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Barbara’s family history is rooted in the East End of London. Her ancestors worked as costermongers (fruit and vegetable sellers or ‘barrow boys’), dressmakers, bricklayers and dockers. And there is an early link to the entertainment industry too. Her grandmother, ‘Fat Nan’, had been a "hoofer" - a chorus-line dancer.
Poverty blighted Barbara’s ancestors’ lives. John Deeks, her great-great-grandfather, lived in one of the most deprived areas of London. A general depression of the building trade in the 1880s meant that his last years were spent in the workhouse.
Going further back, Barbara found that her maternal great-grandmother fled the Irish potato famine between 1846 and 1850. She came to London from Cork with her parents and became a match-box maker in Old Nichol Street, exchanging one sort of poverty for another.
There are a number of sources you can use to trace a relative who fell on hard times. A good place to start is with official records, such as census returns from 1841-1901, to locate an ancestor. You can start to make some judgments about their relative wealth.
Institutions such as workhouses, pauper hospitals and charitable establishments are listed, with the name, age, place of birth and occasionally the occupation of each inmate. Bear in mind though that census records were only made every ten years on a particular day, so they will not necessarily tell you if an ancestor has spent some time in one of these institutions.
Another source is birth, marriage and death certificates, introduced in England and Wales in 1837, Scotland in 1855 and Ireland in 1864. Certificates often provide an indication of a person’s social status, particularly if they list an official residence e.g. a birth in a workhouse or a death in an almshouse.
Find out more about birth, marriage, death certificates and census records 
If you do find an indication from census records, or a death certificate, that one of your ancestors spent time in a workhouse, the name of the institution should be recorded, along with information that can help you track down the name of the Poor Law Union which administered the workhouse.
If you are unsure, you can find out more from a guide about the topic, available here
You can also search online for surviving records at www.a2a.org.uk
There are records describing workhouse and factory conditions available on www.movinghere.org.uk
Alternatively you can visit www.workhouses.org.uk, a resource that lists where workhouses were and what records are available.
