Jesson Lesson

I’ve been nibbling away at one of my many brick walls, and felt that it was time to write something up. People performing pre-civil registration research in England and Wales will easily relate to the problems I describe here. Although solid progress was made, there are still parts for which I feel that I may be painting a story rather than uncovering one — you be the judge.

The research relates to my Jesson line during the early 19^th Century, and in particular to Thomas Jesson, the grandfather of the Mary Jesson researched in A Rich French Actor; one of my g-g-g-g grandfathers.

My friend Peter Lucas has been conducting a One-Name Study (ONS) on the Jessons for many years (originally http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/jessonfamily but moved to http://www.maberly.name/Jessonindex.htm in August 2018). We have pooled our knowledge on several occasions, but we both knew that there was something missing in relation to Thomas.

The Problem

Thomas was born around 1792 in Sapcote, a small village about 10 miles SW of Leicester. He was baptised on 14 Apr 1792 to a Thomas and Rebecca Jesson at Sapcote All Saints.[1] His mother was Rebecca Gent, and his parents were married in the same parish during 1790.[2] Thomas married a Mary Bentley on 11 Mar 1822,[3] and they had two sons: William (b. c1822)[4] and James (b. c1824)[5]; in both baptism registrations the “Quality, Trade or Profession” column reads “Frame knitters” — the plural indicating that this applied to both parents. The trail then goes cold for a long time.

Figure 1 – Sapcote All Saints church.[6]

The next appearance of the family is in Nottingham, about 40 miles north of Sapcote, in the 1841 census.

Name	Sex	Age	Birth year	Occupation	Place of birth
Thomas	M	45	1796	F.W.K	Notts.
Rebecca	F	40	1801	-	ditto
James	M	15	1826	-	ditto

Table 1 – 1841: Jesson family. Milk Street, Nottingham.[7]

There was now a problem because his wife was named Rebecca (not Mary), and there was no sign of William.

The 1851 census confirmed that James (the eventual father of the Mary mentioned in my pervious article) and Thomas were both from Sapcote, and were both framework knitters. There were no alternative identifications possible, given their combined details, but where was William, and who was Rebecca?

Name	Role	Status	Sex	Age	Birth year	Occupation	Place of birth
Thomas	Head	Married	M	58	1793	Framework Knitter	Sapcote, Leics.
Rebecca	Wife	Married	F	51	1800	-	Hinckley, Leics.

Table 2 – 1851: Household of Thomas Jesson. 5 Castle Court, Nottingham.[8]

Name	Role	Status	Sex	Age	Birth year	Occupation	Place of birth
James	Head	Married	M	27	1824	Framework Knitter	Sapcote, Leics.
Keziah	Wife	Married	F	24	1827	-	Tewksbury, Glos.
Thomas	Son	-	F	5	1846	-	Nottingham
Mary	Daughter		F	2	1849	-	Nottingham

Table 3 – 1851: Household of James Jesson. 4 York Place, Nottingham.[9]

There was no obvious death registration for the son, William. Also, there was no preceding marriage visible for Thomas and Rebecca, and no obvious death registration for Mary. So was Rebecca a new wife or a pseudonym for the same one (Mary)?

Thomas died on 8 Jul 1855, aged 64, of dropsy [abnormal accumulation of fluid beneath the skin and in the cavities of the body] at Castle Court, Howard Street. His occupation was “Stocking framework knitter”, and the informant was Ann Herod of nearby Milk Square, who was present at the death.[10] To make things worse, I could see no subsequent death or remarriage for his Rebecca.

This is the sort of problem you leave until a (very long) rainy day.

Rebecca Jesson

Well, that rainy day arrived — we get a lot of them here — and it began with finding when Rebecca died. Although she did not show up in the civil registration index, she did show up in the burial register of Nottingham’s privately-run General Cemetery, along with her husband, Thomas.

Name	Burial	Death
Frank Wright	7 Apr 1905	Unrecorded
Charles R. Wheatley	3 Mar 1892	Unrecorded
Rebecca Jesson (aged 72)	17 Feb 1869	Unrecorded
Thomas Jesson	11 Jul 1855	8 Jul 1855

Table 4 – Burial register details for Rebecca Jesson.[11]

The other two deceased are not relations that I am aware of.

By that time, civil registration of deaths was well-established, so where was Rebecca? The dates from the burial register eventually allowed me to identify her GRO index entry as “Rebecca Lesson” (as in my title),[12] and this was how it was recorded in the original index (i.e. not a subsequent transcription error). Interestingly, the new GRO index of civil registrations[13] has the same error, and this suggests that the original registration had some horrible error.

The newspapers came to the rescue in finding their marriage.

On the 26th ult. [26 Jul 1845], at the Superintendent Registrars' office, Radford, Mr. Thomas Jesson, Milk-street, to Mrs. Rebecca Burdett, of Carrington.[14]

Carrington was a hamlet about 1.5 miles north of the town centre. As well as showing that their marriage occurred some time after they were living under the same surname (see 1841 census, Table 1), and not in any church, this notice is interesting because it referred to Rebecca as “Mrs”. If she was a widow then it is very likely that Thomas was also widower, and that his first marriage had ended. His son by that marriage, James, married Keziah Chandler only the following year, in 1846.[15]

In many cases of a deferred second marriage, it was because the participants in the first marriage had simply separated, and they had to wait for a period of seven years to elapse with no contact before legally remarrying. However, this option wasn’t available until the offence of bigamy in England & Wales was redefined in section 57 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 — it didn’t apply in this instance, and so the first wife of Thomas (Mary) must have died.

The marriage certificate for Thomas and Rebecca confirmed that she was a widow, and that her father, John Quaile, was a frame-smith. One of the witnesses was the Keziah Chandler that Thomas’s son (James) would soon marry; the other being a Jeremiah Butler.[16] It was then possible to show that Rebecca had previously married a Thomas Burdett while still living in Hinckley, in 1818.[17]

Hinckley (the birthplace and marriage-place of Rebecca) was a village only 5 miles to the west of Sapcote. Not only was it associated with framework knitters, it is reputed to have been the first location where textile employees started destroying the machines that were taking their jobs — actions that were later to become the Luddite movement during 1811–1816. Their common origin and widowed status would easily explain how they met, but Thomas’s younger sister, Maria (see below), was baptised in Hinckley so their families must have known of each other.

Loughborough

In order to locate candidate deaths, I used the National Burial Index (NBI)[18]. This provides a comprehensive list of known burials in England and Wales, and it allows searches by birth date when a burial date is unknown.

Searching for “W* Jesson”, born 1822±1, there was only one candidate showed up in the whole database: Wm Jesson, buried 12 Jul 1835 at Loughborough All Saints parish, Leicestershire. Loughborough is a small town about 20 miles north of Sapcote, and was well-established in the domestic knitting industry that this Jesson family worked in.[19]

Figure 2 – Loughborough All Saints church.[20]

Performing a wider NBI search for all Jessons who were buried in the same Loughborough All Saints parish revealed only four entries:

Burial	Given name	Age	Equiv. birth year
4 Sep 1834	Mary	34	1800
12 Jul 1835	Wm [William]	13	1822
18 Oct 1835	Hy [Henry]	3	1832
28 Feb 1836	Maria	4	1832

Table 5 – Jesson burials at Loughborough All Saints.

Mary is a very strong candidate for Thomas’s first wife because of her age, but could Henry and Maria have been twins belonging to the same family; it would have been a tragedy indeed to have so many losses in just 18 months. Could an infectious disease have ravaged the family?

The death of William was reported in the newspapers, and confirmed that the father was a Thomas Jesson.

On Wednesday [8 Jul 1835], the son of Mr. Thomas Jesson, aged 13 years.[21]

So could the parish registers shed any further light on these deaths? Mary’s entry confirmed that she was the wife of a Thos. [Thomas] Jesson,[22] and presumably the same one as William’s father.

As expected, William’s entry confirmed his father as a Thomas Jesson,[23] but it didn’t mention any mother; with other entries involving children, the register indicated “son/daughter of father & mother”. This strongly suggested that Thomas was widowed, and so was the same Thomas as the husband of Mary in the earlier entry — remember that we are dealing with only four Jesson deaths in this parish.

Both of the entries for Henry and Maria similarly identified the father as Thomas, and with no mother.[24] Thomas had a younger sister named Maria,[25] so Henry might have been named after a relative of Mary’s.

Part of this deduction rests on there being just one Jesson family in Loughborough at that time. Findmypast’s Leicestershire databases confirmed that there were only these four Jesson burials in Loughborough between 1805 and the end of that century. The situation was similar with baptisms, where there was just one in 1844, and with marriages, where there was one in 1828 and one in 1848, but we’ll come back to these in a later section.

The following vital-event yearly data for the associated Leicestershire hundreds illustrates how small these communities were.

Year	Hundred of Sparkenhoe[a]			Hundred of West Goscote[b]			County summary for Leicestershire
	B	M	D	B	M	D	B	M	D
1821	915	249	551	1128	372	622	5074	1598	3046
1830	888	217	606	973	345	704	4956	1502	3461

Table 6 – Vital-event statistics for Leicestershire Hundreds.[26]

[a] Sparkenhoe: 50 parishes, including Hinckley and Sapcote.

[b] West Goscote: 31 parishes, including Loughborough.

Framework Knitters

This was a very poor, and much-abused, profession; labour costs were deliberately kept low as the masters could easily employ new labour. The knitters toiled 16–18 hours a day, and had to pay for their own yarn, replacement needles, and the rent on their frames — irrespective of whether they were using them. Worse still, they were paid by the article rather than by the yard. Living on the bread-line, in near poverty, it is hardly surprising that the Luddites reacted, as they did, to mechanisation taking away their work and making their plight all the worse.

Around the time that Thomas may have moved to Loughborough, 1833, framework knitters were petitioning the government for controls to protect their livelihood, including a minimum wage.

Lord R. [Robert] MANNERS presented a petition from the framework-knitters of Loughborough, complaining of distress.

Mr. GILLON presented a petition complaining of distress from the linen weavers of Forfar, and praying for a law providing that henceforth the linen weavers might be paid by the yard for their work. If something were not done on the subject he should, next session, call attention to it. -- Petition referred to the committee on manufacturers.[27]

Nothing came of this, and a subsequent petition in 1843 additionally made mention of the bad practices they were subjected to.[28] Eventually, a Royal Commission enquired into the conditions of framework knitters in 1845.

The following article appeared just the month after that first petition, and nicely summed up the mood in Loughborough.

On Monday [26 Aug 1833] evening, a meeting of persons engaged in the lace trade was held at Loughborough, and they agreed to subscribe in aid of the fund to prevent the exportation of machinery.

A notice has been issued by the framework-knitters' committee at Loughborough, stating that all persons found begging in the name of the "knotted branch of framework-knitters," are imposters [sic], that branch having a dependency of their own, and caution the public not to relieve any one.

The jurneymen [sic] lace hands of Loughborough have formed a union for the purpose of supporting each other when out of work. A great many have come forward, and in the course of a fortnight it is expected they will all join.[29]

The “knotted branch” appears to have been a sick society: a sort of friendly society where a group of people shared a percentage of their earnings to ensure their mutual welfare in cases of sickness or unemployment.[30] This particular one was Leicestershire-based and was mentioned in the newspapers as early as 1825, but there were others around the country, and related to several professions.

The way these societies also controlled their combined labour paints them as prototype trade unions, which were technically illegal at that time; it wouldn’t be until the Trade Union Act 1871 that unions would be legalised. For instance, "...a great number of workmen in the Silk Knotted Branch still continue out of employ, in consequence of refusing to work at an abatement of sixpence per pair. They hold out principally because of the very high price of provisions, and every other necessary of life”,[31] and “The journeymen belonging to the Silk Knotted Branch in Nottingham, Mansfield, and Ilkeston, still continue out, in consequence of the hosiers not complying with what the hands think a just and reasonable request”.[32]

Interestingly, poor law unions only came about the year after the above Loughborough article as a result of the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. Before that time, individual parishes had to administer poor relief rather than through unions of parishes.

Potential Conflicts

The presence of so few Jesson events in Loughborough should make it easier to identify relationships; however, there were a small number of other references that required explanation. None of these were in the same decade as the four burials, but they were in neighbouring decades and so it was necessary to establish whether they were related, and whether there might have been more than one Thomas Jesson. The following table enumerates a range references derived from various Ancestry vital-event databases (not images) on 26 Jan 2017.

Name	Date	Details
Harriet Jesson	25 Jul 1807	Baptised in Loughborough All Saints.[a]
	12 Feb 1828	Married John Plowright at Loughborough All Saints.[b]
Abraham Jesson	1840	Civil death registration in Loughborough district.[c]
Maria Jesson-i	17 Jun 1844	Baptised to George and Sarah at Loughborough All Saints.[d]
Maria Jesson-ii	5 Dec 1848	Married Thomas Smith at Loughborough All Saints.[e]
Phoebe Jesson	19 Jan 1846	Baptised at Loughborough Emmanuel (not All Saints) to Samuel and Sarah.[f]
Jane Jesson	1848	Civil marriage registration in Loughborough district.[g]
Ann Jesson	1849	Civil death registration in Loughborough district.[h]

Table 7 – Other Jesson references, from Ancestry vital-event databases.

[a] “England, Select Births and Christenings, 1538-1975”; FamilySearch, 2013.

[b] “England, Select Marriages, 1538–1973”; FamilySearch, 2013.

[c] “England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1837-1915”; citing Q1, vol.15, p.145; FreeBMD, 2006.

[d] “England, Select Births and Christenings, 1538-1975”; FamilySearch, 2013.

[e] “England, Select Marriages, 1538–1973”; FamilySearch, 2013.

[f] “England, Select Births and Christenings, 1538-1975”; FamilySearch, 2013.

[g] “England & Wales, Civil Registration Marriage Index, 1837-1915”; citing Q4, vol.15, p.249; FreeBMD, 2006.

[h] “England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1837-1915”; citing Q3, vol.15, p.89; FreeBMD, 2006.

Harriet’s baptismal surname is transcribed as “Jepson” on Findmypast, but the image confirms her as “a bastard of Ann Jesson”.[33] On her marriage entry, the witnesses were Mary Jesson and Thos. Linaker. Harriet signed her surname as “Geson”, but Mary signed correctly.[34] There’s no further sign of Ann in this parish. The Mary could have been the one who died in 1834, and that would suggest a connection between Ann and Thomas, but I didn’t manage to prove to disprove this.

Abraham was 90 years old, and buried on 10 Mar 1840 in the parish of Whitwick, St John the Baptist, about 7.5 miles west of Loughborough. Ann was also 90 years old, and buried 3 Jul 1849 in the same parish.[35] Hence, neither was associated with the Loughborough All Saints parish. Oddly, Whitwick St John is in the registration district of Ashby de la Zouch rather than Loughborough. The answer is that their abodes were both given as Grace Dieu, famous for its priory, which is an extra-parochial tract included in the Belton parish for statistical and civil registration purposes; Belton does fall within the Loughborough district.

The younger Maria-i was baptised to George and Sarah Jesson, residing on the Nottingham Road. George was a butcher.[36] When the older Maria-ii married Thomas Smith, she was also living on the Nottingham Road. Although her father was also a Thomas Jesson, he was a publican rather than a framework knitter. Witnesses were a James and Mary Twain.[37] The fact they were living on the same road strongly suggests that these Marias were related.

Phoebe was baptised at 40 years old. Findmypast records her name as “Phobe Jepson” (rather than “Phoebe Jesson”, as on Ancestry) and in this case the image confirms this to be correct; the surname clearly contains a “ps” rather than a long-s, and can be contrasted with the subsequent entry, for “Wesson”, which does show a long-s.[38] Hence, Phobe/Phoebe is a red herring.

Jane (a “minor”) married William Norman Bramley junior on 24 Oct 1848 in the parish of Sheepshed (now spelled Shepshed),[39] about 5 miles west of Loughborough. She is not associated with Loughborough All Saints.

So, we have two Marias to check further, one of whom had a father named Thomas Jesson. Looking at the 1841 and 1851 censuses, we find them both in the same family. The older Maria-ii being the daughter of Thomas and Dorothy, and the younger Maria-i being the daughter of George (son of Thomas and Dorothy) and Sarah.

Name	Sex	Age	Birth year	Occupation	Place of birth
Thomas	M	40	1801	Publican	Leicestershire
George	M	15	1826	-	ditto
Timothy	M	10	1831	-	ditto
Christopher	M	8	1833	-	ditto
Walter	M	7	1834	-	ditto

Table 8 – 1841: Household of Thomas Jesson. Nottingham Road.[40]

Name	Sex	Age	Birth year	Occupation	Place of birth
William Seale	M	30	1811	Ag. Lab.	Leicestershire
William Ward	M	20	1821	Brick layer	ditto
Dorothy	F	40	1801	-	ditto
Maria	F	14	1827	-	ditto

Table 9 – 1841: Household of William Seale. Nottingham Road.[41]

Name	Role	Status	Sex	Age	Birth year	Occupation	Place of birth
Dorothy	Head	Widow	F	50	1801	Retired Innkeeper	Long Clawson, Leics.
Nathanial Spencer	Visitor	Married	M	20	1831	Solicitor writing clerk	Not known

Table 10 – 1851: Household of Dorothy Jesson. Rushes.[42]

Name	Role	Status	Sex	Age	Birth year	Occupation	Place of birth
George	Head	Married	M	28	1823	Master butcher	Loughborough
Sarah	Wife	Married	F	30	1821		ditto
Maria	Daughter		F	6	1845		ditto
Mary	Daughter		F	5	1846		Nottingham

Table 11 – 1851: Household of George Jesson. Sparrow Hill.[43]

A scan for all the Leicestershire baptisms for a Thomas and Dorothy confirmed the above relationships — although no baptism could be found for the older Maria-ii — and revealed that all the children were baptised in Long Clawson, about 14 miles east of Loughborough, contrary to the 1851 census information for George, but matching the birthplace of their mother, Dorothy. Also, it revealed that Walter was probably baptised Arthur, and this would explain why there was no subsequent mention of Arthur and no baptism for Walter. These conclusions were also in broad agreement with Peter Lucas’s ONS (p.F4).

Name	Birth	Baptism
Sarah		23 Dec 1820
George		21 Jan 1822
Thomas		21 Sep 1823
Richard Fisher		17 Jul 1825
Christopher	01 Sep 1832	24 Sep 1834
Arthur		24 Sep 1834

Table 12 – Baptisms to Thomas and Dorothy in Long Clawson.[44]

Hence, this Thomas Jesson was not present in Loughborough before 1835. He clearly could not have been the husband of Mary, and the burial entries for William, Henry, and Maria (Table 5) indicated that their father was a widower.

There were no other Jesson vital events recorded in Loughborough during the 1830s decade, other than the four burials, and it would appear that there was just the one family there. There were Jessons there during the 1820s, and Jessons who migrated there from Long Clawson just before 1841. What this analysis shows, though, is that the Thomas Jesson identified in each of those 1830s burial register entries must have been the same one.

Where Next?

There are few records that might directly identify this Jesson family because their short residence in Loughborough was pre-civil registration and pre-census. Trade directories, military records, and (online) criminal records shed no light on the subject. There was a census on 30 May 1831 but it consisted of numbers derived from church records and registers, and used for population statistics.[45]

Given the tragic family situation, Thomas may have been struggling, and may have received relief from the parish or a poor law union. Loughborough’s poor law union came into existence on 9 Sep 1838,[46] and the Leicestershire Records Office online catalogue suggests records from 1837 (their ref. G/7); however, they confirmed that there are few surviving poor law records from this period, and that they could find no mention of a Thomas Jesson. Their workhouse records only begin in 1913.

Although they appear to have been the only Jesson family in Loughborough during those years, it is possible that a married female relative of Thomas may have moved there with them. The FAN Principle could be applied to family members of both Mary Bentley (origin currently unknown) and Thomas in order to determine if they were in Loughborough too.

Conclusion

Thomas and Mary were framework knitters back in the village of Sapcote. When Thomas came to Nottingham, he remained a framework knitter in 1841 and 1851. On his death in 1855, he was a “stocking framework knitter”. His son, James, also had the same profession, and many of James’s children were associated with lace and general hosiery. This work was clearly an important part of their life for several generations.

The village of Sapcote was not generally associated with knitting, but the small town of Loughborough certainly was. I believe that Mary had twins, Henry and Maria, in 1832, and that this forced the need to find more productive work. Loughborough had organised support for this profession in terms of sick societies, and possibly unions. Whether the twins were born just before or just after their move is less important than the fact that extra mouths would need to be fed. The absence of any baptisms for these children supports a move from one parish to another having taken place around the same time.

It would then seem that tragedy hit the family within a couple of years with four members, beginning with Mary, dying in only 18 months. It is highly possible that some infectious agent took hold of their household but I could find no mention of epidemics in the town. During the period 1813–1830, 21% of Leicestershire deaths occurred in infants less than one year old, and 34% in children less than four years old.[47]

Sometime between 1836 and 1841, Thomas and his surviving son, James, moved a further 20 miles north to Nottingham, an industrialised town that was renowned for knitting, hosiery, and the lace industry — it would have been hard to remain in Loughborough after those events, and Nottingham was booming. In Nottingham, he met Rebecca Burdett, a widow who was born and married in Hinckley, just 5 miles from Sapcote, and where his own sister was baptised.

The names Mary and Rebecca both recur in later generations, and James’s eldest daughter was named Mary, after his mother (see A Rich French Actor).

An interesting aspect of this research is that it’s more about history than lineage. Thomas and Rebecca were too old to have children; William, Henry, and Maria all died as youngsters; and the family was only in Loughborough for a relatively short period of time. No tree can capture this type of history, or distinguish the known from the inferred. And DNA is of no help.

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[1] Sapcote Parish (Leicestershire), Baptism Register, page and entries unnumbered, baptism of Thomas Jesson, 14 Apr 1792; “Leicestershire baptisms”, database with images, Findmypast (www.findmypast.co.uk : accessed 19 Jan 2017); citing archive ref. DE933/2, p. 19; Record Office for Leicestershire.

[2] Sapcote Parish (Leicestershire), Banns of Marriage, p.25, no.97, Jesson-Gent banns, 15 Jun 1790; “Leicestershire banns”, database with images, Findmypast (www.findmypast.co.uk : accessed 19 Jan 2017); citing archive ref. DE933/5; Record Office for Leicestershire; banns is not proof of a marriage by itself, but the subsequent children are proof enough in this case.

[3] Sapcote Parish (Leicestershire), Marriage Register, p.21, no. 62, marriage of Thomas Jesson to Mary Bentley, 11 Mar 1822; “Leicestershire marriages”, database with images, Findmypast (www.findmypast.co.uk : accessed 19 Jan 2017); citing archive ref. DE933/6; Record Office for Leicestershire.

[4] Sapcote Parish (Leicestershire), Baptism Register, p.26, no. 206, baptism of William Jesson, 17 Sep 1822; “Leicestershire baptisms” (accessed 19 Jan 2017); citing archive ref. DE933/4.

[5] Sapcote Parish (Leicestershire), Baptism Register, p.30, no. 235, baptism of James Jesson, 28 Jul 1824; “Leicestershire baptisms” (accessed 19 Jan 2017); citing archive ref. DE933/4.

[6] Sapcote All Saints church, taken 5 Jun 2012; image credit: Poliphilo; [CC0]; via Wikimedia Commons.

[7] "1841 England Census", database with images,  Ancestry (www.ancestry.co.uk : accessed 19 Jan 2017), household of Thomas Jesson (age 45); citing  HO 107/870, bk.5, fo.14, p.20; The National Archives of UK (TNA).

[8] "1851 England Census", database with images,  Ancestry (www.ancestry.co.uk : accessed 19 Jan 2017), household of Thomas Jesson (age 58); citing  HO 107/2132, fo.226, p.2; TNA.

[9] "1851 England Census" (accessed 19 Jan 2017), household of James Jesson (age 27); citing  HO 107/2132, fo.254, p.6.

[10] England, death certificate for Thomas Jesson, died 8 Jul 1855; citing 7b/99/389, registered Nottingham 1855/Sep [Q3]; General Register Office (GRO), Southport.

[11] “The central database for UK burials and cremations”, database with images, deceased online (www.deceasedonline.com : accessed 19 Jan 2017), entries for grave of Rebecca Jesson, 1869, Nottingham General Cemetery, grave ref. /10659.

[12] Transcribed GRO Index for England and Wales (1837–1983), database, FreeBMD (freebmd.rootsweb.com/cgi/seach.pl : accessed 20 Jan 2017), death entry for Rebecca Lesson [Jesson]; citing Nottingham, 1869, Mar [Q1], vol. 7b:180.

[13] The UK General Register Office (GRO) is responsible for civil registrations of births, marriages, and deaths (BMD) in England and Wales. It maintained quarterly paper-based indexes of registrations from 1837 to 1983, and several databases of their transcriptions exist, such as the popular FreeBMD. During 2016, the GRO published wholly new indexes of births and deaths based on the previous work of the abandoned DoVE project. These newer indexes are formed from the registrations themselves rather than being derivatives of the previous indexes.

[14] “Married”, Nottingham Review and General Advertiser for the Midland Counties (1 Aug 1845): p.4, col.1.

[15] Nottinghamshire Family History Society (NottsFHS), Parish Registers Marriage Index, CD-ROM, database (Nottingham, 1 Jan 2013), database version 3.0, entry for James Jesson and Kessiah Chandler, 15 Aug 1846, Nottingham St Paul Parish. FreeBMD (accessed 20 Jan 2017), marriage entry for James Jesson and Kessiah Chandler; citing Nottingham, 1846, Sep [Q3], vol. 15:822.

[16] England, marriage certificate for Thomas Jesson and Rebecca Burdett, 26 Jul 1845; citing 20/834/104, registered Nottingham 1845/Sep [Q3]; GRO.

[17] Hinckley St Mary Parish (Leicestershire), Marriage Register, p.108, no.324, marriage of Thomas Burdett to Rebecca Quail, 4 Jul 1818; “Leicestershire marriages” (accessed 30 Jan 2017); citing archive ref. DE1135/17.

[18] Federation of Family History Societies (FFHS), National Burial Index for England & Wales, CD-ROM, database (www.ffhs.org.uk, 2010), third ed., viewer 1.21; hereinafter cited as NBI.

[19] Dr Denise Amos, "Framework Knitters", The Nottingham Heritage Gateway (www.nottsheritagegateway.org.uk/people/frameworkknitters.htm : created 18 Dec 2010, accessed 20 Jan 2017).

[20] Loughborough All Saints church, taken 17 Feb 2008; image credit: Tim Heaton; [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)]; via Wikimedia Commons.

[21] “Leicestershire: Died”, Nottingham Review and General Advertiser for the Midland Counties (10 Jul 1835): p.2, col.4; place not given, preceding two entries occurred on the Monday and Tuesday in Loughborough.

[22] Loughborough All Saints Parish (Leicestershire), Burial Register, p.87, no.694, Mary Jesson, 4 Sep 1834; “Leicestershire burials”, database with images, Findmypast (www.findmypast.co.uk : accessed 21 Jan 2017); citing archive ref. DE667/22; Record Office for Leicestershire.

[23] Loughborough All Saints Parish (Leicestershire), Burial Register, p.118, no.937, Wm [William] Jesson, 12 Jul 1835; “Leicestershire burials” (accessed 21 Jan 2017); citing archive ref. DE667/22.

[24] Loughborough All Saints Parish (Leicestershire), Burial Register, entries: p.125, no.991, Henry Jesson, 18 Oct 1835 and p.133, no.1058, Maria Jesson, 28 Feb 1836; “Leicestershire burials” (accessed 21 Jan 2017); citing archive ref. DE667/22.

[25] Hinckley St Mary Parish (Leicestershire), Baptism Register, p.6, 4^th entry on page, baptism of Maria Jesson, 28 May 1796 (b. 25 May 1796); “Leicestershire baptisms” (accessed 19 Jan 2017); citing archive ref. DE1135/9.

[26] "England and Wales, Parish Register Abstract, 1831", digital images, Ancestry (www.ancestry.co.uk : accessed 25 Jan 2017); hundreds of West Goscote (p.163, img.176), Sparkenhoe (p.165, img.178), and county summary (p.167, img.180); although the 1831 census (taken on 30 May 1831) was published in 1833, the publisher is unidentified.

[27] "House of Commons, Monday, July 22", London Evening Standard (23 Jul 1833), p.4, col.1.

[28] Wanda Fraiken Neff, Victorian Working Women: An Historical and Literary Study of Women in British Industries and Professions, 1832-1850 (Taylor & Francis, 1966, first published in 1929), p.90.

[29] "Derbyshire: Incendiary Fire", Nottingham Review and General Advertiser for the Midland Counties (30 Aug 1833): p.3, col.3.

[30] “To The General Public”, Leicester Chronicle (4 Jun 1825): p.2, col.4, the table of sick societies contributing loans and donations.

[31] Derby Mercury (8 Jun 1825): p.3, col.3; reprinted from Nottingham Journal.

[32] “The Town News”, Nottingham Review and General Advertiser for the Midland Counties (19 Feb 1836): p.3, col.1.

[33] Loughborough All Saints Parish (Leicestershire), Baptism Register, p.116, entries unnumbered, Harriet Jepson [Jesson], 25 Jul 1807; “Leicestershire baptisms” (accessed 26 Jan 2017); citing archive ref. DE667/5.

[34] Loughborough All Saints Parish (Leicestershire), Marriage Register, p.55, no.164, marriage of Ann Jesson to John Plowright, 3 Jul 1849; “Leicestershire marriages” (accessed 26 Jan 2017); citing archive ref. DE667/15.

[35] Whitwick St John The Baptist Parish (Leicestershire), Burial Register, entries: p.157, no.1256, Abraham Jesson, 10 Mar 1840, and p.9, no.70, Ann Jesson, 3 Jul 1849; “Leicestershire burials” (accessed 26 Jan 2017); citing archive refs. DE1760/15 and DE1760/20.

[36] Loughborough All Saints Parish (Leicestershire), Baptism Register, p.135, no.1075, Maria Jesson, 17 Jun 1844; “Leicestershire baptisms” (accessed 26 Jan 2017); citing archive ref. DE667/9.

[37] Loughborough All Saints Parish (Leicestershire), Marriage Register, p.50, no.99, marriage of Maria Jesson to Thomas Smith, 5 Dec 1848; “Leicestershire marriages” (accessed 26 Jan 2017); citing archive ref. DE667/18.

[38] Loughborough Emmanuel Parish (Leicestershire), Baptism Register, p.75, no.599, Phobe Jepson, 19 Jan 1846; “Leicestershire baptisms” (accessed 26 Jan 2017); citing archive ref. DE2594/1.

[39] Sheepshed Parish (Leicestershire), Marriage Register, p.154, no.307, marriage of Jane Jesson to William Norman Bramley junior, 24 Oct 1848; “Leicestershire marriages” (accessed 26 Jan 2017); citing archive ref. DE610/20.

[40] "1841 England Census" (accessed 27 Jan 2017), household of Thomas Jesson (age 40); citing  HO 107/595, bk.8, fo.45, p.26.

[41] "1841 England Census" (accessed 27 Jan 2017), household of William Seale (age 40); citing  HO 107/595, bk.8, fo.45, p.26; same building as household of Thomas in previous note.

[42] "1851 England Census" (accessed 27 Jan 2017), household of Dorothy Jesson (age 50); citing  HO 107/2085, fo. 327, p.27.

[43] "1851 England Census" (accessed 27 Jan 2017), household of George Jesson (age 28); citing  HO 107/2085, fo.190, p.3.

[44] “Leicestershire baptisms” (accessed 27 Jan 2017), search criteria surname=Jesson, father=Thomas, mother=Dorothy.

[45] “Census records”, The National Archives of the UK (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/census- records/ : accessed 24 Jan 2017).

[46] Peter Higginbotham, “Loughborough, Leicestershire”, The Workhouse: The Story of an Institution (www.workhouses.org.uk/Loughborough/ : accessed 24 Jan 2017).

[47] Calculated from county statistics in the “England and Wales, Parish Register Abstract, 1831” database, p.167, image 180, table of burials by age.

Erudite Erasure

What has happened to our libraries? Are they really surviving in the digital world? These are not new questions, but I want to add some personal insights and experiences.

Figure 1 - Evaporating libraries.[1]

During my teens, I spent many hours in the central library of Nottingham, in England. I would get down there after school and remain there, reading and taking notes, until closing time. I would then return home on the bus, clutching a stack of books and a bag of chips (that’s “fries” to my American friends). The driving force was a curiosity about certain subjects in physics and mathematics that were too far above my pay-grade for either my teachers or my school library to help.

In those days, the term “local library” actually meant something as each suburb usually had its own branch library, although they wouldn’t have held the specialised material that I needed, and hence the need for me to take a 30-minute bus ride into the city. Since that time, funding cuts and general lack of attendance have meant job cuts and the closure of many branches. Also, that original central library building (built in 1881, on Shakespeare Street) was taken over by the Nottingham Trent University, and the central library moved to a different location on Angel Row. That more-modern nondescript building never seemed to carry the same authority as the original one, and there are plans to move it yet again.

I still use that library, but for an entirely different purpose. As my subject of interest now includes local history, I often access their local studies department, either in person — when I’m in the area — or through the Internet, or by telephone. The staff are always very helpful, and they’ve performed numerous searches on my behalf.

One of the resources I frequently accessed through their Web site was the Gale database of ‘19^th Century British Library Newspapers’; all this required was my UK library card. Some time ago, this resource was taken down by the Nottingham library. At the time, I was told that it had been replaced by online access to the British Newspaper Archive (BNA), except that this was only accessible from the library premises! This was incredibly stupid as it barely qualified as “online” at all, and I was extremely angry. If I had some disability then it may have been too onerous to take that trip into the city each time I needed access. As it was, my physical location was rather fluid — hopping between countries — and so it was impractical for me, too.

Even if I could have called in, I specifically wanted access to the Gale database as it covered additional newspapers, and it offered advanced search operators that made complex searches much easier and reliable than using BNA. I tried a number of other English libraries but the same story was told by most — maybe it was all about money, or old-style book-loan thinking, or the hard sell from BNA.

So what was the story with the other libraries that did still host this Gale database? Well, things got a little farcical there. Both Bristol and Derbyshire claimed that the “licensing agreement” with the publisher meant that I had to “live, work, or study” in that area. Well, “live” and “work” are easy to define, but what does “study” mean? Does it mean attending some local educational establishment, or performing research in the area, or performing research of the area? Several of my articles are more historical than genealogical, and relating to multiple towns including my home town, so they stood to benefit from my research. In fact, I had already given a number of my blog links to the Nottingham library. This really makes a mockery of doing research in a digital world since your physical location should not be important for access to Web resources.

Our library cards do not actually say “UK” on them, and they are issued by the central library of the respective district. In fact, the card numbers are not even uniform, and I was told that there are at least three independent systems managing them. Effectively, I was only a member of the libraries in the county — or sometimes a consortium of neighbouring counties — that issued my card, and of no others. Each district decides on the online resources it will host, but I am not free to join just any library as I must have an address in that area. This chaos also used to mean that I could not loan a book directly from a different library, but they would at least have been able to organise an inter-library loan if my own library didn’t hold a copy. In the digital age, the same chaos means that there is no concept of a single sign-on (for web access) using our card numbers; their systems are totally independent.

Let me just emphasise this: our libraries are insular bodies that do not recognise all library cards issued in the same country; they will not share digital resources with holders of cards from other districts; and not all libraries host the same online resources. To make this worse, some of those database publishers have no interest in personal subscriptions. Gale, for instance, informed me that “Our databases and digital archives are only available for institutions to trial and purchase. They are not available at this stage for individual subscriptions or trials …”, and so I was reliant on a library lottery.

I haven’t even considered the predicament of any expatriate researchers. I am lucky that I have retained a connection with my home country, even though I spend time elsewhere.

It’s hard to know who to blame: the individual libraries, the controlling authorities, or the publishers of the databases. But it is interesting to ponder on who benefits from this skewed, Luddite interpretation of Web access. Access to library resources is currently free to members of that library, but the database publishers want money. That money comes primarily from the local councils, and since each library decides on what it wants to host then they can’t afford to subsidise access from other districts where their libraries do not host the same resources.

I don’t know how functional the new BNA access is from the library premises, but I do know that the access provided through a Findmypast subscription is deliberately nobbled to the point of being barely usable (see When the Digital Age Hinders). I can therefore see how the same mentality would try to restrict it to a physical location. But there are claimed licensing restrictions on other databases, too. Why would these be necessary if the publisher gets paid? Are the libraries complicit in these restrictions in order to get a cheaper subscription?

The upshot of this is that users are left wanting. There is no coherent strategy regarding access to their Web resources across the country; if your own library doesn’t have it then you could be stuck. This includes all digital resources, not just genealogical or historical ones. Personal subscriptions to the relevant databases may not be possible, and so we need our libraries as portals to them. I would happily pay some modest amount, based on the frequency of my access, but that is only possible if these libraries agreed on a coherent national framework, including a single sign-on using our card numbers.

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[1] Image credit: Mysticsartdesign, Pixaby (https://pixabay.com/en/library-sky-birds-mystical-clouds-425730/ : accessed 12 Jan 2017); CC0 Public Domain.

Impermanent Links

Why are Web hyperlinks so unstable? Is there a specific reason for this in the field of genealogy? Could archival approaches help? Will the Internet ever learn, and will genealogy survive?

Figure 1 – Decaying URL links.

OK, the introduction is a little emotive, but the issue of unstable hyperlinks is a bane for any researcher or author wanting to cite online resources, or for anyone merely wishing to return to something of interest.

A hyperlink is simply a field that can physically take you to a different location, either in the current document/page or in a different one, but in the context under discussion they relate to hyperlinks on the Internet. These are the links that connect the HTML pages and so form the core of the World Wide Web.

Each page has an address, or URL (Uniform Resource Locator), by which links find their target. The vast majority of these begin with the “http://” that we’re all familiar with, and which indicates that they are using the HTTP protocol. Hence, to be more accurate, the problem is really that of unstable URLs rather than unstable hyperlinks; when the address of the target is changed (or deleted) then the links to it become broken.

Supermarket Mentality

As with supermarket shelves, there is a perception in Web design that tearing down some organised arrangement and replacing it with a different one will always have an advantage. This might include giving things a fresh look, providing easier access, or simply justifying someone's employment. The persons responsible are not looking at such changes from the same perspective as the poor Web user (or supermarket shopper) who is trying to find the same thing as they used before. This so-called Link rot is an issue affecting all Web sites, not just genealogical ones.

A particular problem with genealogical sites, and with many historical ones in general, is that we usually have no option but to specify the search criteria by which we found some item. But citing an index is not the same as citing the underlying item. When some re-indexing occurs then our previous criteria may no longer be appropriate. It is not uncommon, too, to find databases renamed, or merged, thus exacerbating the problem of reproducibility.

Although less prevalent, the loss of a Web site — say after failing to pay for its upkeep — is another potential cause of broken links. Even if its holdings are snapped up by some other site then the associated URLs, and possibly the very organisation of the resources, will have changed.

A sorry example of this involves the “Your Archives” facility that was launched in 2007 by The National Archives of the UK (TNA). Their description of it read “…providing an online platform for users to contribute their knowledge of archival sources held by The National Archives and other archives throughout the UK”, and it acquired a huge amount of information that was not available in their other collections. One of the community projects was the “Historical Streets Project” that not only had indexes of which census pages covered particular streets, but also allowed people to “…write stories about localities, properties, institutions, and businesses etc.” Over 31,000 people registered and contributed but it was then abandoned in 2012 and the facility closed. The contributions are still on their Web site but they were dumped into a read-only archived location (e.g. http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php?title=Category:1841_census_registration_districts becoming http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130221233217/http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php?title=Category:1841_census_registration_districts) with the result that many internal links are now broken.

Link Rot

In 2010, Bugeja and Dimitrova showed that citations to online resources have a rate of decay that can be measured using a half life, akin to radioactive decay.[1] Radioactive decay occurs exponentially, and the radioactivity reduces by a factor of two after each passage of a fixed period, known as the half life. The same was shown to occur with the URLs in journal volumes with 50% of them becoming broken after each half life.

Figure 2 – Half-life of URL links.

Schemes and Disciplines

So where are the weak spots in all this? Well, the basic structure of a URL may be summarised as follows:

scheme:  [//hostname]  [/]path  [?query]  [#fragment]

For instance:

http://www.familyhistorydata.parallaxview.co.uk/home/document-structure/person#PERSON

The scheme usually indicates the protocol: HTTP in this case.

The hostname involves a hierarchical sequence of domain names, beginning with the top-level domain or TLD (“.uk”), and operating right-to-left through a second-level domain name (“.co”), etc. Each is a subdomain of the previous domain, so “www” is a subdomain of “familyhistorydata.parallaxview.co.uk”, etc.

The path appears as a sequence of slash-separated folder names, and usually maps directly to an equivalent hierarchical path on the Web server, but not always. The last part of the path is usually a file name, but this particular example describes page objects in a database rather than page files on disk and so there’s no *.html file.

The optional fragment identifier may indicate the placement of, or direction to, a specific item, and is most often the location of a heading or anchor-point within an HTML page.

We’ll mention ‘query’ in a moment.

The most common problem with the URL is that it may expose aspects of the Web server’s technology and current physical organisation. The term Semantic URL describes a URL form that is cleaner and more user-friendly because it describes a conceptual organisation instead of a particular physical one. It is usually said that these decouple the user interface (UI) from the server’s implementation, but it could be argued that URLs were never designed to be directly visible in UIs. Irrespective of this, they achieve a great longevity because the server can be reorganised without breaking previous URLs.

The term used to describe stable or persistent URLs is Permalinks. To some extent, the many URL-shortening sites such as bit.ly, goo.gl, and tinyurl.com can achieve this, although they generally shorten long URLs by hashing the characters using base-36 or base-62 arithmetic, and result in apparently random characters. Some of these sites can generate more readable names, at the expense of some extra length, but the results are still flattened with the loss of any hierarchical semantics. Their advantages lay in situations of restricted length, such as in SMS text messages, and tracking for usage statistics, but they also get abused by spammers because you cannot see where they will redirect you.

Persistent URLs (PURLs) relate to a particular redirection service that allows manageable (i.e. modifiable) mappings between your public URLs and the underlying ones. These are differentiated from Permalinks by them using a different domain and being aimed at lifetimes of decades rather than years.

The general perception is that we need a stable and documented address for online resources so that we can direct someone to the exact same page and displayed data. Certainly this is an issue if you’ve hard-coded URLs in printed material, or you’ve embedded a URL in a hard-coded QR code, or you’ve hard-coded either of these on something physical like a grave marker. If you can’t guarantee the persistence of the URL then you really need an intermediate one that can be managed and redirected as appropriate.

This may be the general perception but it isn’t the full story. For a start, the increasingly dynamic nature of the Web means that the same URL does not display the same data, even when nothing has been rearranged. The page may allow some interaction with a back-end system, such as a database, and so what you see may depend on what you typed in the page, and possibly what you did before. This is already a problem for projects such as the Internet Archive since it cannot guarantee to restore fully operational Web sites.

For genealogy sites, the most important manifestation of this is the search operation. The vast majority of resources are indexed by one or more fields (primarily personal names) and there is no published URL format that will take you directly to the same page or data that you’ve found via your search; you have to cite the search parameters and hope that anyone following your citation will find the same information, and the same edition of that information (more on this later). So if we’re providing a URL, do we give the generic one of the content provider, or one taking you to their search dialogue, or something else?

Some resources may consist of just browsable un-indexed images, or tabulated data, and their citations might then use waypoints in order to guide someone else to the same information.

A little earlier, I indicated that URLs can also include a ‘query’ clause, although I deferred a description of it. The clause consists of an ampersand-separated list of name=value terms, and it is employed when access to the associated online resource involves an element of logic that cannot be represented by a simple hierarchical ‘path’.  A search operation is a good example, and the search parameters might be represented as individual query terms, e.g.

            http://search.example.com?given-name=Tony&surname=Proctor

Google’s approach is slightly different in that they encode the complete search string, and more, in the fragment identifier, e.g.

https://www.google.com/#safe=off&q=wiki+internet+archive

Unfortunately, there is no requirement for the associated site to update the active URL in respect of what you’ve typed, or what local action you have requested. Such sites do not offer the opportunity to make effective use of a URL in a citation.

Another example is the OpenURL concept which uses the URL query string to encode the elements of a citation in order to retrieve a corresponding Web resource from an unspecified target. Although general-purpose in principle, it is used almost exclusively for published books and journals available online. The idea is that some resolver will parse the citation elements and return a link to a participating library or repository hosting an online copy.

Archival Approach

If you cite something in an archive, you would include the codes by which it was catalogued, and you wouldn't attempt to give its precise physical location in the building (although you might mention that it had to be retrieved from some auxiliary storage area). It then seems wrong that online resources are expected to be cited using their electronic location: their URL.

If the provider made available permalinks, and they were humanly-readable semantic URLs, then it would help, but it would not mean that data had actually been organised that way so where is the guiding principle?

Imagine if the content providers used an archival approach to their collections of images and transcribed extracts, treating them according to the natural hierarchy associated with their provenance and source arrangement (see Hierarchical Sources). Most URLs betray the fact that genealogical data organisation is determined by software principles rather than by archival principles, and with the provenance and structure of the source data being an afterthought at best. Such hierarchical arrangements would provide the natural levels at which to include archival descriptions, including the precious source-of-the-source that is so often inaccurate or omitted.

More than this, though, it would allow the provenance of the provider’s data to be plainly visible: such information as who produced a given image, who transcribed certain details, and when was that transcription last updated (i.e. corrected)?

There’s a tendency to think of a citation as a pointer to the original information source. Of course, this is wrong! While the source-of-the-source is important, the citation is primarily a pointer to the information that you consulted, and online sources will be derivatives of those originals; images will not be exact copies, and transcriptions (including transcribed extracts) will often be inaccurate (see Anatomy of a Source).

So what approach might help, given that content providers will have digital images and/or databases of transcribed information, as opposed to physical documents or other artefacts? Well, if they followed archival principles then they would catalogue sources as they’re scanned, and as they’re transcribed, treating their digital resources as sources in their own right, undergoing accession into their digital repository.

Case Study

The case I want to use in order to illustrate my point is the decennial census of the UK, and this will involve looking at how it is currently presented by Ancestry and Findmypast.

The census returns were taken on the same day across the UK but were the subject of different jurisdictions and are now stored and organised differently. Those of England and Wales are stored at The National Archives of the UK (TNA). Those of Scotland were stored at the General Register Office for Scotland, Edinburgh (GROS); however, on 1 April 2011, the GROS was merged with the National Archives of Scotland to form the National Records of Scotland. The surviving pre-1921 all-Ireland censuses are stored at the National Archives of Ireland, but later ones for the northern counties are stored at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI). Although not technically part of the UK,[2] those for the Crown dependencies of the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man are also held at TNA.

TNA has a comprehensive scheme for cataloguing the materials it holds, and they publish recommendations for how it should be used to cite their materials at Citing Documents. For the censuses, this amounts to using the departmental code, series number, piece number, and book number (for 1841) for the specific census item; and then internal identifiers of folio and page number to identify a specific page within that item. For instance, ‘HO 107/11/12, folio 12, page 19’ in 1841, or ‘RG 9/2460, folio 43, page 27’ in 1861. These alphanumeric codes are used by virtually all UK researchers, but they are often viewed as cryptic and unhelpful in the US where all relevant long-hand details are expected in the citation, including the county, ecclesiastical parish, registration district, and possibly more.

What may not be known is that online copies of TNA’s images, and associated transcriptions, have to be indexed by these codes. I cannot provide a reference but I understand that this stipulation is in the licensing necessary from TNA. As a result, it means that they provide a much more accurate way of locating a known page than the vagaries of name-based searches, but it does not mean that additional detail cannot be provided. Indeed, the content-provider name is essential since their images and transcriptions will not be identical to others, as is identification of the person or family being referenced on the page. Citations are also about how source information supports or refutes an argument, and so any detail that establishes the nature of the source and the strength/weakness of its information will always be useful. However, failure to give all those archival codes would be doing a disservice to any reader with a UK interest!

NB: While these codes apply to those censuses held by TNA, they do not apply to the others such as the Scottish ones. This gives a small problem for the content provider if they wish to present a single census collection for the UK.

Picking on 1861 for the purposes of illustration, Ancestry has an “1861 UK Census Collection”, described as “The 1861 Census of England, Wales, Scotland, Channel Islands and Isle of Man”, which is accurate according to the contents therein, but it doesn’t contain Ireland, which was in the UK at the time. Although a search across the whole collection is the norm, it is also possible to search the individual databases in that collection by selecting from the list at the bottom of the search page:

1861 Channel Islands Census
1861 England Census
1861 Isle of Man Census
1861 Scotland Census
1861 Wales Census

For those relevant to TNA, extra input fields are presented for the piece, folio, etc.

Findmypast has an “1861 England, Wales & Scotland Census” database that presents input fields for piece, folio, etc., in all cases. The database also includes the Crown dependencies and so the title and description are both inaccurate according to the contents, even though it is not described as a “UK” collection. It is not as easy to restrict your searches to a particular country or island in this database. Back in 2015, the company came under fierce criticism because they’d introduced pseudo-TNA codes to apply to these input fields for the Scottish census transcriptions (ScotlandsPeople presented the images, but Findmypast were not allowed to use them), none less so than from Chris Paton of The British GENES Blog.[3]

Such criticism was well-founded if it related to the introduction of fake TNA codes that were not distinguished from the real ones, and which would therefore create confusion. However, if Findmypast had simply introduced a system of archival cataloguing for their own materials (following TNA’s precedent) then criticism would have been ill-founded; such an approach would have been wise, and that’s effectively what I am recommending here. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that this was Findmypast’s intention.

Entering a document reference into TNA’s Web site (e.g. “RG 9/2460”) displays an archival description of the associated item, but neither Ancestry nor Findmypast can do this because they have no reference that is separate from their search functions. Let’s take a moment to look at their URLs (at the time of writing) for “James Procter” in the aforementioned 1861 census page, found directly via piece, folio, and page.

The list of people on this page in Ancestry’s “1861 UK Census Collection” corresponds to an opaque URL of:

http://search.ancestry.co.uk/cgi-bin/sse.dll?db=uki1861&gss=sfs28_ms_db&new=1&rank=1&msT=1&_F0007B87=2460&_F0007B88=43&_F000597C=27&MSAV=1&uidh=u54

It is opaque because there is little evidence of the original parameters that I specified. The transcribed extract for James is at the following URL, and the image URL for the page is so long that I won’t bother presenting it:

http://search.ancestry.co.uk/cgi-bin/sse.dll?_phsrc=TUY970&_phstart=successSource&usePUBJs=true&indiv=1&db=uki1861&gss=angs-d&new=1&rank=1&msT=1&_F0007B87=2460&_F0007B88=43&_F000597C=27&MSAV=1&uidh=u54&pcat=35&fh=16&h=22219042&recoff=&ml_rpos=17

The list of people on that page in Findmypast’s “1861 England, Wales & Scotland Census” corresponds to a URL of:

http://search.findmypast.co.uk/results/world-records/1861-england-wales-and-scotland-census?pieceno=2460&folio=43&page=27

This is much more readable, and the search parameters are clearly visible. However, the specific transcribed extract for James corresponds to the following:

http://search.findmypast.co.uk/record?id=gbc%2f1861%2f0013051517

This has lost all connection with the search parameters, and it contains undocumented codes that may or may not be persistent.

So what am I saying here? The different censuses should be accessible individually, thus respecting their provenance, and not dumped into a single amorphous database; Ancestry makes a good job of this. The provider should employ a set of persistent identifiers to organise their information according to its natural structure and provenance. Each page image and each transcribed extract (e.g. details of a given census person) should have a unique and persistent URL to access it directly via these identifiers, without having to go through the same search again — and so without having to pray that the indexing hasn’t changed.

The censuses held by TNA are interesting because the pages are already indexed by their original archival codes. These are termed natural keys since they are part of the original data and are not fabricated purely for some database indexing. When such keys are well-defined (and particularly when they’re mandated) then the provider’s identifiers should acknowledge them; however, the provider’s identifiers must be more detailed because (a) images and transcribed extracts must be two distinct derivatives of the same original information, and (b) the extracts may be at a lower level than the original source item level, or even below the individual page level, as in the case of a census.

Or, in summary, all online genealogical data should:

• Expose persistent semantic URLs for each image and for each transcribed extract,
• Include documented persistent identifiers in those URLs related to the provenance and natural structure of the associated source, as held by the provider,
• Link the provider’s identifiers to corresponding archival descriptions, to the provenance of the information, and to source-of-the-source information.

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[1] Michael Bugeja and Daniela V. Dimitrova, Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age (Duluth, Minnesota: Litwin Books, 2010).

[2] For the purposes of the British Nationality Act 1981, the “British Islands” include the United Kingdom (Great Britain and Northern Ireland), the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man.

[3] Chris Paton, “FindmyPast, Scottish census sources, and Moby Dick”, The British GENES Blog, posted 27 Jan 2015 (http://britishgenes.blogspot.ie/2015/01/findmypast-scottish-census-sources-and.html : accessed 16 Dec 2016).