Jonathan Brown - TRACING YOUR RURAL ANCESTORS: A Guide For Family Historians

M ost of us probably have rural ancestors. Often they are not that far distant: after all, half the population of England and Wales lived in the country in 1851. My father was from the first generation in his family to leave the village when, after the Second World War, he joined the Post Office telephone service. He went first to the market town. After climbing the telegraph poles in the surrounding villages for a while, he was promoted to head office in London and embarked upon a life in suburbia. His father had been a village baker, and before him there was a complement of agricultural labourers in the family.

Ernest Browns (my grandfathers) scales. Made in Birmingham, of course, so nothing intrinsically rural about them. (The author)

Such stories can be replicated many times over in families across the land, and tracing something of them can be very rewarding. Frustrating as well, of course, because the trail can so quickly run cold as far as any record with names is concerned. I would be hard pushed to find anything mentioning my grandfather Ernest Brown as a baker, except probably the censuses of the time, and they have not been released yet. He is certainly not in the county directories. But I know that is what he was. Ernest told me a little about it when he was alive. I saw his bakehouse. I have ridden his delivery bike and fallen off it into a ditch. I have his scales; and I use them to weigh my flour when I make bread.

In a sense I have just been following the first rule of family history start from what we know about our families, and work out from there. And in this book I shall try to do something similar. If we have names from the census or the parish registers telling us our ancestors were farm labourers or whatever, how do we work outwards from there to the surroundings in which these people lived? So, I shall take a look at the constitution of rural society the farmers and their workers, the landowners, the village tradesmen, and the professional people to discover who they were, how they lived, and what records they might have left. The frustrations will remain, for the number of records that mention our rural forebears by name will often be small. But I hope the potential rewards will also be apparent as we discover a bit more about the lives our ancestors lived. The sky, almost, is the limit: potentially there are many avenues to explore in fleshing out the history of our family.

It will not be possible to cover everything in a volume this size. The great variety of regional and local society will of necessity be oversimplified. I shall also have to concentrate only on the village, for to look at the society of the country town in any detail would introduce too many extra paths to explore. But the links between village and market town were too intimate for the town to be completely excluded after all, many a village could once have been classed as a town, but its market declined.

In what follows, the first chapter gives a brief introduction to the structure and nature of rural society. Later chapters talk about the principal groups of people who might be found in the village, and how they might be described in the documents. These chapters will tend to work backwards from the recent past into earlier centuries, just as when constructing the story of our families. At the end of each is a brief guide to some of the sources in which records of these people can be found. gives some guidance on where and how to get access to the books and documents. The bibliography offers suggestions for further reading to cover most interests, including books that range from introductory texts to the more detailed and academic.

Many people have contributed to the making of this book unknowingly, over the time long before my colleague Guy Baxter put the project in my in tray. They include those who have sent me their enquiries relating to their own family research. In answering them their concerns seeped into my thinking. The members of family history and local history groups, and continuing education classes, to whom I have given talks from time to time, have all helped through their questions and responses in the composition of this book. My thanks go to all of these, but one special word must be for my former work colleague Christine Croker. I have listened over a number of years to the tales of her quest for rural ancestors, which took her to the far north-east and almost the far south-west of England, and she has prompted many thoughts for this book.