UK suffragette records | Genealogy Gems

British Isles Genealogy Records New Online

by Sunny | Jun 22, 2018 | 01 What's New, British, Findmypast, Irish, Scottish Genealogy

New U.K. suffrage records are online—and so is a related historical experience at Google Arts & Culture! Also: U.K. slavery notices, Scottish memorial inscriptions, British newspapers, and Irish school records.

Featured: The Suffragettes and the Road to Equality

Google’s blog recently reported a new Google Arts & Culture initiative: The Suffragettes and the Road to Equality. “In June this year, as a wave of Processions celebrating women and their long struggle for political and social equality comes to the UK, Google Arts & Culture has collaborated with more than 20 partners to bring online archival collections, video footage, and in-depth, visual stories of those who have helped shape history,” states the post.

For the first time, Google Arts & Culture is showcasing the work, lives, and sacrifices of powerful figures like Emmeline Pankhurst, Milicent Fawcett, and Princess Sophia Duleep Singh. This online experience delves into the organizations they established, their revolutionary forms of protest, and the objects that represent their legacy—the iconic suffragette banners, their personal letters and writings, photographs, and hundreds of other artifacts. Explore the exhibition on Google Arts & Culture.

More Suffragist records at Findmypast

We have previously spotlighted several U.K. suffragist record collections at Findmypast (including these ones recommended by Genealogy Book Club author Nathan Dylan Goodwin). Findmypast recently reported adding these items to their Suffragette Collection:

Thousands of newly transcribed 1911 census returns that either list “suffragette” or “suffragist” as an occupation or someone who had had been “spoiled” in an act of civil disobedience.
More than 78,000 records taken from Metropolitan Police and Home Office files, revealing the struggles endured by the movement’s most ardent supporters and highlighting the state’s responses.
Women’s Suffrage Petition of 1866. Search for the names of your relatives who may have signed the petition that laid the foundations of the organized campaign for women’s suffrage.
Nearly 60,000 new records from 14 suffrage newspaper titles. These include interviews, personal accounts, political statements, satirical cartoons, news stories, photos and more.

New British Newspapers

Recently, the British Newspaper Archive reported the following additions (also searchable in the British Newspapers collection at Findmypast):

New titles and updated content covering the cities of London, Birmingham and Newcastle, and the counties of Bedfordshire and Wiltshire, Cumbria, Cheshire, Lancashire and Oxfordshire. Two new titles are the Birmingham Weekly Post and the Uxbridge & W. Drayton Gazette. The Birmingham Weekly Post and the latter editions of the Uxbridge & W. Drayton Gazette are full of pictures of local and national news. You can read all about Princess Margaret’s visit to Solihull in 1954 when 100,000 people came to greet her here, as well as an interesting report in the Uxbridge & W. Drayton Gazette about the 1957 craze in pets – bush babies.
Another new paper, the West Cumberland Times, adds significantly to coverage of Cumberland, with issues dating from 1874-1911.
They’ve also added more pages to Dover Telegraph and Cinque Ports General Advertiser, covering 19th-century life in one of England’s most important port towns. Coverage now spans 1833-1862.
More content in the Trinity Mirror Archive, with new titles going all the way up to 1986. For example: the Sunday Sun (Newcastle). With its current run beginning in 1936, the paper offers its own perspective on the biggest event of that particular year – the abdication of King Edward VIII. Also: almost a century of news from South London in the Norwood News (1868-1962).

More new British Isles genealogy records

Slavery in the U.K. Glasgow Live recently reported on the Runaway Slaves in 18th-century Britain project, which the project site itself describes as “a searchable database of well over eight hundred newspaper advertisements placed by masters and owners seeking the capture and return of enslaved and bound people who had escaped. Many were of African descent, though a small number were from the Indian sub-continent and a few were Indigenous Americans.”

According to the Glasgow Live article, “The advertisements paint a detailed picture of the men, women, and children who ran away in an attempt to be free of servitude, providing a rich source of information about the enslaved and slavery in 18th century Britain. The written notices described the mannerisms, clothes, hairstyles, skin markings, and skills of people who otherwise would have been completely absent from the official historical records of the time. The advertisements also include information about the work of the enslaved, their homes and situations, and the lives, businesses, and homes of their masters and mistresses.”

Ireland. Over 43,000 additional records covering schools in County Mayo have been added to Findmypast’s collection of Ireland National School registers. The entire collection now contains more than 186,000 records from many areas of the country spanning the years 1860 to 1922. According to the site, “School registers can reveal a variety of details related to your ancestor’s schooling. Records may reveal how they did in school, how good their attendance was, how old they were and what their parents or guardians did for a living. These registers, from schools that have since closed down, give a fascinating insight into the multidenominational early school system and can be a valuable resource for genealogists. Please note, however, those images that include individuals born after the 100-year cut-off have been redacted; therefore, some entries only include a transcript.”

Scotland. Over 33,000 additional records have been added to Findmypast’s collection of Scottish Memorial Inscriptions. “The collection includes records from 14 Scottish counties including the Isle of Skye and 209 burial grounds….In this index, you will find burials as early as 1507, like Robert Graham buried at Kinneff church in Kincardineshire, and as recent as 2016, like Morag Hamilton buried in Carmichael cemetery in Lanarkshire.”

Fun reading on British Isles genealogy

One of our favorite Genealogy Gems Book Club authors is Nathan Dylan Goodwin, author of the popular “Morton Farrier, Forensic Genealogist” mystery series. His latest release combines two titles in one: “The Suffragette’s Secret,” a short story, is published with his new full-length book, The Wicked Trade. Click here to read his guest blog post about the suffragette records he loves on Findmypast, and click here to check out his Morton Farrier series on the Genealogy Gems Book Club webpage.

About the Author: Sunny Morton

Sunny is a Contributing Editor at Lisa Louise Cooke’s Genealogy Gems; her voice is often heard on the Genealogy Gems Podcast and Premium Podcasts. She’s known for her expertise on the world’s biggest family history websites (she’s the author of Genealogy Giants: Comparing the 4 Major Websites); writing personal and family histories (she also wrote Story of My Life: A Workbook for Preserving Your Legacy); and sharing her favorite reads for the Genealogy Gems Book Club.

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). For example, as an Amazon Associate, Genealogy Gems earns from qualifying purchases. Thank you for supporting Genealogy Gems!

These UK Suffragette Records Tell Amazing Stories

by Sunny | Apr 25, 2018 | 01 What's New, Book Club, British | 1 comment

UK suffragette records tell amazing stories about the women and men who fought the British government for women’s voting rights a century ago. Nathan Dylan Goodwin, the popular Genealogy Gems Book Club author, shares three of his favorite sources for discovering suffragette stories like the one that unfolds in his new short story, “The Suffragette’s Secret.”

Thanks to Genealogy Gems Book Club author Nathan Dylan Goodwin for contributing this guest blog post.

My new short story, “The Suffragette’s Secret,” features a fictional main character, Grace Emmerson, a suffragette living on the South Coast of England in Brighton. But many of the events and supporting characters described in the story are real. In the story, forensic genealogist Morton Farrier uses real historical documents while working in the modern day to uncover Grace’s suffragette past. Many of these historical records (over 55,000 of them) are now available online in the FindmyPast Suffragette Collection.

Morton and I would recommend spending some time browsing this fascinating collection from a pivotal moment in women’s history. Even if your own ancestors did not make the headlines, they may have been involved at a more local level. And the lives of both women and men in your family may have been affected by suffragette activity, whether or not they are mentioned by name in the records. So it is a collection definitely worth exploring.

UK suffragette records I love

1. Suffragette Amnesty register (HO 45/24665)

With the threat of war and its having become inevitable in August 1914, most of the dominant suffragette organizations, including the Women’s Social and Political Union suspended all militant activity. In response, the British government gave an amnesty to more than one thousand women (and some men) who had been arrested for the cause. Their amnesty records are part of the Findmypast Suffragette Collection and also searchable at Ancestry.com (if your subscription includes UK records).

Alongside the names of those arrested comes the date and court where the charge was originally brought – an excellent starting point for further research.

In “The Suffragette’s Secret,” I referenced the real-life case of Nellie Godfrey. In the Amnesty Register of 1914, her name and references appear thus in the image shown here (the links lead to Google Maps references of the Bow Street magistrate’s court):

Godfrey, Nellie
Bow Street 9/7/09 180.782
Bolton 8/12/1909 186.626
Bow Street 27/11/11 203.651

Taking the second reference as an example of where this record can lead, this shows that Nellie appeared on the 8th December 1909 before Bolton Magistrate’s Court.

Searching for these criteria in Findmypast’s Suffragette Newspaper Collection brings up the following story: ‘Nellie Godfrey, of London, was charged at Bolton yesterday with throwing a missile at a motor car in which Mr [Winston] Churchill rode to his meeting on Tuesday night, and was fined 40s or seven days. Defendant went to prison. It was stated that the missile thrown was a piece of iron wrapped in a paper bearing the words “Thrown by a woman of England as a protest against the Government’s treatment of political prisoners.”’

For most of these records, further information exists at the National Archives. Prefixing the reference number with HO (for Home Office) and typing it into the document search box (HO 186626) on the National Archives website brings up a link to a document which details Nellie’s arrest and time in prison. (Unfortunately, these records are not yet digitized, but can be ordered.)

2. Calendar of Prisoners

These records, about suffragette prisoners who were tried in the London courts between 1911 and 1914, feature some of the prominent names from the movement, including the famous Pankhursts (one of whom is shown in the Calendar of Prisoners image below):

One record found in Crim 9/58 is that of Emily Wilding Davison, shown here. She was killed when she threw herself under the king’s horse at Epsom on 8th June 1913. Among several interesting details found in a document pertaining to an earlier arrest in December 1911 are to be found the following facts:

Emily Wilding Davison, 36, a tutor, arrested for ‘unlawfully and maliciously placing in a Post Office letter box a dangerous substance likely to injure the same and its contents and attempt to commit like offence.’ She was jailed at Holloway for six months.

This type of militancy, placing dye or some other kind of corrosive liquid into a letter box in order to render the letters inside illegible, was common among suffragettes and an act often making the local newspapers, which can be read about as part of the Suffragette Collection.

Further records for Emily Wilding Davison exist in the FindmyPast Suffragette Collection, including HO 144/1150/210696, which details several of her actions and subsequent convictions.

3. Suffragettes’ Complaints against Police (MEPO 3/203)

During my research for “The Suffragette’s Secret,” I visited the National Archives and accessed the Suffragette’s Complaints against Police, which was then not available online. At 286 pages, “Complaints against Police” provides an illuminating account of how the police handled a large group of suffragettes who had converged on Downing Street, intent on gaining access to the Prime Minister’s (Herbert Asquith) residence. A sample appears here, to the right.

The file includes several accounts from the perspective of the police involved, in which they all strenuously deny any harsh treatment of the women whom they encountered there. In contradiction to this are the numerous and varied statements from men and women involved in the altercation in which physical abuse and violence by the policemen was described as wide-spread, as this statement from the file attests:

‘About 2.15 in Parliament Square PC A.R.82 struck a Women’s Social & Political Union member in the face. At about 2.30 between Parliament Square and Cannon Row, almost opposite Palace Chambers, PC R.R.21 twisted the arm of and shook furiously a lady he had arrested. She was not resisting arrest. During the raid in Downing Street yesterday evening PC 449B got his knee into the middle of one woman’s back and knocked her down. PC 456E afterwards banged the same woman’s head repeatedly against the railings. I can produce my witness at any inquiry.’

This Suffragette Collection from FindmyPast contains a wealth of information useful to genealogists, social historians and those interested in women’s history. Other records available include cabinet papers, the treatment and force-feeding of political prisoners and various actions and imprisonments of the women men and men involved in the fight to gain the ability to vote.

Nathan Dylan Goodwin is one of our favorite Genealogy Gems Book Club authors! He’s a must-read for anyone who loves a good mystery–especially when the solving is led by a skilled (and very likable) forensic genealogist. Nathan first joined the Genealogy Gems Podcast to talk about his book The Lost Ancestor, but he now has several Morton Farrier, Forensic Genealogist books out. The newest one is a 2-for-1 bonus: “The Suffragette’s Secret,” the short story, is published with his new full-length book, The Wicked Trade. Click on these titles to order them–or check out all his books (and other great titles) on the Genealogy Gems Book Club webpage.

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting Genealogy Gems!