Family HistoryYour guide to resources.

Jeremy Clarkson’s research into his family tree revealed ancestors who were at the heart of the industrial revolution. The Kilner family had established several glassworks across the north of England during the nineteenth century, when business boomed and vast fortunes were amassed; indeed, the Kilner name became associated with the production of a particular type of storage jar, with the brand-name still in use today.

Unfortunately for Jeremy, the family fortunes were lost in the early twentieth century, partly through changes to the glass bottle manufacturing industry when more effective mechanisation was introduced from America, and partly because the family business passed into less capable hands – a fact demonstrated by the vastly reduced sums of money left in successive generations of Kilner wills.

The impact of the Kilner’s Providence Glassworks in Conisbrough, the town where Jeremy’s great-great grandparents Caleb and Eleanor Kilner lived, was considerable. Not only were the glassworks the main source of employment – as demonstrated by census returns throughout the nineteenth century – but the Kilner family helped to finance the local Methodist minister, acting as trustees for the land on which the chapel was built. Even a bridge in the town bears the Kilner name. The changes made to Conisbrough by the industrial activity of the Kilners can be traced at The National Archives in two major land surveys, the Tithe Apportionments of the mid-nineteenth century and the 1910 Valuation Office survey.

Catalogue reference: IR 30/43/109
Tithe map for Conisborough, c. 1840. The future site of the Kilner’s Providence Glassworks remains a series of undeveloped fields.

 

 

 

Catalogue reference: IR 134/3/134
Valuation Office survey map for Conisbrough, c. 1910 showing how the Providence Glassworks occupies a prime site near the river, with its own branch railway line and a network of roads connecting it to the town.

Going further

Records of industry are usually deposited in county record offices or specialist archives, although The National Archives has a wide range of sources relating to nationalised industries. Further information on the Tithe Apportionments and the 1910 Valuation Office survey can be found in our research guides.