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Nick Mays
Deputy Archivist
News International Ltd

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Headline: How I tracked my roots... To a Brummie bedstead burnisher;Cover
Story
Byline: Damian Whitworth
Source: The Times
Issue Date: Friday May 14, 2004
Page: Times2 4
Picture Caption: Whence we came: several generations of a Victorian family
in 1895. Photograph by GETTY IMAGES. Facing page, researchers pore over
records in the National Archives in Kew with the aid of new technology.
Photograph by MATT WRITTLE

Story Text:


 THIS IS FAMILY HISTORY WEEK AND GENEALOGY IS THE NEW NATIONAL OBSESSION,
WITH THE CURIOUS USING A COMBINATION OF DUSTY ARCHIVES AND COMPUTER
TECHNOLOGY TO TRACE ANCESTORS. DAMIAN WHITWORTH TRIED IT

 YOU KNOW THAT an activity has become part of the fabric of everyday life
when experts detect an accompanying rage. Road Rage, Air Rage, Trolley
Rage. I come across a new one on a wet weekday afternoon in the "marriages"
section of the Family Records Centre in Islington.

 The room is busy, with little elbow room at the desks, particularly those
in front of the shelves containing indexes of marriage certificates from
the 1890s. A coach party has just arrived and people with urgent, unsmiling
faces are hauling the heavy, bound volumes off the shelves and leafing
through them rapidly, running their fingers down long lists of names. Many
are muttering to themselves and when they find what they want they exclaim
loudly: "There he is! Found him!" Nobody else looks up from scouring their
own volumes. If they find the information they want they make careful
notes. If they don't they slam the book shut, sling it back on the shelf
and grab the next one.

 I am doing exactly the same. After a couple of days of archive work I too
am talking to myself like a lunatic. In the cramped conditions I keep
returning indexes to the shelf at the same time as the person next to me, a
white-haired gentleman with claret cheeks. He is clearly not happy at
sometimes having to wait while I replace my volume. On one occasion he
tuts. When I dump a book down a touch too heavily and it sends his papers
gusting off the desk he huffs: "Do you mind!" He disappears to the other
side of the stack and I spread out, putting my notebook where he had been
working. I head off in search of a volume from another shelf and when I
return a minute later see him furiously throwing my notebook off what he
clearly regards as his territory.

 I decide to avoid a stupid argument. When I later describe the incident to
Nick Barratt, who runs Sticks Research Agency, he nods and smiles. "Index
Rage," he says. "You see it a lot."

 Index Rage has not yet become the scourge of our public libraries. But it
is a symptom of the phenomenal boom in interest in family history. Archives
that were once the hunting grounds of dandruffy academics are now teeming
with amateur genealogists caught up in a national obsession with
discovering where we came from.

 Technology has powered the genealogical revolution. Since the National
Archives put the 1901 census on line in 2001 the number of hits on its
website has increased tenfold to 116 million a year. Its newsletter, which
had a modest readership of 4,000 in 2002, now has 75,000 subscribers.
Television shows on genealogy are all over cable history channels. In my
local newsagent this week I picked up six different magazines covering the
subject.

 This week the National Archives has been celebrating Family History Week
with a series of events at its Kew headquarters and the publication of
Journeys in Family History, a lavishly illustrated hardback guide to
researching your lineage.

 "It's a very fashionable subject," says Dr Elizabeth Hallam Smith,
director of public services at the Archives. "It's often said that we live
in a rootless society, the pace of change is very fast and this gives
people a stake, a grounding; especially when they bring their ancestors to
life. People become very passionate about it."

 Hallam Smith is fairly passionate herself. As we wander into the map and
large document room, where twentysomethings in combat trousers are working
through files alongside tweedy septuagenarians, she whispers excitedly:
"Look at the faces! Look at the absorption on these people's faces. This is
where you see the passion."

 History, she says, is "a bit like gardening. It has become fashionable."
She believes that part of the appeal lies in the act of searching itself.
"People like these personal quests." Then they become caught up in what
they discover.

 "What's so great is that anyone can come into the archives and research an
unknown person and find how they are linked to great events. People here
feel that they have a stake in the nation's memory, the idea that their
ancestors were part of these big central events. People find that
fascinating." At the heart of the archives, in a glass case, sits the Holy
Grail of genealogy: the Domesday Book.

 Few of us can trace our family back that far, Hallam Smith explains. You
would need to have been a landowner in the 11th century.

 It is unlikely that my ancestors owned much back then. But then again, I
have no idea what my forebears were doing before about 1920. Nick Barratt
says that part of the modern fascination with digging through archives
comes from a sense of "dislocation". This has its origin in the scattering
of families after the First World War and the resulting erosion of the oral
tradition which had ensured that family histories were passed down from
generation to generation. He's right about that. Quick calls to my father
and grandmother leave me without even a definitive answer on my paternal
great-grandfather's name.

 I have to start with the basics, which means a trip to the Family Records
Centre, which is jointly run by the National Archives and the General
Register Office.

 Here you can obtain copies of birth, marriage and death certificates.
Unless you have the exact date, this can involve a great deal of searching
through the indexes for the certificate you want. The certificate then has
to be ordered and takes a minimum of 24 hours to be copied (at Pounds 23
for each express delivery certificate and Pounds 7 for a four-day
turnaround; the research process can be slow and expensive).

 Death certificates supply a person's age, and this leads you to the birth
certificate with vital information such as parents' names. Marriage
certificates also contain ages and parents' names. So, gradually, one
document at a time, it is possible to work back through the generations
into the mid-19th century. However, the registration of BMDs was a
Victorian invention and before 1837 the researcher needs to enter the much
sketchier area of parish records.

 I have immediate problems with the Whitworths, who appear to have had a
haphazard approach to recording BMDs. This is not entirely surprising.
Vagueness on family information seems to be in the genes. I can remember my
grandfather's surprise when he discovered, towards the end of his life,
that he wasn't called Trevor after all. His Irish mother had named him
Traver. Or perhaps her accent had confused the registrar. The absence of a
marriage certificate for this Irish great-grandmother suggests that she wed
in Ireland. Possibly to an Arthur Whitworth. Nobody can recall. I decide to
switch to my paternal grandmother's side of the family.

 Here, I have more luck and over three days I am able to skip back to a
great-great-great grandfather, a gardener, living in Birmingham at the time
of the marriage of his son in 1893. The 1901 census is a crucial resource.
Available online, it allows you to search for individual names and
addresses and, for a fee, to view the original entries and start to build a
picture of complete families.

 The Armed Forces' meticulous records are a rich seam to be mined by
genealogists at Kew. The gradual release since 1996 of soldiers' personal
files from the First World War and the release of around 216,000 officers'
files since 1998 have been key to the explosion in family history.
Nevertheless, 60 per cent of files from the First World War were lost in
the Second World War and none of my great-grandfathers can be found.

 However, I make a thrilling discovery on my mother's side. A cousin has
already done a lot of work here and I am able to request the military
records of my great-great-great-grandfather. Close to the bottom of a
crumbling stack of discharge papers, I find a document from 1857. My mother
has always joked about being able to trace the family back to Moses, and
here, in copperplate handwriting, his name -Moses Glassey -leaps off the
page. The four-page record details how at the age of 18 he gave up his life
as a weaver to join the 13th Regiment of Foot. The small bombshell is that
he was Irish, which my mother's family had never suspected.

 Over 17 years he worked his way from private to corporal to sergeant, with
a brief demotion after a court martial for drunkenness. He served three
years in Gibraltar, where he caught a cough which prevented him from
"marching or bearing his belts". So he was discharged.

 It is hard to imagine a less distinguished military career, but after
discovering the papers I am as excited as if he had been the Duke of
Wellington. I have experienced the genealogist's "buzz".

 Nick Barratt, who seems able to hold a complete picture of my family tree
in his head, ensures that I am able to move ten times faster than I would
if I were personally trying to plot each move in my search.

 My fellow ancestor hunters are a mixed crowd. All ages are represented,
but most of the younger researchers are professionals, like Barratt,
available for private hire to people living abroad, or wealthy and lazy
enough not to do their own digging. The majority of punters are retired,
often working with spouses or with friends. The occasional moment of rage
aside, it is a sociable business One regular at the archives is Anne
Grimshaw, a 57-year-old technical magazine editor at the University of
Hertfordshire. She has traced her family back to a weaver, alive in 1741.
Like many family history aficionados she has moved on to reconstructing the
worlds in which her subjects lived and now specialises in military trails.
She followed her father's path through Italy and North Africa, in the
Second World War, by physically visiting the places he went to, and tracked
a distant ancestor's movements in the Napoleonic Wars. Her latest project
is seeking the original owner of a bayonet on behalf of a friend who knows
only that it belonged to a great uncle who fought at Trafalgar.

 "Part of the attraction was having my own special piece of history. The
history I did at school didn't bear any relation to anything that my
ancestors might have been involved in. I loved the idea of being able to
find things out that nobody has done before. You can be the world expert on
somebody."

 Now she is "not really bothered who it is. It's the thrill of the chase
without the blood." David Hey, the author of Journeys in Family History,
began his research three decades ago. "These days record offices do not
have the calm, restrained air that they possessed when I was a young man."
He has traced his family back ten generations to 1633 when they were living
in a West Yorkshire farmhouse. He started teaching a course in family
history at Sheffield University and is now president of the Sheffield &
District Family History Society and has written several books.

 He has little time for speculation on the whys and wherefores of family
history.

 "People want to search for their roots," he says bluntly. "I get rather
annoyed when people come up with glib explanations. They say 'It's insecure
people in search of their roots'. Look around at the people in the Family
Records Centre - that doesn't apply to them. I've even heard it said that
it has taken the place of religion. I say to that: 'It's very popular in
America, where 50 per cent of the population still go to church'.

 "People have always been interested in family history, but have not had
the chance to pursue it. Now there are more record offices and the
technological developments, such as the internet, so they can do it. It's
simply that people have more leisure time and a lot of people retire
earlier."

 He is amused that so many people begin their research in the hope -or
belief - that they have impossibly romantic origins. "I have never met an
American who claims that his ancestor was a transported convict or an
indentured servant rather than a passenger on the Mayflower. Their English
equivalents have a fondness for supposed Huguenot ancestors, or for an
aristocratic connection 'on the wrong side of the blanket'.

 "But the truth of the matter is that in the Middle Ages most people were
peasants and in recent centuries they were industrial workers. They are the
ones from whom most of us are descended. People quickly accept the reality
-they've got no choice really."

 Very true. Eventually, with the aid of the 1901 and 1881 censuses and
painstaking work in the BMD indexes, I trace the Whitworth line back to a
William who could sign his 1873 wedding certificate only by marking it with
a cross. I am the great-great-grandson of an illiterate Birmingham bedstead
burnisher.

 I feel pleased to have found out so much in less than a week. "You've done
well," Barratt says. "But you've only just started. Now it gets
interesting." He reels off a list of parish registers, wills, land surveys
and other possible avenues to explore.

 I thank him, but I think all that can wait for my retirement.

 HOW TO GET STARTED

 INTERVIEW elderly relatives for information on birth, death and marriage
dates of ancestors and where they lived. Draw a family tree containing
everything you already know. Write everything down as you proceed. It's
very easy to get confused.

 Obtain copies of BMD certificates. Look these up in indexes at some county
record offices, Mormon Family History Centres or the Family Records Centre
in Islington.

 Free BMD (http://freebmd.rootsweb.com <http://freebmd.rootsweb.com> ) and
www.1837online.com <www.1837online.com> provide access to transcripts and
images of indexes. Copies of certificates can be purchased from the Family
Records Centre or by post from the General Register Office, Southport
(www.statistics.gov.uk/registration <www.statistics.gov.uk/registration> ).

 Check the 1901 census at www.census.pro.gov.uk <www.census.pro.gov.uk> .
Examine First World War and other military records at the National
Archives, Kew. Finally, be patient. Researching a family takes time, and
much of the work cannot be done on the internet.

 Useful websites: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk <www.nationalarchives.gov.uk>
; www.familyrecords.gov.uk <www.familyrecords.gov.uk> ;
www.familysearch.org <www.familysearch.org> ; www.stick.org.uk
<www.stick.org.uk> ; www.cyndislist.com <www.cyndislist.com> .



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