A Story of Three Brothers

Well, sort of. The archetypal “three brothers” story usually involves transatlantic travel, but my story involves travel between two far-flung locations in 19^th Century England. It also includes a small lesson for family historians.

My mother’s grandmother was a Gertrude Webber, born 1885 in Nottingham, but Gertrude’s grandfather was a Robert Webber, born 1816 in Chard, Somerset. It was always something of a mystery why he travelled from Chard to Nottingham, a distance of nearly 200 miles to the north-east. While Nottingham was a quickly-growing industrialised town, Chard was a relatively small town in the south of the county of Somerset, quite close to the point where the counties of Devon and Dorset adjoin. Even before I started this research, I had expected it being something to do with work but I didn’t anticipate putting a case together for why.

Figure 1 - Chard St. Mary the Virgin, 2007.[1]

Robert was born to a Benjamin and Alice Webber in 1816 in Chard. Benjamin had married Alice Keetch on 21 July 1811 at Chard St Mary the Virgin, by Banns. Both bride and groom simply made their mark in the register, but the witnesses: N.G.Chapman and Ann Benneet, both signed their own names.[2]

Some of their children were baptised in Chard while some were baptised in Combe St. Nicholas, a small village less than 3 miles NW of Chard. As well as being a village, Chard was also a registration district that included both of these villages, and Merriott (9 miles NE of Chard) and Ilminster (6 miles N of Chard). A good selection of images of old Chard, and neighbouring locations, can be found in the Francis Frith Collection. These are copyrighted images although copies may be purchased.

Figure 2 - Chard and Combe St. Nicholas region (“active” Goole Map).

Using parish baptism and burial images supplied by the Somerset Archive and Local Studies, the following children were identified:

Given name	Baptism	Location	Abode	Burial (Age)	Location
James[3]	5 Jan 1812	Combe SN		9 Mar 1820 (8)	Combe SN
Mary[4]	14 Feb 1813	Combe SN	Wad[e]ford
John[5]	25 Sep 1814	Chard	Chard Parish
Robert[6]	1 Sep 1816	Combe SN	Willhayne
William[7]	20 Dec 1818	Combe SN	Willhayne
Joseph[8]	8 Apr 1821	Combe SN	Willhayne
Joshua[9]	2 Mar 1823	Combe SN	Welling
Amelia[10]	19 Dec 1824	Combe SN	Combe	19 Jan 1829 (4)	Chard
Simeon[11]	11 Nov 1828	Chard	Chard Borough
Henry[12]	20 Jun 1830	Chard	Chard Borough	12 Sep 1830 (1)	Chard
Charles[13]	17 Aug 1831	Chard	Chard Borough	5 Oct 1832 (1)	Chard

Wadeford is about 2 miles NNW of Chard, and Willhayne is a tiny hamlet just outside of Wadeford. It’s clear that the family didn’t move very far in these early years.

By combining these details with later marriage details, using both FreeREG and civil registrations, the following tree was constructed (NB: dates are baptism/burial rather than birth/death):

Figure 3 - Webber Family Tree.

Some of these dates are yet to be determined, and Simeon Webber in particular will be the subject of his own article at a later date, but it gives enough of a picture to proceed with this article.

So where were this family in 1841: the year of the first full English census? Well, Robert was already in Nottingham by that time, but he hadn’t been there for very long. He was lodging with the family of a lace maker called Charles Legg on Pipe Street, but also present were his younger brother, William, and a John Trask who was three years older. The above tree shows that this John Trask was the husband of Mary Webber and so was Robert’s brother-in-law. The two Webber brothers were single but John’s wife was still in Chard — hence my reasoning that they hadn’t been there very long. All three were recorded as lace makers.[14]

The rest of the family appeared to be in Chard, still, residing on High Street.[15]

Name	Age	Occupation	Notes
Benjamin Webber	50	Labourer
Ellis [Alice] Webber	52
John Webber	27	Labourer	Son
Joseph Webber	20	Labourer	Son
Joshua Webber	18	Labourer	Son
Simeon Webber	15		Son
Thomas Williams	32	Smith	Unrelated
Mary Trask	29	Dress maker	née Webber, Daughter

The details in the 1841 census were quite limited, and so it’s not easy to determine what is meant by the generic term ‘Labourer’. Somerset was a very rural county given over to various types of agriculture, and in later census returns, John, and his two sons: Benjamin and John, were all agricultural labourers. However, we cannot guess what type of labourers the rest of the family were. In all the records that I’ve seen mentioning the father (Benjamin) — census, parish records, and civil records — only the generic term was ever used.

Looking at the state of agriculture, both in Somerset and nationally, was quite revealing about life in that time period generally. It was sufficiently important that the Somerset County Gazette advertised the launch of an “Agricultural Correspondence” column in order to keep all interested parties in touch concerning problems, changes, and developments, although I could find no evidence of this idea actually materialising.[16] Crops, in particular, affected the lives of everyone. The larger Somerset farms rotated their crops of wheat (1^st), barley (2^nd), clover, vetches, and potatoes (3^rd), and then wheat again, but without any intervening fallow. The opinion was that corn was just as good after the other crops, including turnips, beans, and peas, but especially after flax and hemp, as when preceded by a fallow. Flax (often involved in the making of linen) and hemp were widely cultivated in the rich fertile country extending from Wincanton, through Yeovil, to Crewkerne, but successful cultivation required considerable care and attention.[17]

The year of 1839 was very wet with southern England receiving twice the average rainfall during the summer. Although 1840 then had a drought, notably March and April, with April receiving just 14% of its average rain, the three winter months were extremely cold.[18] Early 1840 saw more agricultural labourers out of work than usual at that time of the year, with the poor houses seeing a 75% increase on previous years. This was partly due to the long course of wet weather and partly due to the discharge of many railway workers[19] — presumably because various stages of work on the Great Western Railway (GWR) were reaching completion.

These highs and lows of the weather were made all the more relevant to ordinary people because of something called the Corn Laws. These were introduced in Great Britain by the Importation Act 1815, and were an attempt to favour British grain — including wheat as well as corn, and anything else that required grinding — over foreign imports by imposing harsh import duties. Powerful and influential landowners wanted to maximise their profits but the overall effect was to raise the price of food, and especially that of bread. This then conflicted with the less-influential industrialists who wanted to maximise their profits through lower wages. Ordinary families suffered as a result, especially when crop yields were low. The Anti-Corn Law League was a successful national lobbying group, founded in 1838 by Richard Cobden and John Bright, who wanted the Corn Laws to be abolished. However, it was the first two years of the Irish famine of 1845–1852 that finally forced a resolution, and it was Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel who achieved the repeal via the Importation Act 1846.

The way that these laws divided the country according to their wealth and life-style might be summarised by two different newspaper articles from 1840. In July, the Bristol Mercury[20] wrote a long article contrasting the importance of the harvest between the farmer (to pay his rent to the landowners), the merchant & banker (wealth), the mechanic & labourer (employment), and the "poor mother" who simply needed food for her family.  The harvest had become a life or death issue for many, and whereas a Russian grain shortage had caused their Emperor to import foreign grain duty-free, British landowners still believed that the laws were good for the country. It described the position of the Corn-Law advocates as “the most unnatural and repulsive", and the harvest as a “sword of Damocles” hanging over landowners since a future bad harvest was inevitable. In the following December, the Taunton Courier[21] reported on a speech by the Rev. H. F. Yeatman at a meeting of the Sturminster Agricultural Association. In that speech, he asked: “What will become of the 5,000,000 agricultural labourers, who will, more or less, be thrown out of employ if the Corn Laws are repealed, and the poorer soils thrown out of cultivation?”

Somerset’s livestock agriculture had long supported a thriving woollen trade, but this started to suffer greatly as a result of the woollen mills in the north of England, fuelled, as they were, by the mechanisation of the Industrial Revolution. Rescue arrived in 1819 in the form of the lace trade, and the relocation of several lace manufacturers from Nottingham. Nottingham Lace was already world-renowned but the activities of the Luddites — textile workers who during 1811–1816 protested against the machines taking their jobs — forced several of them to find new labour. This was good for Chard as some of the older woollen mills were converted for lace manufacture.[22] Given that the “three brothers” identified themselves as lace makers in the 1841 census of Nottingham then we can now be fairly sure that this was also their occupation in Chard.

Nottingham was an important town in the textile industry, and in particular for its lace. The power loom had been invented by a Nottinghamshire clergyman called Edmund Cartwright way back in 1784. Although refined by several other inventors thereafter, it wasn’t until 1842 that a semi-automatic design was available — one that required stopping only to recharge the shuttles. A revolution in lace making came in 1808 with bobbin net: a strong but light form of machine-made tulle, pioneered by John Heathcoat (pronounced heth-cot) in Leicestershire, which contrasted with the labour-intensive bobbin lace, or “pillow lace”. Although born in Derbyshire, Heathcoat set up a business in Nottingham but then decided he had to move to Leicestershire to escape the invasive competition between inventors. Unfortunately, his new factory was attacked by former Luddites in 1816 and he further moved his business to Tiverton in Devon.

Figure 4 - A Roberts loom in a weaving shed in 1835.[23]

The Continental lace industry was also expanding, and the French had imposed a 50% import duty that contributed to the depressed year of 1834 in England. The application of steam power in the Nottingham lace factories may have been to the detriment of small, hand-operated machinery, but it was also needed in order to deal with the foreign competition. Although it was technically illegal to export lace machinery, this still occurred and the government consistently failed to prosecute the culprits. Following the case of King v. Faber, where machinery for export was seized, and the subsequent legal action by Faber for illegal seizure, campaigns to prevent export were abandoned. From 1838, the Board of Trade started granting licences for the export of machinery and machine parts, although campaigns to prohibit the export of lace, especially to the French, continued.[24] Of particular concern was the export of bobbin-net machinery. In a letter published on 19 March 1834, John Hall, Honorary Secretary, Nottingham, explained to people that workers were being enticed to go to other countries with promises of good wages and accommodation, only to find that they were simply being used in the instruction of foreign workers on the making of bobbin net. He promised that the Executive Committee (appointed for the prevention of Exportation of Bobbin Net Machinery) would not only pay these workers their passage and expenses back to Nottingham, but also their further expenses until new work could be found for them, if they could provide proof of who was exporting the associated machinery.[25]

In the early 1840s, Nottingham’s textile industry was boosted by the application of steam power to hosiery and lace machines, and later by the Enclosure Act 1845 freeing up extra land for the development of new factories and housing. It was therefore a good time for my ancestors to move there. Equally important, though, was the fact that the Chard lace industry was going through a bad time. In January 1842, Thomas Wakley M.P., on visiting friends and family near Chard, declared “The lace trade is, we are sorry to state, is in a very low condition here. Most of the mills have begun to work short hours".[26] Later that year, a cut in wages caused a walk-out by lace mill workers, and angry scenes that became known as the “Chard Lace Riots”. The following extract from a later statement by the acting Magistrates describes how it came about:

On Monday 22nd August [1842], the workmen of Messrs. Wheatly and Riste suddenly left their work, and, as it is called, "turned out". These, uniting with others belonging to Mr. Oram's factory, previously out of employment, proceeded at 2 o'clock, when the workplace of Mr. Hill's factory returned from dinner, and forcibly prevented them, by threats, and by blockading the gates of the premises, from going into work. A few of the workmen, however, were admitted into the factory through a private garden. About an hour after this, Mr. Hill came to the mayor in great alarm, and, after some conversation, swore that he apprehended tumult, riot, and felony, would take place in the borough, and that serious damage would be done to his property, praying, at the same time, that the justices would adopt such measures for his protection and the preservation of the peace as they might deem necessary.[27]

The Magistrates dispatched an application for assistance to the commanding officer of the Scots Greys, stationed in Taunton, and also to a Lieut. Nicholetts requesting him to hold the Ilminster Yeomanry in readiness. Provision was also made to swear in householders as Special Constables. The Scots Greys arrived in the town but quickly left with new orders routing them to Clifton. The "turn outs" were understood to be drinking heavily in the neighbourhood of Mr. Cuff's factory and the Yeomanry were called in, anticipating larger intoxicated numbers returning to the town. The situation was delicate as the Yeomanry could have easily fired on the mob under provocation, but an agreement was reached between the mill owners and the workers allowing the Yeomanry to withdraw. Although the mob was initially held back, this could not be sustained and they followed the Yeomanry, throwing stones at them.[28] By 1843, Mr. J. Oram, struggling lace manufacturer of Chard, was bankrupt.[29]

My ancestor’s move was probably at the very tail end of the Industrial Revolution, but the times were still changing: huge railway developments (see GWR, above) and canal projects — the Chard Canal was opened in 1842 but was a financial disaster. It may be little-known that Chard claims to be the birthplace of powered flight, since it was there, in 1848, that John Stringfellow, a former maker of bobbins and carriages for the lace industry, first demonstrated that engine-powered flight was possible. He and William Henson, a Nottingham-born engineer who also worked in Chard’s lace industry, collaborated on the design and production of the Aerial Steam Carriage. Looking back at the 1841 census of Chard (see note [15]), John Stringfellow was actually the neighbour of Benjamin Webber, appearing in the very next household on High Street.

Robert Webber married Elizabeth Cooke at Sneinton St. Stephen on 12 June 1842. Robert was recorded as a lace maker of Carlton Road, and Elizabeth was living at Minerva Terrace, Sneinton. Robert’s father (Benjamin) was recorded as a labourer, and Elizabeth’s father (George) as a boatman. Witnesses were a John Cooke and Sarah Heaton.[30] Unfortunately, Robert’s father died the following year, on 30 September 1843, aged 60 of ‘Obstructed bowel’. The informant, who was present at the death, was a Mary Larcombe, and the 1841 census (see note [15]) shows her to be another neighbour on High Street, Chard.[31] Robert’s younger brother, William, married Emma Burrows at Nottingham St. Mary on 24 December 1844 (Christmas Eve).[32] Both brothers were clearly now quite settled in Nottingham.

In 1851, John and Mary Trask were living at 24 Beck Lane, Nottingham. With them was Mary’s 64-year-old widowed mother, Alice Webber, but also two members of the Peadon family: Abraham [Mitchell] (aged 22) and John [Plyer] (aged 20), and a Benjamin Sellers (aged 21). These were also lace makers from Chard lodging with the Trasks.[33] The Peadon brothers (alternatively spelled Peaden and Peeden) were born to a Robert (a ‘Cotton twist labourer’) and Mary Peadon in Chard. In 1850, Abraham and four others were dismissed from the Perry Street (a hamlet near Chard) lace manufactory by Mr. John B. Payne for leaving without notice, contrary to their contract.[34] A good explanation of his 1851 appearance in Nottingham was that he was looking for new work with his younger brother — despite the previously cited newspaper report indicating that their jobs were conditionally returned to them — and that he and John Trask may have previously worked together in Perry Street. In 1861, though, Abraham was back at Perry Street as a mechanic in the same lace factory. Alice Webber also returned to Chard before 1861, and she died there on 17 August 1864 at Combe St, Chard Borough, aged 76, of ‘Chronic Bronchitis, some years. Debility’.[35] It’s possible they returned at the same time, and were accompanied John and Mary Trask since there was no further evidence of them in Nottingham after that. Unfortunately, the Trask surname is much more common in Somerset and their final whereabouts isn’t yet known. The younger John Plyer Peadon remained in Nottingham and had a family there. He and his son, Arthur Frederick Peadon, bought a machine and set up their own business in 1884 (trading as Peadon and Son) in Long Eaton, just over the border in Derbyshire, but by 1891 they had gone bankrupt.[36] Despite this, the name ‘A. Peadon and Sons Ltd.” persisted in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire until it was finally wound up in 1951, at which time its registered offices were at: Messrs F. Stokes and Ricks, Sherwood Buildings, Sherwood Street, Nottingham.[37]

On reading this, it may be reasonable to question whether I’ve actually proved anything. Well, of course, I haven’t proved why any of the Webber family came to Nottingham, but what I have done it to present documented evidence of their lives, and of the events affecting both those towns and the country as whole at that time. These may be considered distinct overlays when looking at the combined history. While we cannot provide evidence of a definite connection between those layers, we can demonstrate that the family had to make choices, and also show some of the primary choices that were open to them. A simpler description of this two-layer case is that industry, agriculture, politics, and the weather provided a backdrop to the choices and events in the family’s lives, and from that perspective they provide a greater understanding of those lives. In a more complex case, though, then there may be more than two layers: each encapsulating distinct sets of related events and evidence, but whose inter-layer dependencies are more subjective. It is then up to the historian to make a case for how the events in one layer will have affected those in another layer. My recommendation: look beyond the records relating directly to their lives, and don’t be worried about making tentative conclusions; nothing is 100% in genealogy. The insights into life during those times will be well worth the effort.

---

[1] Chard St Mary the Virgin, 2007. Image by Dbown100 [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

[2] St. Mary the Virgin (Chard, Somerset), Baptismal Register, p.94, entry 974, marriage of Benjamin Webber and Alice Keetch, 21 Jul 1811; certified image (printed from digital camera) supplied by Somerset Archive and Local Studies (SALS), 8 Apr 2015.

[3] St. Nicholass (Combe St. Nicholas, Somerset), Baptismal Register, unnumbered p., baptism of James Webber, 5 Jan 1812; certified image (printed from digital camera) supplied by SALS, 8 Apr 2015. Burial Register, p.16, entry 124, 9 Mar 1820; SALS.

[4] St. Nicholass (Combe St. Nicholas), Baptismal Register, p.1, entry 6, baptism of Mary Webber, 14 Feb 1813; SALS.

[5] St. Mary the Virgin (Chard, Somerset), Baptismal Register, p.22, entry 170, John Webber, 25 Sep 1814; SALS.

[6] St. Nicholass (Combe St. Nicholas), Baptismal Register, p.15, entry 116, baptism of Robert Webber, 1 Sep 1816; SALS.

[7] St. Nicholass (Combe St. Nicholas), Baptismal Register, p.23, entry 181, baptism of William Webber, 20 Dec 1818; SALS.

[8] St. Nicholass (Combe St. Nicholas), Baptismal Register, p.32, entry 255, baptism of Joseph Webber, 8 Apr 1821; SALS.

[9] St. Nicholass (Combe St. Nicholas), Baptismal Register, p.39, entry 311, baptism of Joshua Webber, 2 Mar 1823; SALS.

[10] St. Nicholass (Combe St. Nicholas), Baptismal Register, p.46, entry 366, baptism of Amelia Webber, 19 Dec 1824; SALS. St Mary the Virgin (Chard), Burial Register, p.118, entry 938, 19 Jan 1829; SALS.

[11] St. Mary the Virgin (Chard), Baptismal Register, p.195, entry 1559, baptism of Simeon Webber, 11 Nov 1828; SALS.

[12] St. Mary the Virgin (Chard), Baptismal Register, p.15, entry 117, baptism of Henry Webber, 20 Jun 1830; SALS. Burial Register, p.139, entry 1106, 12 Sep 1830; SALS.

[13] St. Mary the Virgin (Chard), Baptismal Register, p.32, entry 253, baptism of Charles Webber, 17 Aug 1831; SALS. Burial Register, p.159, entry 1267, 5 Oct 1832; SALS.

[14] "1841 England Census", database,  Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 13 Apr 2015), household of Charles Legg (age 33); citing  HO 107/869, book 4, folio 15, page 22; The National Archives of the UK (TNA).

[15] "1841 England Census", database,  Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 13 Apr 2015), household of Benjamin Webber (age 50); citing  HO 107/8949, book 1, folio 30, page 1; TNA.

[16] "To the Farmers of Somerset and Dorset", Somerset County Gazette (7 Dec 1839): p.2.

[17] John Billingsley Esq., General View of the Agriculture of the County of Somerset (Bath: R. Crutwell, 1797); digital images, Google Books (books.google.com : accessed 16 Apr 2015).

[18] “Historical Weather Events: years 1800–1849”, Booty (http://booty.org.uk/booty.weather/climate/1800_1849.htm : accessed 16 Apr 2015).

[19] Taunton Courier, and Western Advertiser (22 Jan 1840): p.6, col.4, last paragraph; originally printed in the Berkshire Chronicle.

[20] "The Crops, the Country, and the Corn Laws", Bristol Mercury (25 Jul 1840): p.5.

[21] "The Landed Interest", Taunton Courier, and Western Advertiser (9 Dec 1840): p.8.

[22] “A Brief History of Chard”, Chard Museum (http://www.chardmuseum.co.uk/History_of_Chard/ : accessed 17 Apr 2015).

[23] A Roberts loom in a weaving shed in 1835. Image Credit: © Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images (http://wellcomeimages.org) [CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons, Library reference: Slide number 5208, Photo number: L0011293. Originally published by Edward Baines, "Power loom weaving", History of the cotton manufacture in

Great Britain (London: H. Fisjer, R. Fisher, P.Jackson, 1835), p.238–9.

[24] Roy A. Church, Economic and Social Change in a Midland Town: Victorian Nottingham 1815-1900 (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1966), p.99; digital images, Google Books (books.google.com : accessed 16 Apr 2015).

[25] “Exportation of Bobbin Net Machinery to Foreign States”, Nottingham Review and General Advertiser for the Midland Counties (21 Mar 1834): p.2, col.7.

[26] “Chard”, Bristol Mercury (8 Jan 1842): p.8 col.3.

[27] "Chard", Exeter and Plymouth Gazette (8 Oct 1842): p.3, col.5.

[28] "Chard Riots", Taunton Courier, and Western Advertiser (Wednesday 31 Aug 1842): p.5, col.4.

[29] "Bankrupts", Taunton Courier, and Western Advertiser (26 Jul 1843): p.4.

[30] England, marriage certificate for Robert Webber and Elizabeth Cooke, married 12 Jun 1842; citing 15/818/313, registered Chard 1842/Jun [Q2]; General Register Office (GRO), Southport.

[31] England, death certificate for Benjamin Webber, died 3 Jun 1843; citing 10/263/448, registered Chard 1843/Dec [Q4]; GRO.

[32] Nottinghamshire Family History Society (NottsFHS), Parish Register Marriage Index, CD-ROM, database(Nottingham, 1 Jan 2013), database version 3.0, entry for William Webber and Emma Burrows, 24 Dec 1844.

[33] "1851 England Census", database,  Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 19 Apr 2015), household of John Trask (age 36); citing  HO 107/2132, folio 581, page 15; TNA.

[34] “Chard: Leaving Service”, Exeter and Plymouth Gazette (9 Mar 1850): p.8, col.2.

[35] England, death certificate for Alice Webber, died 17 Aug 1864; citing 5c/315/188, registered Chard 1864/Sep [Q3]; GRO.

[36] "The Bankruptcy of Ilkeston Lacemakers", Nottingham Evening Post (15 Oct 1891): p.4.

[37] The London Gazette (27 Jul 1951, Issue 39296): p.4057.

Customer Service

What has happened to customer service from the large genealogical companies? Is there a decline in the service from online companies in general? Are customers the only casualty here or is it to the detriment of the companies too?

I have some history in this particular field and so maybe my expectations are higher than most, or maybe not. In the 1990s I worked for a software company that strived to achieve the then-new ISO 9000 certification — and succeeded — and I later worked for a company specialising in business intelligence software for large contact centres.

My lack of satisfaction has mainly come from one particular company; one that I have subscribed to since they first appeared. However, I don’t believe that they are the only culprit and so to save them from embarrassment I’ll simply refer to them through the fictitious name of Your-Yore. In fact, much of what I’m about to say could be levelled at many companies outside of genealogy, and especially those with a Web presence.

ISO 9000 is a family of international standards, first published in 1987, concerned with quality management. It identifies a number of factors which have to be regularly audited and measured for compliance and effectiveness. Part of this involves the product itself: whether it meets customer needs, whether its evolution continues to address such needs, monitoring the reliability and efficiency of the product, fixing product problems, etc. Another part refers to the customer and requires that systems be in place for communicating with customers about product information, enquiries, contracts, orders, feedback, and complaints. Customer Service is more-specifically addressed by the ISO 10000 family of standards, and also by The International Standard for Service Excellence (TISSE).

In a genealogical context, the product will involve the Web site (or other software component), including its user interface (UI) and its search engine, but also its underlying data. Reporting software issues, such as features not working as described, or not working at all, would be relevant to many companies, but genealogical data may also be the subject of discontent. Data may be missing, mis-indexed, mis-transcribed, or of unknown or dubious origin not identified by the company. I have reported issues to Your-Yore relevant to all of these categories, and including suggestions for enhancement and other advances, but what happened to them?

Let’s just take a moment to examine the reasons why a customer may contact such a company:

• Software issue (as described above).
• Data issue (as described above).
• Account, membership, or subscription issue.
• Feedback, suggestion, or complaint.
• Sales.
• Technical support.

A contact centre, also known as a call centre, will have agents dealing with all of these, and each category must be directed to an appropriate person or department. Despite the availability of text-chat interfaces, social media, and self-service menus, the predominant mechanisms are still email (possibly with a Web form to initiate it) and the telephone. But the reality is neither that simple nor that rigid: a call may transition from one category to another, such as a technical question eventually becoming a software issue; the contact mechanism may change part way through a call, such as one initiated by email later involving a telephone conversation; or a given customer may have several independent calls active. The upshot of this is that a company needs an Issue Tracking System (ITS) in order to separate the different calls, and to enable their progress to be followed individually.

This is where is I have to bite my tongue as companies such as Your-Yore have no such system, and do not offer the customer any sort of ticket number by which they can follow a call to resolution, or to escalate it if necessary. This makes me angry, not just because the concept is part of “call management 101” but because it hinders the company as well as the customer. There is valuable information to be gleaned from those call logs, including the reliability of the product and the satisfaction of the customers. In addition to large-scale metrics, though, it could allow the company to know its customers, not just on an individual level — their background, experience level, etc. — but collectively. There is certainly a proportion of genealogists who are very fussy about the way they research, and how they write-up or otherwise store their results. This may once have been the domain of the professionals but that group is now wider; how much wider is something that the company can only determine through analysis of such data, or business intelligence. It’s probably no coincidence that Your-Yore recently embarked on a major change to its product that woefully underestimated the nature of its customers, and which left this particular group of customers extremely dissatisfied.

Returning to those software and data issues that I had previously reported to Your-Yore, I have no record of them, other than my original email — when it was initiated by one. I have no way of knowing whether the associated problems were fixed or otherwise addressed, and no way of chasing them up. This company recently introduced a forum where their customers could provide feedback and suggestions — a nice idea but the implementation was deficient. Having lost all confidence in submission by email, I tried to post some of the issues on their new forum as feedback. The advantage of the forum was that the postings were public, but the disadvantage was that there was virtually no acknowledgement or active participation by the company. Worse than that, some partial automation of the system managed to lose two of my postings, and when I say ‘lose’ I mean totally lost. Although I could provide the original URLs, there was apparently no way of recovering them, and no way of determining why they were lost or discarded.

Contact centres typically direct technical questions to a help desk or technical support desk. These mostly have a multi-tier organisation so that tier 1, or the first line support, gathers the customer’s description and supporting information in an attempt to match against known problems. Tiers 2 and 3 would each be more technically knowledgeable and would receive the more difficult calls from their preceding tier. Well, that’s the theory, and the practice as I recall it, but this type of support desk is gradually being replaced by online ‘user communities’, which basically means that the buck is being passed. Even when the company participates in those communities, there is no obligation to find you a solution. There is nothing wrong with user communities per se, but they are not the same as a support desk. Particularly with the large software companies, such as Microsoft, the older style technical support tends to be something you pay for over and above the cost of the product itself, and that effectively means that only business customers can take advantage of it; the smaller customers are left to find solutions by themselves. If you’re a paying customer, and the problem is really a product fault not of your making, then this can be truly vexing since the information would be to their advantage.

One non-genealogical software company that I’ve had several painful dealings with was Skype. Unlike Your-Yore, they allocated ticket numbers and appeared to follow more professional practices, except that email messages were picked up by a different agent on each stage of a given thread. If those agents had taken the trouble to read the rest of the thread then my experiences wouldn’t have been as bad as they were, but it was clear that they focused on particular keywords, either in the title or in the first paragraph, and then pasted some stock paragraph of text into their response that was all but useless. The explanation for this is straightforward as that issue is quite common. Large call centres are effectively modern-day sweat shops, and the lives of the agents are governed by metrics and measurements. When their performance is assessed on how quickly they can turn a call around, as opposed to them finding a resolution or to the level of customer satisfaction, then such short-cuts are used extensively. However, customer support is not a game of tennis, and responding quickly rather than effectively (and courteously) does neither the company nor the customer any good. By contrast, my experiences with Hover, with whom I have multiple email and domain registrations, were exemplary. The differences in how I would relate my experiences of those two companies to friends would be marked, and would persist well beyond the actual events.

If you’re thinking that certification is expensive then you’d be correct, and the software company I mentioned that achieved ISO 9000 certification in the 1990s spent considerable time, effort, and money to get there. This is one of the common criticisms of those standards but you can read a different significance into that observation. You may consider that modern companies are leaner and want to increase their profit margin by reducing their overheads, but that lack of investment also disguises a fundamental disrespect for the customer. Treating customers as a commodity means that there is no appreciation of what they can do for the company in terms constructive feedback, loyalty, and word-of-mouth.

Making available billions of “records” to hundreds of thousands of customers is a simplistic model but it works, right? The customers should be grateful and they can take it from there, right? Yeah, right!