Researching Local History

The Human Journey

M. Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582042889
• eBook ISBN: 9781317900313
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This practical but inspiring book considers what local history is, why researching it is valuable and rewarding, and how we should go about it. Issues addressed include: getting oral and documentary evidence; keeping records; the nature of data, information and knowledge; and their use to create the different products of local history research. Michael Williams is both a professional scientist and a local historian of long standing, and he uses both sides of his experience in a text that is at once rigorous about the historical process, and also a fascinating - and often moving - account of his adventures into the past of his own family and community. He demonstrates local history methodology through his research into ancestry, migration, work, war and religion in the towns and villages of England and Wales. It is richly illustrated throughout.

Chapter One

The Why and How of Studying History

For a scientist like myself brought up on experiments, measurements and coefficients, as someone who thought in terms of statistical tests, the study of history has seemed strange and difficult to take in hand. It is broad and diffuse, and stretches to unreachable horizons, and yet is crammed also with minute pieces of factual information. How on earth does anyone evaluate the material of a subject that is so lacking in means of experiment for disproving theories? How can any factors be identified as causing things if there are no opportunities for isolating variables?

Indeed, the whole matter of the nature of ‘history’ has seemed to me problematical. Just what is the history of an event, or of a country? What information qualifies to be part of it? How do you get that relevant information? What do you leave out? Such dilemmas were not mentioned during the (apparently) very factual history lessons that children of my generation received at school.

But of course, I am far from being the first person to notice that writing the history of a place, or the story of the events during a particular period of time, poses some awkward problems. However, it was only when I became interested in the past of some particular places that I found myself confronted by these problems: how do you research a history? How do you write the story of a place?

No doubt all the authors who laboured to compile the huge number of existing published ‘histories’ of all sorts – of places, of events and of times – have met these questions. Really, at the beginning, there are three issues: how do you decide what to study; how do you study it, and how do you report the results? To create a discussion, it is easiest to start by thinking first about written histories.

Written History

Putting aside the matter of how historians have chosen their research topics, and their tasks in finding and processing the data that the research throws up, the way that they most usually dealt with the matter of compiling a historical account has been one or another of the following.

First, they have concentrated on certain major features of the past time in question, on generalities, on some broad relation such as that between nation states or between other large bodies of people. They have written then what is sometimes called a macrohistory.

Second, they have focused on certain personalities that flourished at the time of their interest – their lives and their influences: kings, generals, ministers of state, preachers, teachers or perhaps even renowned demagogues.

Third, they may not have concentrated on people at all, but on things which do not move or talk, the products of trade or industry, or the fabric – the buildings, and the site and the growth of a place.

Finally, they may have chosen to concentrate upon specialities, slivers and fragments of special information within the whole: perhaps the origins and developments of institutions and their proceedings. Examples of this last way might be the rise and workings of a political party, the beginnings of a trade union or a religious sect, or the development of a body such as the Royal Society. All of these ways solve the ‘history writing problem’ by narrowing it down. Science works like that too. It is a very successful strategy.

Many of the products of this sort of work inevitably point up the role of the people who wielded power – monarchs, princes and rulers, and others who governed. These accounts offer little detail of deed, thought or choice among the people who were governed. The histories tell much of owners and generals, but little about labourers and common soldiers. And of course, since the great and powerful have more often than not been male, the histories have often told much about powerful men; but much less about women. Perhaps some issues of real substance are: how to contrive to deal with manageable quantities of material, yet how also to refine it, presenting the reader of a resultant ‘history’ with a product that they can relate to. For even though the mass action events of continents and nations did affect the lives of millions, and although many striking personalities did influence great events, one must ask if ordinary people even heard tell of the famous names. And surely, few ordinary folk set eyes upon palaces or on the great chambers of government?

Certainly, the value of the many distillations of the past lies not at all in showing detail at a human scale, but rather in offering important generalities or conclusions. It rests too, in the provision of short abstracts, texts suitable for easy transmission, for sharing and repeating. The transmission of history in this form has very important social roles and implications. Material at the scale of the individual has to be sought and found elsewhere.

Getting at the Ordinary

We each know that, inside ourselves, we have a unique set of experiences. Indeed, even when we attend an event with other people, we do not all see it the same way. Great events are always made up of lots of tiny ones. Inevitably individuals, from their own vantage point, see their own proportion of them, and on top of that have their own selective recall. Every individual can generate a unique account that is personally truthful. The total of details they all remember is often impossibly large. Even for one ninety-minute football match, no one would have time or space to note down all the tiny events that the members of the 30,000 crowd recalled seeing. Of the match a macrohistory may simply and reasonably state that the final score was 3–0, and that it was an untidy game. This report will be all most of us will need. After all, we are much more likely to need the complete set of Saturday football scores, each with its attached brief report, than we are a multi-volume work written about one match. Macro versions of events (‘macros’) are essential components of a sane life.

There may be no problem at all in accepting the macros of last week’s soccer programme, yet perhaps we have reservations about being provided only with the twenty-line or even the five-line versions of huge events such as the Second World War. In highly abridged versions, even great personages may be omitted, and the account may very well mislead. But even if it does not misinform in that way, it inevitably overlooks very many ordinary lives. Those whose words are included are selected to speak as the contribution of the people of power. As readers of histories, we may well feel and conclude differently, when we are offered writing about or from the common people. At any time, how close were the great personalities in experience and thought to the main body of people? Usually, not very.

Nevertheless, macros which distil the mass action of events, or which build a story around the lives of politicians or thought leaders, offer at least one other social essential: disseminated they make that glue that binds people to other people. Communities, races and nations need shared views of their collective pasts. The schoolroom and kitchen repetitions of gists of history ensure the existence of a shared reference material. Its potency is quite undiminished by its over-simplifications and by any inaccuracies that it propagates. The myth provision in society is so important that if something digestible and containing some skeleton of truth is not available, human nature will ensure that some truthless folklore will arise. Myths can fulfil their essential purpose even without resort to truth.

But there is widespread dissatisfaction with global accounts. For some people the accepted wisdom about events is simply not enough. And they need to ask ‘how true are the myths?’, or ‘what relation did the well-known events have to the lives of my people?’ Irrespective of what they read, some people want to know ‘just what were the lives of ordinary people really like in past times?’

Somehow the challenge of these sorts of questions has to be met. There has to be some other way of examining the past; or perhaps even some other sort of history. And if there is another way of looking back, one question that must live there is: ‘how do I and other folk fit to the past of our people?’ For somehow we, the living, have to place ourselves in context, and bridge a ravine that lies between us and national or global events. But we can talk of another way of looking only if we think about research as an activity, and address the process – the actual way of doing it.

Changing How We See

Imagine a busy, sunny, daytime city. You view it from the roof of a skyscraper. Here is a thing of great flux. People and vehicles move one way and another way. Some move quickly, some pause. Others seem always static. The main shopping street is full and remains so, despite the comings and the goings. We cannot doubt the activity of the place. The volume of the traffic remains undiminished.

Our description, though, mentions only a part of what there is to see. By concentrating upon the fullness of the street we have restricted ourselves to one type of information, and in consequence have obtained a very incomplete picture of how the city works.

So suppose we change our way of looking; imagine we decide not to stare at the mass of people and vehicles, but at particular individuals. We will follow them from when and where they come into view to wherever it is they go. Doing this we may soon realise that although the street remains approximately as full for several hours at a time, the individual people in it are regularly exchanged. Many of them are only passing through, or pausing there briefly. Some occupy particular buildings. A few travel in company rather than alone. Some have come a very long way to the city; others have far to go when they leave. By looking at the individuals, the way the live city works is illuminated. In historical studies, if we turn the eye of our research from gross events, to a study of some individual places, a selection from the many, the history of the nation may be also illuminated, just as the organic city is traced by its active citizens.

The study of people and change in selected localities, at once, then, shows a potential for satisfying our need of relating ordinary lives to larger events, and for simultaneously gaining a view of the process of change as it happened to the common people. And in the course of this study, we would not put out of sight the major factors in the nation’s past, even though we reduce a large lake of information to a drinkable glassful. We won’t stop being conscious of great events. There is a prospect here of much minute labour. This makes the different sort of history we spoke of earlier.

Being a Stakeholder

As far as most of us are concerned, the time and effort needed to reveal details of the lives of past individuals might not be forthcoming, had we not a personal stake in the business. A personal connection drives us on. For instance, my own route to studying British history has been via local history. But my first steps into local history were upon the carpet of my own family’s past.

I had naturally chosen to study first the places where I and my ancestors had lived. Later I commenced a study of the city in which I live now. The results of this work, and especially that which started with my own ancestors, to some extent colours my view of great events in British history. It has also beaten a path for me into a story of two nations. Sometimes it has offered a feel of some currents that pass among 58 million people.

Like myself, most local historians are motivated by personal curiosity. Often, though not always, this commences with a need to clarify things about their own roots, or their own surroundings. On the trail of their own forebears, individuals will invest hours without number seeking out and studying documents. They will incur uncalculated personal expense, on the road to a clearer view of their own background, and in the hope of explaining that in themselves which they so far have found unexplainable.

While many searchers do seem well satisfied with some names written on a genealogical chart, others, once they have named great-grandfather, must locate his house. They find themselves deeply curious about his neighbours. For these people, a study in local history has been entered on, almost without a conscious decision.

As a result of this sort of sequence, I have come to know several Somerset villages, the tenancy of the farms in them and the lineage of many of the long-established families. I have identified people who left them for America. Some years ago, when certain very old people were still alive, I could hold conversations with them about farming methods and about families that had long since disappeared. My family’s history had, without my noticing it, grown up into local history.

But the growth process does not stop there. The past of those same villages includes and illustrates many, many other phenomena: the eighteenth-century draining and enclosure of the Levels, the depth of nineteenth-century rural poverty, commercial turf cutting, the growing of cider apples. The list is very long. Some, at least, of these matters lead directly to considerations of topics of general importance in British rural history.

There is, then, a ‘hot line’ from family history, through local history to national history. Not that one should imagine for a moment that genealogy is the only starting point for local history. After all, had I gone to live on King’s Sedgemoor, even with no knowledge of my own roots there, I may still have been fascinated enough by that watery landscape to begin to ask questions about the locality. Curiosity about one’s current surroundings is often quite sufficient to provoke the beginnings of a local study. That too has happened to me, though I had lived in this city quite some years (two decades in fact), before I finally felt sufficient of a Sheffielder to begin to formulate questions about Sheffield history. I saw the place. I even went to lectures about the place. But I did not formulate research questions until much later. Perhaps it is true that before one actively poses local questions, one has to feel some local connection. Certainly you have to have some experience of the place. It can thus be argued that the questions always begin with our own selves, and hence always start with our own time.

Microhistories

If potted histories and myths serve the needs of nations and act as binding forces within communities, they must also have some role in securely establishing new children within their own people. Local histories, though, are ‘microhistories’ – accounts in which the historian attempts to understand the past and possibly, therefore, the present, by a study of fine detail. The historian is taking first, not the global, but the parochial view. The concerns of the research are not immediately those of nations and their great events, but those of named people, of families, villages, employers, homes and landlords. In this prospect of affairs, compilers are likely to place themselves close to the questions asked, and to look thereby for the generation of a history, in which their own face can be reflected. It will, they hope, also be a history in which the past of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Author’s Preface
• Editorial Preface
• Chapter 1. The Why and How of Studying History
• Chapter 2. Given in Evidence
• Chapter 3. That Which is Written
• Chapter 4. Notes, Notebooks and Archives
• Chapter 5. One Society at One Particular Time: Caerleon in the First World War
• Chapter 6. The Matter of Population
• Chapter 7. Labelled for Posterity
• Chapter 8. Tracing the Welsh
• Chapter 9. Getting it Together
• Chapter 10. But What is it All For?
• Index