Michael Sharpe - Tracing Your Potteries Ancestors

TRACING YOUR POTTERIES ANCESTORS

Tracing Secret Service Ancestors

Tracing Your Air Force Ancestors

Tracing Your Ancestors

Tracing Your Ancestors from 1066 to 1837

Tracing Your Ancestors Through Death Records

Tracing Your Ancestors Through Family Photographs

Tracing Your Ancestors Using the Census

Tracing Your Ancestors Childhood

Tracing Your Ancestors Parish Records

Tracing Your Aristocratic Ancestors

Tracing Your Army Ancestors 2nd Edition

Tracing Your Birmingham Ancestors

Tracing Your Black Country Ancestors

Tracing Your British Indian Ancestors

Tracing Your Canal Ancestors

Tracing Your Channel Islands Ancestors

Tracing Your Coalmining Ancestors

Tracing Your Criminal Ancestors

Tracing Your East Anglian Ancestors

Tracing Your East End Ancestors

Tracing Your Edinburgh Ancestors

Tracing Your First World War Ancestors

Tracing Your Great War Ancestors: The Gallipoli Campaign

Tracing Your Great War Ancestors: The Somme

Tracing Your Great War Ancestors: Ypres

Tracing Your Huguenot Ancestors

Tracing Your Jewish Ancestors

Tracing Your Labour Movement Ancestors

Tracing Your Lancashire Ancestors

Tracing Your Leeds Ancestors

Tracing Your Legal Ancestors

Tracing Your Liverpool Ancestors

Tracing Your London Ancestors

Tracing Your Medical Ancestors

Tracing Your Merchant Navy Ancestors

Tracing Your Naval Ancestors

Tracing Your Northern Ancestors

Tracing Your Pauper Ancestors

Tracing Your Police Ancestors

Tracing Your Prisoner of War Ancestors: The First World War

Tracing Your Railway Ancestors

Tracing Your Royal Marine Ancestors

Tracing Your Rural Ancestors

Tracing Your Scottish Ancestors

Tracing Your Second World War Ancestors

Tracing Your Servant Ancestors

Tracing Your Service Women Ancestors

Tracing Your Shipbuilding Ancestors

Tracing Your Tank Ancestors

Tracing Your Textile Ancestors

Tracing Your Trade and Craftsmen Ancestors

Tracing Your Welsh Ancestors

Tracing Your West Country Ancestors

Tracing Your Yorkshire Ancestors

A Guide for Family and Local Historians

Michael Sharpe

First published in Great Britain in 2019

PEN & SWORD FAMILY HISTORY

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS

Copyright Michael Sharpe, 2019

ISBN 9781526701275

eISBN 9781526701299

Mobi ISBN 9781526701282

The right of Michael Sharpe to be identified as Author

of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library.

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BAA Birmingham Archdiocesan Archives

BMDs Births, marriages and deaths

BMSGH Birmingham & Midland Society for Genealogy and Heraldry

FHS Family history society

GRO General Register Office

LCC Lichfield Consistory Court

LRO Lichfield Record Office

MI Monumental Inscription

NSR North Staffordshire Railway

PCC Prerogative Court of Canterbury

PCY Prerogative Court of York

PLU Poor Law Union

PMAG Potteries Museum & Art Gallery

SNI Staffordshire Name Indexes (website)

SRO Staffordshire Record Office

SRS Staffordshire Record Society

SSA Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Archives (Service)

STCA Stoke-on-Trent City Archives

TNA The National Archives

WSL William Salt Library

The Proud Potteries

This book is about the Staffordshire Potteries: how it became one of the most distinctive industrial districts in the world and how you can find your ancestors there.

North Staffordshire is rightly proud of its industrial heritage. For almost 300 years from the mid-1700s, this isolated community on the western edge of the Peak District became a microcosm of the Industrial Revolution. Working with the simplest of tools and raw materials, often in wretched conditions, a skilled and industrious workforce produced objects of great beauty that were admired and desired around the world. Their efforts secured for Britain a pre-eminent place in a key industry that had previously been thought of as unprofitable, or reliant on royal patronage or Far Eastern expertise.

The processes and skills required were extraordinary. The factories, or potbanks, with their distinctive bottle ovens turned out ceramic wares of every shape and description from domestic utility items and fine bone china, to decorative tiles, sanitary ware and building materials, and later on specialized industrial products such as electrical insulators. But this innovation and creativity came at a cost. Working conditions in the potbanks were often grim, and the bottle ovens along with the areas other staple industries, mining and steelmaking heavily polluted the environment, with consequent impacts on health.

It was not a promising start. A visitor to the area in the Middle Ages would have found a few farmer potters eking out a living on the sides of the windswept hills. They would tend their farms during the summer and spend the winter months fashioning butterpots to use in their dairies and crude domestic items to sell in the local markets. But slowly and surely a body of expertise began to accumulate. Driven by the values of the Midlands Enlightenment a conviction that science and technology should be applied to improve the human condition pottery entrepreneurs such as Josiah Wedgwood began to apply inventions and discoveries to improve their wares. Some of these innovations were of their own making, others came from far and wide. In doing so, they turned what had been a craft into an industry with a worldwide reputation.

While names such as Wedgwood, Josiah Spode, Thomas Minton, John Astbury, John Doulton and Enoch Wood are credited with laying the foundations of the pottery industry in Staffordshire, many of the most talented people are known only to history. For hours on end, year in year out, these unknown craftspeople (both men and women) toiled in the potbanks producing some of the most exquisite creations ever made by human hand. It is these people we set out to find when we embark on the search for our Potteries ancestors, and we can be proud of them too.