Main website navigation:
Jeremy Paxman, the scourge of politicians and students on BBC’s Newsnight and University Challenge, was deeply moved on discovering his family history. He made some startling discoveries about his ancestors. Their lives, on both sides of the family, were blighted by poverty. It is a story common to many people’s ancestry.
In this episode a key event was migration from one part of the country to another. Jeremy found during his research that initiatives had been set up in the 1820s and 1830s to move the rural poor from areas such as East Anglia to the newly industrialised north. The aim was to find work for former agricultural labourers and artisans in the factories. The problem of simply transferring from one part of the country to another, with the mill towns quickly becoming over-populated, with areas of extreme poverty. During this period co-operative societies were established to cater for the starving poor and many of these people entered workhouses
There are a number of sources you can use to trace a relative who has fallen on hard times. A good place to start is with official records, such as census returns from 1841-1901, to locate an ancestor, and 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 may 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 
Census records can tell you where and ancestor lived, their occupation and who they lived with. Census records also give important clues about your ancestors living conditions. For example, how many other people lived in the house? Was there overcrowding, as was the case with Jeremy Paxman’s ancestor?
Did your ancestor also have a military background?
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 http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a
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.
