A new online service has been launched by the Council to help people discover more about their ancestors’ links with Bath.
The “Bath Ancestors” database offers a searchable index of many thousands of local names associated with the city in centuries gone by.
Councillor Cherry Beath (Lib-Dem, Combe Down), Cabinet Member for Sustainable Development, said: “Bath & North East Somerset Council’s Bath Record Office holds historic records including information from court and Poor Law registers, schools and hospitals, apprenticeships, rate books and wills. This information is a valuable resource to family historians, but previously many records in Bath Record Office could only be searched by visiting in person.
“The ‘Bath Ancestors’ database enables anyone – whether across the district or across the world – to tap into a piece of Bath’s social history and maybe even find a family connection simply by visiting the Council’s online resource at www.batharchives.co.uk.”
Some of the more notable entries on the site include records of felony convictions for the theft of a copper tea kettle, a bell fixed to a building, 11 herrings, a case of potted veal, three pairs of Wellington boots and a quantity of lard. Other crimes included absconding from the workhouse, keeping a bawdy house, bigamy and murder.
The “Bath Ancestors” database also carries details of the Mineral Water Hospital case book from the 1750s – with patients coming from as far away as Scotland and Ireland. None of the patients were rich, as the hospital was specifically for those who could not afford to stay in Bath and receive spa water treatment at their own expense.
Brief explanations of the records which appear in the database are supplied on the site, so that users can understand what they have found. It is also possible to click through to an “order documents” page where a copy or transcript of the item may be ordered from the Bath Record Office for a small charge.
Colin Johnston, Bath & North East Somerset Council’s Principal Archivist, said: “For decades, our volunteers created indexes by writing the name of each person found in a particular record on an index card. Then in the 1990s, a new wave of volunteers with IT skills began creating indexes on computer.
“It’s hard to quantify the sheer volume of volunteer work that has gone into creating these resources but the Council’s Bath Record Office has over 100 separate indexes containing more than 70,000 names.
“The ‘Bath Ancestors’ database covers the years 1603-1990, and contains information taken from original records held by the Record Office. So far, just over half of the indexes are online and we hope to be able to make the rest available soon.”
The work of amalgamating all the different indexes and developing the online database has been carried out by volunteer Simon Caldwell, of Bath, whose years of professional IT experience have proved to be a major asset to the Record Office.
Mr Caldwell said: “I’m delighted to have had the opportunity to make the work of so many other volunteers available on the internet. The software enables individual index files to be loaded into a common format within one database. Users at home can now search the database online by document type, date, parish and name etc., including a ‘sounds like’ function which copes with different spellings of the same name; there is also a full-text search.”
1 Comment
cassyput
Saturday 13th October, 2012 at 11:51Just had a quick look and this is a really great resource.