Week 43 (Oct. 22-28) Urban

While many of my ancestors were farmers and farm labourers, others resided in a much more urban setting.  Tracing their addresses through censuses, directories, newspaper articles and other resources.  As cities grew and industrialisation drew many into urban living, urban ancestors became more and more common.

One ancestor, Christopher Prentice, worked as a Water Bailiff in Ipswich, Suffolk in the late 1700s.  Too early for the census records, much of my knowledge of Christopher's life comes from newspaper articles.

I hadn't known the job of Water Bailiff  was an elected position until I found the article above, which was placed in the Ipswich Journal on Saturday 12 September 1778 thanking those who had elected him to the position for their trust.

Website Wednesday - Old & Interesting

Antique household equipment, furnishings, utensils - housekeeping as part of social history. Domestic life, household management - how people ran their homes and did the daily chores. Yesterday's everyday objects are today's antiques or museum pieces, making us curious about past ways of life.

Old & Interesting takes a look at how these everyday things were used, how people managed their home life - and more.

The site includes a history of laundry - a unique set of pages about laundry methods and tools, including histories of  ironing, washboards,  starch and bluing.

There is a Kitchen Antiques Directory for the best online resources on culinary equipment, cooking and eating tools as well as baking, butter, and other traditional and historic food preparation pages
 

Information on beds and bedding includes featherbeds and bed warmers for comfort, or simple straw mattresses and rustic box beds.
 

There are also one-off pages on topics from brooms to meat screens or hasteners to cleaning with stone and sand.
 

Week 42 (Oct. 15-21) Fire

Fire has the potential to have a devastating impact on family history records.  This has long been evident in the impact the loss of the Dublin Public Records Office on researching Irish ancestors. 

The Battle of the Four Courts, the opening engagement of the Irish Civil War, began on 28 June 1922. National Army forces of the Irish Free State were attempting to drive Anti-Treaty Republicans from the Four Courts, and other locations in Dublin. 

The Anti-Treaty garrison had occupied the Four Courts and the Public Record Office 10 weeks earlier, on the night of Holy Thursday 13 April. The Easter date was significant as it linked their campaign with the Easter Rising of 1916. From April to mid-June 1922 political tensions grew, but there were still some friendly contacts between the two sides. In late June the Free State’s National Army surrounded the entire Four Courts complex. In the early hours of Wednesday 28 June they gave the Anti-Treaty forces an ultimatum – evacuate the building or they would open fire. 

At around 4.45 am, just before sunrise, an artillery gun firing 18 pound shells opened fire on the building, accompanied by machine gun and rifle fire. The battle had begun.

Early in the afternoon of 30 June, after two days of fighting, the Four Courts was shaken by a tremendous explosion. 

This shattered the eastern wall of the Record Treasury of the Public Record Office and threw burning material in among the paper and parchment records. The explosion produced a dramatic pillar of smoke and flung files, books and scrolls high into the air. Scraps and fragments fell on the streets of the city, some even landed in Howth, 10 km away.

The remains of the Record Treasury

 
The old, dry records on the shelves quickly caught fire. The flames destroyed practically all the records in the Treasury. Within a few hours seven centuries of Ireland’s historical records were gone.

Immediately the opposing sides blamed each other for the disaster. More usefully, though, within days the staff of the Public Record Office began rescuing any surviving records from the ruins. These rare, charred documents, called the ‘Salved Records’, were carefully stored for future investigation.

Amazingly, the fire break designed to save the Record Treasury, worked — but in reverse, protecting the administration office at the front from the terrible fire in the Treasury. This saved many catalogues, and books that described and summarised the records, from the flames. 

Along with the Salved Records, these catalogues and summaries were the starting point in rebuilding the lost Irish records.

Website Wednesday - Welsh Newspapers Online

Welsh Newspapers Online is a free online resource from the National Library of Wales where you can discover millions of articles from the Library’s rich collection of historical newspapers.

Welsh Newspapers Online currently lets you search and access over 1,100,000 pages from nearly 120 newspaper publications generally up to 1910. This resource also includes newspaper content that has been digitised by The Welsh Experience of World War One project.

Welsh Newspapers Online is part-funded by the Strategic Capital Investment Fund and the European Regional Development Fund through the Welsh Government.

There is also the companion site Welsh Journals, which gives access to over 1,200,000 pages from over 475 journals published between 1735 and 2006.

While many of the titles included in these databases were printed in English, there are also a number printed in Welsh.

Family Tree UK Magazine

The latest issue of Family Tree UK magazine is now available free online for Campaspe Library members via our subscription to Libby eMagazines.

Inside this month's issue : 

• A World first: 200th anniversary of Brunel’s underwater tunnel 
• Digitisation of adoption records discussion
• Ancestry appeal to access Scottish records
• DNA Club news
• RootsTech registration 2026 now open
• Branches and Leaves - the importance of researching the whole family
• Suffering and shell shock : the psychological toll of WWI and WWII
• Getting started with AI for genealogy confidently
• The new MitoTree and Million Mito Project
• How to put your story together for publishing
• Further records of the Crown
• And more... 

Who Do You Think You Are Magazine

The latest issue of Who Do You Think You Are magazine is now available free online for Campaspe Library members via our subscription to Libby eMagazines.

Inside this month's issue : 

• A Banner for a hero
• Ancestry adds millions of Birmingham electoral registers
• Free UK Genealogy reveals plans for probate website
• TNA discovers will from Shakespeare family legal dispute
• Records of Irish schools released
• PhD student's family history collection digitised
• A Right Royal to-do - Charles II's visit to Norfolk
• Think outside the box - brick wall research
• The inheritance of trauma
• Stolen by the Nazis
• Asylum Records
• Crime and punishment 
• Protestation Returns 
• And more... 

Week 41 (Oct. 8-14) Water

Water has a profound impact on many lives.  Whether we live by the sea, by a river or far from water influences many aspects of our lives.  Too much water or not enough can be devastating.

Hard on the heels of 2 years of Covid lockdowns, 2022 saw my home area suffer the worst floods in living memory.  While my home itself was not impacted, many friends saw their homes flood, roads and highways were cut, access to services cut, shops closed and like many I came under an evacuation order.  

We watched the Murray River flood parkland, the water creeping closer and closer, flooding homes and breeching levies like the one behind the library where I work - see the photo below.  As the water rose the community came together to frantically sandbag homes and businesses, another wonderful show of community spirit in the face of a crisis.

After the water receded there was the clean-up to follow.  Cleaning and repairing homes, businesses, roads and farmland again involved the entire community.  For many the impact was ongoing.

Recording our memories of such major events should be a part of our family history records, for the generations that come after us.  My memories of the flood are now a part of my own family records, with photographs of the rising water and the devastation it left behind, as well as images of the community coming together to sandbag and support on another.