Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy (62 page)

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The National Archives of Australia has only a very limited amount of information on migration, as matters of immigration were not federal policy until 1901. Prior to that each of the six states would
control immigration and their archives contain a variety of information on the new arrivals. It is best to contact the relevant state archive to discover the exact nature of the records held.

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The National Archives of Australia (www.naa.gov.au) does hold information for twentieth-century migration, including passenger lists form 1924 onwards, and some of their holdings can be searched online.

‘Australia was populated in greater numbers by free settlers than by convicts.'

Another important destination for those choosing to emigrate was New Zealand. Unlike Australia, New Zealand was never used as a penal colony, and those who arrived came by their own free will. The present-day government of New Zealand has placed a very good history of immigration to the country on the website http://www.teara.govt.nz/ NewZealanders/NewZealandPeoples/HistoryOfImmigration/en. This is a very good introduction for anyone interested in finding out the history of immigration to the country. The same economic push-and-pull factors of searching for a better life and the active encouragement of the New Zealand government lay behind this migration. The very first Britons arrived in 1790 but large-scale migration only occurred from 1840 onwards, after New Zealand was declared a crown colony.

A large number of emigrants would have first arrived in New South Wales and it may be possible to trace your ancestor using the same Australian sources as above. After 1839 the New Zealand Company began an active policy of recruiting migrants. The company was in existence until 1858 and its archives are now at The National Archives in series CO 208. The Society of Genealogists also contains microfilm of birth, marriage and death indexes of New Zealand, where civil registration became compulsory from 1848 onwards.

The National Archives of New Zealand (www.archives.govt.nz) also contains records of immigration to the country. These include lists of assisted passengers arriving up to 1890 and passenger arrival lists.

British and Irish migrants started to arrive in South Africa from 1806 onwards, when the Cape of Good Hope was officially ceded by Holland to Great Britain. Numbers arriving continued as further territories were obtained by the British from the Boers, culminating in the Union of South Africa in 1910. Other than the passenger lists in BT 27 (described
above) there is only a very limited amount of information in the UK, found in The National Archives (payments made to Army and Navy pensioners settling there in the mid-nineteenth century held in the WO series, and correspondence files relating to settlers in the CO series), and also in some records at the Society of Genealogists. Although civil registration became compulsory for the entire country in 1923 (and earlier for some different provinces) the registers are not currently open to members of the public. It is best to contact the South African Society of Genealogists for further guidance if you are interested in tracing an emigrant ancestor in South Africa, at www.gensa.info.

The countries that received large numbers of British and Irish migrants have been discussed above. However, many other parts of the British Empire also had people settling in them, many of those individuals involved in the direct governance of the many colonies. One guide for records for those who settled abroad and retained links with the ‘homeland' is the book,
The British Overseas: A guide to records of their births, baptisms, marriages, deaths and burials, available in the United Kingdom
(3rd edition, 1994) published by Guildhall Library.

One of these territories was the subcontinent of India. There had been a European presence in India since the sixteenth century and the East India Company, established by Royal Charter in 1600, eventually became the effective ruling body of India by the mid-eighteenth century. After the failed Indian Rebellion of 1857, India came under direct rule by the British Crown until the end of the colonial era in 1947. During this period many hundreds of thousands of individuals went to India, employed firstly by the East India Company and later in the employment of the India Office.

‘Migrants to other parts of the British Empire were often involved in the governance of the colonies.'

A large number of records were created relating to the governance of India, including personnel files of employees and parish records. The East India Company maintained a separate army, which later became the Indian Army, and records for these have been discussed in
Chapter 9
. Similarly, the births, marriages and deaths of those residing in India
are detailed in
Chapter 5
. Additionally, the large archive of the East India Company at the British Library contains various documents for individual employees. These can be accessed by using the many indexes available for the various series of the collection, and there is also a card name index held in the Library. The British Library has also placed the card index as a searchable database online at http://india family.bl.uk/UI/. However, this index only contains a limited amount of biographical information and it is also worth visiting the Library in person as many people would not have been included in the card index.

Alistair McGowan was always curious about his origins, suspecting a European bloodline but uncertain exactly where it appeared in his family tree. He started by asking relatives about his background, knowing already that his father, George, was born and brought up in India. George's birth certificate listed him as ‘Anglo-Indian', which Alistair found out from research at the British Library's Asia, Pacific and Africa reading room meant that one of the women in his family was Indian by birth. His quest was therefore to determine when his Anglo' family emigrated, and which one married an ‘Indian' girl.

Sources revealed that generations of McGowans were born in India, part of the colonial administration of the Raj and, prior to 1857, part of the civil service established by the East India Company that controlled British interest on the sub-continent. A key document was the baptism of Ralph McGowan, which revealed that his father was a magistrate called Suetonius; no mother's name was listed on the document.

Alistair continued his research in India, and sought the advice of local historians who helped him work further back in time. He found a religious pamphlet that indicated Suetonius had married a noble-born Muslim lady, but because she refused to convert to Christianity her name was omitted from the baptism record that Alistair found in London.

Returning to the records at the British Library, Alistair was able to work even further back in time, and discovered that Suetonius's father was also called Suetonius, and was baptized in Bengal in 1775. His parents were John McGowan and Mary de Cruz, and Alistair established from military records, including pension funds, army gazetteers and service papers, that John first arrived in India as a private with the East India Company's army, and worked his way up to the rank of major – quite a rise. But the final surprise lay in the muster books for Fort St George, which indicated that John McGowan had sailed to India from Ireland – not Scotland as Alistair had always assumed. Was John McGowan born in Ireland? The records were inconclusive …

The Society of Genealogists also holds a selection of records for India. In addition, the ‘Families in British India Society' is dedicated to British and Anglo-Indian families living in India and can provide assistance to anyone researching their ancestors. They have placed a number of their records online available to search by name. Further details about the society can be found on their website, www.fibis.org.

The Caribbean was another important colony in the British Empire, and emigration proved popular during the height of the plantation era in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As most emigrants settled prior to the late nineteenth century it is not possible to track these individuals using passenger lists in The National Archives series BT 27. Alternative sources have to be used, many of which are found in The National Archives.

Suggestions for further reading:

• Emigrants and Expats: A guide to sources on UK emigration and residents overseas
, by Roger Kershaw (Public Records Office, 2002)

• Britannia's Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600
, by E. Richards (Hambledon, 2004)

The best starting point for detailed guidance is
Tracing Your West Indian Ancestors
by G. Grannum. The series E 157 has some registers of passengers travelling to Barbados during the seventeenth century. Further information about emigrants can be found in the calendar of State Papers Colonial mentioned above. The records of the governments of the various islands of the Caribbean may also contain relevant information, and these can be found in the CO series in The National Archives.

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to detail migration records for every country that an individual may have migrated to. However, it is possible to find out further details about specific countries online by visiting the country pages found on www.cyndislist.com or www. worldgenweb.org. Both websites contain country-specific guidance. The Society of Genealogists also has collections for a number of different countries and details of their holdings can be found in their online catalogues at www.sog.org.uk.

One of the saddest and most poignant discoveries you can make is that one of your ancestors fell into extreme poverty, and spent time in the workhouse; or, worse still, was incarcerated in a mental asylum. When someone fell on hard times, their daily existence was grim. This chapter shows you how to spot the clues that suggest all was not well with the family finances, and follow them into document sources to find out what life was like in the workhouse or asylum.

Poverty was, and still is (though to a much lesser extent) an ever-present factor in the social history of the UK and Ireland. Because of this there were also always means of helping the very poor and destitute throughout the country for many centuries, initially through charitable relief through the Church and the monasteries, later through parish relief and the large-scale introduction of workhouses in the nineteenth century to the beginnings of welfare state in the twentieth century. If your ancestor was unfortunate enough to have suffered poverty, there may well be a record of the support provided to him or her in various sources, depending on the period concerned.

‘If your ancestors suffered poverty, there may be a record of support provided to them.'

The early methods of poor relief during the Middle Ages were provided by the Church as part of the religious obligations of the parish. The monasteries were also involved in providing food and shelter to the
poor until their dissolution by Henry VIII in the sixteenth century. The dissolution came at a time when poverty in general was increasing. There was a large increase in population during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. However, this was not paralleled by an equal growth in the economy and, therefore, there was not enough work to sustain this population increase, resulting in a rise in poverty levels.

The 1601 Poor Law Act stipulated that only the ‘deserving poor' should be entitled to support and it was up to the parish overseers to decide who the deserving poor were (usually the old, sick or disabled). Those who were able bodied were helped by being given employment, and those seen as ‘idle' (such as beggars) were disciplined by whipping. Orphaned children were placed into apprenticeships
.

The State had to provide solutions to this and did so by passing a series of laws from 1597 to 1601, culminating in the Elizabethan Poor Law Act of 1601. The measures introduced in this legislation became the backbone of poor law relief until the mid-nineteenth century. The Act placed the responsibility for poor law relief on the parishes of England and Wales. Each parish now had to raise a sum of money from its property-owning parishioners by levying a ‘poor rate'. Two overseers were appointed to collect this sum of money and redistribute it to the needy. They would enter their transactions annually in an accounts book, and these books also detailed the recipients after 1690.

Most relief was in the form of ‘outdoor relief' whereby people were given support in the form of money, food or clothing. The system of ‘indoor relief' (the precursor of the infamous workhouse, discussed below) was introduced in the eighteenth century as a means of housing the infirm, orphans and the elderly. In 1723 an Act was passed to allow local parishes to build workhouses as desired. The Act also set the foundations of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act by allowing overseers to penalize those able-bodied individuals unwilling to enter the workhouse by denying them any other relief (although this was rarely enforced until 1834).

During the seventeenth century a problem arose regarding the implementation of the Poor Law Act – namely parishes had to fund the relief of individuals who were not born in that parish, but who had settled there. These people were seen as a burden on the parish and the situation was addressed by the passing of the Settlement Acts of the late seventeenth century. These Acts allowed two Justices of the Peace to examine those newly arrived parishioners during quarter sessions and remove them if they threatened to be a burden on parish ratepayers. The legislation also laid down the conditions by which an individual could claim ‘settlement' of that parish.