Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy (53 page)

The association of insurance underwriters, Lloyd's of London, took its name from Edward Lloyd's coffee house and became incorporated as the Corporation of Lloyd's in 1871. Edward Lloyd, a coffee merchant, set up Lloyd's Coffee House in London in the late seventeenth century to serve as a meeting place for merchants to exchange news and for merchants and underwriters to negotiate insurance for ships and cargo. He then went on to publish shipping news in
Lloyd's Lists
, which were taken over by the underwriters after his death, so the insurance business has always had strong links with merchant shipping.

The British Insurance Business, 1547–1970: A Guide to Its History and Records
by Hugh A. L. Cockerell and Edwin Green is a comprehensive guide to researching the records of companies dealing in marine insurance, fire insurance, life assurance and accident insurance, and contains a directory of the archives of British insurance companies listing the records that have survived and a table listing local insurance agencies, where they were based and where their records are now held
.

The British middle class were a cautious bunch, always in fear of losing their carefully built-up wealth. Therefore even if your ancestors did not work for an insurance company, you may find a record for them among fire insurance policies from the seventeenth century onwards, if they took one out to protect their home and belongings. Some fire insurance company records are at county record offices, but since many companies were based in London a large collection of fire insurance records can be found at the Guildhall Library. The Guildhall holds records for around 80 London-based fire insurance companies and has produced an online leaflet describing these at www.history.ac.uk/ gh/fire.htm. David Hawkings has also written a comprehensive guide in
Fire Insurance Records for Family and Local Historians
.

There are a multitude of directories and indexes to the names of people who worked in the legal profession, so finding evidence of your ancestor's employment and some background information about their education and career should not be too much of a challenge. The information will hopefully lead you to records of the court in which they served and the firm they worked for, but locating detailed information about the cases they worked on will be more complicated. Biographical information and obituaries may give you some clues as to any important court cases they witnessed, but then a search through court records will be necessary to uncover further evidence, and these are not always easy to locate or very descriptive.
Law Reports
published annually summarize each court case and are a good starting place if you know a rough date for a specific case. Consult
Chapter 27
for further guidance on researching court records generated by criminal convictions.

In England and Wales lawyers were known as proctors or advocates until the mid-1800s, the equivalent of barristers and solicitors today. In the fifteenth century advocates formed an association known as the College of Advocates. The premises where the college was eventually based, just south of St Paul's Cathedral, were close to many church courts and became known as Doctors' Commons. George Squibb wrote
Doctors' Commons: A History of the College of Advocates and Doctors of Law
in 1977, listing college members with some biographical detail and describing the college records held at Lambeth Palace Library.

•
 
Appointments of proctors can be found in the Act Books of the Archbishop of Canterbury, for which there is an index to the entries between 1663 and 1859 in volumes 55 and 63 of the British Record Society.

•
 
The National Archives has published two research guides to help family historians in this field, Domestic Records Information 36: ‘Lawyers: Records of Attorneys and Solicitors' and Legal Records Information 18: ‘Sources for the History of Crime and the Law in England'. These list sources kept at The National Archives in Kew as well as records held elsewhere.

Barristers act as advisors on specialist points of law and are admitted to practice through one of the four Inns of Court – Lincoln's Inn, Middle Temple, Inner Temple or Gray's Inn. Most of the admission registers for the Inns of Court have been published and each Inn has its own library and archives based in London; however, access to people not in the legal profession is highly restricted. Middle Temple Library will admit non-members by written appointment only, for example, and may charge a fee.

•
 
In 1896 Lincoln's Inn published their admission registers and the chapel registers of baptisms, marriages and burials that took place at Lincoln's Inn in
The Records of the Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn; vol. I from 1420 to 1799, vol. II admissions from 1800 to 1893 and chapel registers
. Later admissions to Lincoln's Inn up until 1973 are listed in two volumes held at Lincoln's Inn Library.

•
 
In 1877 Inner Temple published
Students Admitted to the Inner Temple 1547–1660
and, more recently, put an Inner Temple Admissions Database online covering 1660 to 1850, which can be
searched free of charge from www.innertemple.org.uk/archive/itad/index.asp. Admissions books for later dates are at the Inner Temple Library.

•
 
In 1949 H. A. C. Sturgess published three volumes containing the
Register of Admissions to the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple from the 15th Century to 1944
, and a further two volumes published in 1977 by the Hon. Mr Justice Bristow cover the period between 1945 and 1975. The third volume contains an index to volumes I to III, which are arranged chronologically by date of admission, while the appendix in the fifth volume contains an alphabetical index to the chronological records of volumes IV and V.

•
 
In 1889 J. Foster published
The Register of Admissions to Gray's Inn 1521–1889 together with the marriages in Gray's Inn chapel 1695– 1754
, and admissions to Gray's Inn since 1927 have been recorded in the journal
Graya
, along with obituaries and other biographical notes on members
.

Prior to training as a barrister at one of the Inns of Court, a law student may have studied at one of the Inns of Chancery, such as Clifford's Inn, Clement's Inn, Barnard's Inn, Furnival's Inn, Thavie's Inn, New Inn or Staple Inn. Clifford's Inn was the last of the Inns of Chancery to be closed in 1900.

•
 
The National Archives in Kew holds admission registers for Clement's Inn between 1656 and 1883.

•
 
The Seldon Society published C. Carr's
Pension Book of Clement's Inn
in 1960 and more recently published C. W. Brooks'
The Admissions Registers of Barnard's Inn 1620–1869
.

•
 
In 1906 E. Williams wrote
Staple Inn, Customs House, Wool Court and Inn of Chancery; Its Medieval Surroundings and Associations
, including a list of students admitted to Staple Inn between 1716 and 1884.

•
 
Middle Temple Library contains the admissions books for New Inn from 1743 to 1852.

Men in the legal professions between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, including judges and members of the Inns of Court and Doctors' Commons, needed to take an oath of loyalty to the Crown and the Church of England. In addition to the general series containing Oath Rolls, the court where a lawyer wished to practise also has declarations and oaths among its records at The National Archives. Those for Chancery are in series C 214 and C 217; for Common Pleas look in CP 10;
for the Exchequer in E 3, E 169 and E 200; for the King's Bench search KB 24 and KB 113; and for the Palatinates of Chester, Durham and Lancaster look in CHES 36, DURH 3 and PL 23. After 1868 the Barrister Rolls contain oaths in KB 4. There is an index to the names of High Court judges, recorders and magistrates who took an oath from 1910 in KB 24.

‘
Men in the legal professions had to take an oath of loyalty to the Crown and the Church of England
.'

There are a wealth of histories and directories that may lead you to information about ancestors who worked in the legal professions, such as Desmond Bland's
A Bibliography of the Inns of Court and Chancery
and the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians'
Sources of Biographical Information on Past Lawyers
by Guy Holborn, reviewing over 500 sources that contain biographical information about lawyers in England, Wales and Ireland. In 1870 Edward Foss published
Biographia Juridica: A Biographical Dictionary of the Judges of England from the Conquest to the Present Time 1066–1870
, which can still be found in major libraries and archives.

For more general guidance on tracing ancestors in the legal profession the Law Society has an online guide about sources in their library that are useful to family historians. Unfortunately the library is only open to solicitors and their staff; however, the ‘How to Trace a Past Solicitor' guide (found with other research guides at www.lawsociety. org.uk under ‘Products and Services' and ‘Library Services') lists the types of sources the library holds, many of which can be found in other repositories. The Law Society recommends using Lists of Attorneys, the Roll of Solicitors to the Court of Chancery, and the
Law List
directory of practising lawyers from 1775 onwards.
My Ancestor Was a Lawyer
by Brian Brooks and Mark D. Herber, published by the Society of Genealogists, gives another general overview of the types of legal sources useful to genealogists.

In Scotland there are two types of lawyers – advocates, who may plead in the Court of Session, and solicitors (formerly known as writers and sometimes as law agents). Law agents pleading in the smaller courts such as the sheriff courts are also called procurators. The Scottish Bar is known as the Faculty of Advocates, the Lord Advocate is the principal law-officer and judges usually worked as advocates before their appointment.

There are several publications and directories with genealogical information about members of the legal profession from all ranks that should be your first port of call, particularly the annual
Scottish Law
List
, previously called the
Index Juridicus
, dating from 1848. In 1944 Sir Francis J. Grant wrote
The Faculty of Advocates in Scotland, 1532–1943 with Genealogical Notes
, and Brunton and Haig's
Senators of the College of Justice
lists judges of the Court of Sessions up until 1832. A number of Scottish solicitors can be found in
The Register of the Society of Writers to Her Majesty's Signet
. To locate court records for cases your ancestor worked on consult the comprehensive chapter about lawyers in
Tracing Your Scottish Ancestors
by Cecil Sinclair.

Dublin's legal quarter is known as the Four Courts, so named because it is where the courts of Chancery, King's Bench, Exchequer and Common Pleas were housed from the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Irish legal system was revised in the mid-nineteenth century and again by the Irish Free State in 1922 to form the Supreme Court, High Court and Central Criminal Court, all located at the Four Courts. The King's Inns occupied the site prior to the nineteenth century, controlling the entry of barristers to the Irish justice system. In 1982 the
King's Inns Admission Papers 1607–1867
were published, and Colum Kenny has written a couple of guides about the history of King's Inns and their surviving records. The Bar Council Law Library of Ireland is unfortunately restricted to members only; however, their website has an interesting history of the Irish legal system and the librarian may be able to point you in the direction of useful sources. Dublin Directories from the late eighteenth century contain details of Irish attorneys and barristers and the Irish Legal History Society may also be a useful source for advice in tracing Irish ancestors who worked in the legal profession.

In 1922 a separate Bar Council for Northern Ireland was established, and in 1926 the Inn of Court of Northern Ireland was founded so that Northern Irish lawyers could practise from the Bar Library in Belfast. The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland is your best bet for finding records about an ancestor in the Northern Irish legal profession. PRONI has a large Solicitors' Collection, comprising papers deposited by around 140 Northern Irish solicitors' firms. The records contain information about the firms' employees as well as their clients and the cases they worked on. A guide to these records has been published on the PRONI website.

Suggestions for further reading:

•  A Guide to Tracing the History of a Business
by John Orbell (Gower, 1987)

•  British Banking: A Guide to Historical Records
by John Orbell and Alison Turton (Ashgate, 2001)

•  Chartered Accountants in England and Wales: A Guide to Historical Records
by Wendy Habgood (Manchester University Press, 1994)

•  The Society of Accountants in Edinburgh 1854–1914
by Stephen P. Walker (Garland Publishing Inc., 1988)

•  The British Insurance Business, 1547–1970: A Guide to Its History and Records
by Hugh Anthony Lewis Cockerell and Edwin Green (Continuum International Publishing Group, 1994)

•  My Ancestor Was a Lawyer
by Brian Brooks and Mark D. Herber (Society of Genealogists Enterprises Ltd, 2006)

The employment of individuals for the public benefit has grown as a phenomenon since the Victorian era, even more so since the development of the Welfare State at the end of the Second World War. Here we will explore the records available for researching the careers of people employed directly by the State and people who devoted their working lives to helping the rest of society, including civil servants, government officials, the police, people employed in the medical professions, schoolteachers and clergymen.

Complete personnel records for civil servants are generally destroyed once the employee reaches 72 years of age, though the Ministry of Defence retains records of their employees until they would have been 100 years old. Those that have been kept will have been transferred to the national archive for the country concerned, that is to say The National Archives in Kew for civil servants in England and Wales, the National Archives of Scotland for Scottish civil servants and the National Archives of Ireland and Public Record Office of Northern Ireland for Irish civil servants and government employees.

‘
Being government employees means that public sector workers leave behind a lot of evidence in the archives
.'

The National Archives at Kew holds some records for famous or high-ranking civil servants in series CSC 11, as well as some records of ordinary staff who worked for HM Treasury between 1891 and 1976, kept in T 268. The National Archives' research guide, Domestic Records Information 117: ‘Civil Servants Personnel Records', suggests more documents where random files on civil servants might be found and where the names of female employees might be located, though the latter are very limited owing to the ban on married women working prior to the Second World War. It is often necessary to have an idea of the department and sometimes the division your ancestor worked in, as well as a rough timescale. Individuals are named in files that have a very general description in the catalogue, so you will need to order general files relevant to the timescale and department you are looking for to search for any names. You will have more luck if your ancestor was a high-ranking civil servant; these individuals are listed in the
British Imperial Kalendar
from 1809 to 1972, when it became the
Civil Service Year Book
. Civil servants who enjoyed high-ranking positions in the overseas service can be found listed in the
Foreign Office List
. The National Archives' research guide contains a list of similar publications for a number of specific government departments.

You may have more luck if your ancestor served in an official position between the sixteenth and nineteenth century, when many individuals were required to swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown, as indeed were many lawyers. The resulting rolls are scattered across a number of different places – oaths sworn before Justices of the Peace will be found in Quarter Session returns, whilst records of lawyers sworn before the various Crown Courts will be at The National Archives. Further information can be found on The National Archives website.

The Society of Genealogists is currently indexing records formerly contained in the Civil Service Commission: Evidences of Age file at The National Archives in series CSC 1. This comprises birth and baptism certificates of civil service applicants. Contact the Society of Genealogists at www.sog.org.uk to find out more. Copies of civil service staff directories can be found at major archives and libraries, containing limited information on the majority of civil servants, such as their appointments, how much they were paid and where they worked.

The post of customs officer is of ancient importance in the UK because of the islands' dependence on international trade. The
National Archives in Kew and the National Archives of Scotland hold records for customs staff as detailed in The National Archives' research guide Domestic Records Information 38: ‘Customs and Excise Officials and Tax Collectors'. The NAS has a research guide to its customs and excise records at www.nas.gov.uk/guides/customs.asp.
Family Histories in Scottish Customs Records
by Frances Wilkins is an interesting read for anyone with Scottish ancestors in the customs and excise profession. These records are covered fully in
Chapter 14
.

Although John Hurt was fascinated by the family legend that – somehow – he was related to the Marquess of Sligo, proving it was a much harder matter. Along the way, he had come across his great-grandmother Emma Stafford, believing her to be the elusive connection; but by talking to his cousin, John discovered that the link possibly lay through Emma's husband Walter Lord Browne and his family. By investigating details surrounding their marriage, John discovered a notice in the local paper announcing the impending wedding that claimed Walter's father, William Richard Browne, was the head of the Bond Office in London.

This information was fairly specific, and by researching what the Bond Office actually was, John was able to pinpoint William's career as a civil servant in the Customs Office, a major national institution which incorporated the work of checking and issuing bonds for vessels unloading goods cargo in London. Records of employment for customs officers survive in The National Archives, where John was able to trace William Richard Browne's career. He was somewhat surprised to learn that, instead of being listed as the head of the Bond Office – an important, prestigious and well-paid job – he was actually only a clerk, still enjoying an annual salary but by no means as lucrative a position.

Indeed, further investigations at The National Archives revealed that he had run into financial difficulties and, as a result, been declared bankrupt. His customs office pension was used to pay off his creditors and he ended up in court and, eventually, debtors' prison. Having consulted material at the modern Customs House, John gained a greater understanding of the work William Browne would have undertaken before his fall from grace.

One of the first professional, trained police forces was Sir Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police Force of London, established on 29 September 1829, prior to which time London was policed by the Bow Street Foot and Horse Patrols and by parish constables, responsible for law and order in the provinces. There is a service register covering 1821 to 1829 for the Bow Street Foot and Horse Patrols at The National Archives in MEPO 4/508.

Local police forces were required to be set up in boroughs and counties under a similar system to the Metropolitan Police Force from 1856 in England and Wales, and from 1857 in Scotland, though some areas had been building a police force since the 1830s. There have been hundreds of police forces since the mid-nineteenth century, many of which have since merged, but there is no central police archive for all their records. Some police force records will be found at the local county record office while other forces have kept their own archives, such as that of the Metropolitan Police Force. Police records generally comprise attestation papers and personnel books or registers listing policemen's names, ages, dates and places of birth and notes about their career.

The National Archives holds personnel records for the Metropolitan Police from 1829 up until around 1933 in series MEPO, described in more detail in the research guide Domestic Records Information 52: ‘Metropolitan Police (London): Records of Service'. Any research enquiries for records of the Metropolitan Police Force not held at The National Archives should be sent to:

The Metropolitan Police Archive Service,

Wellington House,

57/73 Buckingham Gate,

London SW1E 6BE

Metropolitan Police Archive

Disciplinary books can be extremely interesting too, as the actor Jeremy Irons found out. Jeremy's great-great-grandfather Thomas Irons was a policeman with the Met, and a visit to the Metropolitan Police Archive uncovered records of Thomas joining the force in 1828, making him one of the first Peelers, but he was dismissed in disgrace in 1834 for being drunk and disorderly. Thomas went on to join the controversial Chartist movement and spent time in Newgate prison
.

The Metropolitan Police has some interesting pages about its history on the website www.met.police.uk/history.

Additional information may be found about policemen in local newspaper reports on crime investigations, court cases and inquests, and in the
Police Gazette
, published from 1828, or in
The Police Service Advertiser
published between 1866 and 1959. The Police Historical Society published A
Guide to the Archives of the Police Forces of England and Wales
by Ian Bridgeman and Clive Emsley in 1994, and
My Ancestor Was a Policeman
by Antony Shearman (published by the Society of Genealogists) comprises a short history of the police in Britain, the type of records available and a comprehensive directory of the sources of British police force records
.

The London Metropolitan Archives holds detailed records for the City of London Police from 1832, which are described on the Access to Archives database.

The Irish Constabulary was created as a national armed police force in 1822 and groups of part-time policemen were amalgamated to form the newly reorganized Irish Constabulary in 1836, known as the Royal Irish Constabulary from 1867. The Royal Irish Constabulary was disbanded in 1922 and The National Archives at Kew retains the records of around 84,000 men who saw service with the force between 1822 and 1922 in series HO 184, as described in the research guide Domestic Records Information 54: ‘Royal Irish Constabulary Records'. Duplicates of Royal Irish Constabulary records can be found on microfilm at the National Archives of Ireland and in LDS Family History Centres.

Jim Herlihy has written
The Royal Irish Constabulary: A short history and genealogical guide with a select list of medal awards and casualties
, containing brief biographies of around 3,000 Irish policemen, as well as
The Royal Irish Constabulary: A complete alphabetical list of officers and men 1816–1922
.

The Ulster Historical Foundation has an online database of men who retired from the Irish Constabulary between 1836 and 1844 and a list of Irish Constabulary Sub-Inspectors in 1860 among its occupational databases at www.ancestryireland.com.
Police Casualties in Ireland 1919–1922
by Richard Abbott contains the names and biographical details of men in the police force who died in Ireland during this period.

Records of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, formed in 1786, are held at the National Archives of Ireland and Herlihy has also written
The Dublin Metropolitan Police: A short history and genealogical guide
, as well as
The Dublin Metropolitan Police: A complete alphabetical list of officers and men 1836–1925
.

The medical profession covers a wide range of roles, from apothecaries, chemists, druggists, pharmacists and physicians who administered remedies to surgeons, doctors, nurses, midwives and dentists who treated and cared for patients. For a general guide to medical records useful to genealogists read Susan Bourne and Andrew H. Chicken's 1994 publication,
Records of the Medical
Professions: A practical guide for the family historian
. Most of the secondary sources, indexes and reference books mentioned in this section can be found in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library and any of the national libraries for England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The Wellcome Trust was established in 1936 with money left in the will of the pharmaceutical businessman Sir Henry Wellcome who had dreamed of creating a Museum of Man illustrating the medical past of mankind. The Trust's mission is to promote medical research and as such it has a fantastic library stocked full of books, manuscripts, archives, films and pictures on the history of medicine since the earliest times. You can search the Wellcome Library's collections online at http://library.wellcome.ac.uk.

A Medical Archives and Manuscripts Survey (MAMS) was carried out for more than 100 repositories in Greater London to establish the types of records they hold concerning the history of medicine between 1600 and 1945. The results of this survey can be located on the Wellcome Library website, giving descriptions of the archives of the General Medical Council, the Medical Society of London, the National Institute of Medical Research, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Midwives, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal National Pension Fund for Nurses, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, the Royal Society of Medicine and plenty of smaller institutions across the capital. The reports for each archive are found under the ‘Databases' section of the ‘Electronic resources' page on the website. You may want to contact some of these institutions if they cover your ancestor's occupation to seek their advice about your research.

If you manage to trace several generations of ancestors in the medical profession going further back in time, then
The Medical Practitioners in Medieval England: A Biographical Register
written by Eugene Ashby Hammond and Charles Hugh Talbot may be of use. The biographical register includes physicians and surgeons from England, Wales and Scotland, but very few from Ireland. The biographical detail has been taken from parliamentary rolls, the infirmarer's rolls of Westminster Abbey, charter witness lists, lay subsidy rolls, chancery and exchequer records, household accounts and many more sources.

In 1985 Wallis, Wallis, Whittet and Burnby compiled a register containing around 70,000 entries for
Eighteenth Century Medics (subscriptions, licences, apprencticeships)
, on behalf of the Project for Historical Biobibliography, covering a wide range of medical professions. It is a huge volume consisting of an alphabetical index of individuals compiled from The National Archives' apprenticeship records, subscriptions to the publication of medical treatises, alumni of UK medical schools, some membership lists of the medical Royal Colleges and a variety of other sources. Hard copies of the register can be consulted at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, the Pharmaceutical Society, the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Science Museum, the British Library, the National Library of Ireland, the National Library of Scotland, The National Archives at Kew and the Society of Genealogists, as well as at a select number of universities and regional libraries.