23
.

There are several Famine Museums established to tell the horrors of this period, such as the Doagh Famine Village and Museum in County Donegal, the Famine Museum at Stroketown Park House in County Roscommon, and the Donaghmore Workhouse and Famine Museum in County Laois. You can find out how to investigate whether your labouring ancestor was reduced to entering the workhouse during this time by reading
Chapter 24
. James S. Donnelly published
The Great Irish Potato Famine
in 2001, worthy of a read by anyone interested in this dark period of Ireland's history.