The Nosey Genealogist

What are and where are the National Archives for the United Kingdom?

The National Archives are in Ruskin Avenue in Kew, Surrey which is just on the southern outskirts of London. They were once called the Public Records Office and you will often see the letters ‘PRO’ used as a short name when doing genealogical research. Today you are just as likely to come across ‘TNA’ in your family history researching online and in the written media.

TNA is where the records of the UK central government are deposited if they are considered worth preserving. What is more it is where the records are kept for the English law courts.

While many people will visit the Kew site of TNA, a great many others will go to its website. The advantage of this if you, like me, live a long way from Surrey, is obvious! Within the TNA website is Documents Online, which will allow a researcher to order documents, some to view online and others to be sent by mail.

www.nationalarchives.gov.uk is a website that is quickly developing into one of the best internet resources for family historians as well as for military historians and others. Perhaps it should be said that it is probably not a good idea to use it to start your family history at the moment as it is huge and requires a lot of getting used to.

If you take a look at the Catalogue, you will find that it is not like a library catalogue. At first it seems to be so very complicated and almost perverse in stopping a researcher from finding what one is looking for. The catalogue’s function is to describe and then list in a hierarchical order, all the records that the TNA hold.

Some people may think that they are looking at a catalogue of documents, but it is actually one of ‘records’ as it would be a task of mammoth proportions to describe all the many documents whose home is at TNA. Individual documents fall into categories, which are called ’series’. Series are arranged by the department of government that created them or, in some cases, were the past custodians of the documents.

So if you are to use this resource you will need to understand how the various arms of government worked in the form of which departments are likely to have created the records and how they would have been organised.

There are about ten million descriptions on the TNA catalogue, but they are not all of the same detail or quality. Some are more detailed, especially if the creating government department gave more importance to the record series than others. In the case of the series that is well detailed, in its description, it may even give the searcher descriptions of the documents! But so many others will give little clue as to what is exactly contained in the series in question.

So what have we learnt here?
The catalogue is not a searchable index of documents held at TNA.
It is a searchable index of records, or more precisely descriptions of records that are arranged hierarchically in up to seven stages.

To order a copy of a document to be posted to you will need a note to be taken of the catalogue reference. This reference is in several parts.

The department code, which is between one and four letters, e.g. War office = WO, Home Office = HO

The series description - a number which can be one to four figures
e.g. HO 102

The piece or item number - e.g.WO364/1000

This actually refers not to a document but to a microfilm reel that contains the documents. Here it is armed forces service records from 1914-1920 and in particular for Soldiers’ Documents and Pension Claims, First World War and being the surnames between Desmond, Michael and Davenport, Harry.

If you want more help with the catalogue then I would take a look here: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue/about.asp

I have found a great article called “Q & A on the census” in a back edition of the Family Tree Magazine for January 2008.

It gives some back ground as to why, how and where the census were taken. E.g: Did you know that the first one was in 1801? Most people are aware that we can use the 1841 to 1901 census for genealogical research, but census have, it seems, been taken since 1801 to the present day with the exception of 1941 which fell in the World War II period. But only the returns from 1841 onwards have details that are of any good to family historians. The earlier ones didn’t ask for names of all those in the households.

A useful box on the page gives the dates for the returns that we as family historians use. In 1841 it was the 6th June, while in 1851 the census was taken on the 30th March, then the 7th April for 1861, the 2nd April in 1871, the 3rd April in 1881, 5th April for 1891 and the 31st March in 1901.

How were the census details obtained? This question is answered with the following:

“Registration districts were too large to be covered by a single person so were subdivided into sub-districts and these were again divided  into enumeration districts. In rural areas an enumeration district was the area that could be walked in a day by the person (the enumerator) collecting the schedules. In many instances this would be just one village, whereas a large town would be made up of many enumeration and sub-districts.”

It would seem, from the article, that in the week before the census the enumerator would have delivered to the household the form or schedule and everyone that slept under the roof that particular night would have been included in the return even if it was not their regular home. What was interesting for me was the clarification of the instructions to the enumerators.

No person present was to be left out and those not present were not to be included; which I knew. But what if someone was working over night? Well they were to be included on the census return for the house that they would return to the next morning. This does seem obvious now, but it is good to have it confirmed.

Once the schedules were collected and any not filled out were completed by the enumerator asking questions to gather the correct information, the schedules were copied into the enumerator’s book and these are the documents that we can obtain images of on sites such as ancestry.co.uk or findmypast.com etc. today.