Inside the
1939 Register
How to access the 1939 Register for England & Wales
How the register differs from other censuses
Why some names are crossed out & other mysteries
Why are there more transcription errors than usual?
How to search the 1939 Register
Pitfalls to avoid when searching by address
What's the difference between locked and closed
Closed records are NOT indexed
How to work out who the hidden people were
Who should we be looking for, and why?
Insights we can get from
identity cards
How the numbers from identity cards were used
Tracking
down evacuees using LostCousins
Extending
your tree beyond 1911 using the 1939 Register
How
evacuation was planned in 1939
Qualifications
desirable in an enumerator
This is a Special
Edition of the LostCousins newsletter; for other
issues please visit the LostCousins website and click the 'Latest Newsletter' link
in the menu. You can help LostCousins remain independent
if you use the links in this and other newsletters when you visit genealogy websites.
Sylvanus Percival Vivian, Registrar
General for England &Wales between 1921-45, was the driving force behind
the creating of the 1939 National Register. Having organised the 1921 and 1931
Censuses, and having written critically about the 1915 National Register he
recognised that infrastructure for the 1941 Census could be used to create a
National Register, should war break out. His preparations for the 1941 census
were, therefore, intertwined up with the planning of a national registration
system for the purposes of conscription, which began at least as early as 1935.
However the National Register wasn't created simply as a
means of identifying fit young men who could be sent abroad to die for their
country - the Great War had demonstrated how important it was to effectively marshall resources on the Home Front.
How to access the 1939 Register for England &
Wales
When the 1939
Register was released in November 2015 it could only be accessed using
credits purchased at the Findmypast site - it was not
included in any of the subscriptions. Now you can access the Register with any
World subscription to Findmypast, with a 12 month
Britain subscription (not available to new subscribers) or, following the introduction
of a new subscription structure at Findmypast.co.uk in November 2017, with any
Plus or Pro subscription - you'll find
more details here.
How the register differs from other censuses
We're used to censuses that aspire to
record everyone in the land - but that wasn't what happened in 1939, even
though it was organised in a similar way.
A key task of the enumerators who
collected the data was to issue identity cards - and for this reason military
personnel and government workers who already had ID cards are unlikely to be
recorded in Register. According to the National Archives (TNA) research
guide:
The Register
was not meant to record members of the armed forces and the records do not feature:
However, the
records do include:
Note:
it's rare to find a member of the armed forces on leave in the Register, but
you'll find an example in one of the articles below.
Other key differences compared to the
censuses are that relationships are not shown, middle names are rarely shown in
full, and places of birth are not listed. However, precise dates of birth are
given, and this information might well save us the cost of buying a birth certificate,
especially for our more distant relatives.
Tip:
birthdates are not always recorded correctly - I have two great-aunts
who were twins, but if you relied on what the enumerators wrote down (they were
different enumerators because both of the sisters had
married before 1939) you would think they had been born a month apart. I've no
idea whether the mistake was made by the husband or the enumerator - but it
certainly wasn't the transcriber.
Why some names are crossed out & other mysteries
The 1939 Register was a working document
- unlike censuses, which were checked, analysed, and then archived, the
National Register was updated as changes occurred. For example, if a woman
married she would normally adopt her husband's surname - and if this occurred
after 29th September 1939 a new identity card had to be issued.
Tip:
the use of identity cards didn't end when the war was over - they continued in
use until 1952.
When the National Health Service was
founded in 1948 the National Register was used as the basis of the NHS Central
Register, and this continued in to the early 1990s. As a result
many name changes were recorded as the result of marriages (and divorces) that
took place in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. There may even be some later changes
- but I haven't seen any yet.
Here's an example of a name change on
marriage:
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by
courtesy of The National Archives, London, England and Findmypast
This tells us that May E Lawson became
Dalrymple on her first marriage (which was in 1951), and Noon on her second
marriage in 1955. She died in 1985, but the record would be open in any case as
she was born in 1904, which is more than 100 years ago.
Changes weren't made immediately -
there was usually a delay - and in the example above you can see the change of
name to Dalrymple seems not to have been recorded until early 1955, by which
time Mrs Dalrymple (nee Lawson) was well on her way to marrying again - she
married Frederick E Noon in the third quarter of that year.
This means that where a date is shown
all you can conclude is that the event must have happened prior to that date.
You are NOT seeing the date on which the person married or divorced.
Tip: information in the same colour ink and handwriting is likely to
have been entered at the same time - without this clue I might have associated
the 1955 date with the second marriage.
If there is a change of surname recorded you can usually search using either surname.
Unusually May E Noon has only been indexed under her final surname, possibly
because it's really hard to read her original surname
(Lawson). But you're more likely to see a search result that looks like this
one:
That's my mum! Note that the original
surname - the maiden surname in this case - is shown in parentheses. Her family
didn't live in Suffolk - but my mother's school was evacuated from Ilford in
Essex to Ipswich. I'd probably never have known about this had it not been for
the 1939 Register.
Why are there more transcription errors than usual?
If you're used to just typing in names
and seeing results pop-up you might be frustrated by the number of
transcription errors. Fortunately it's unlikely that
they'll prevent you finding the right records because there are so many
different ways of searching - and anyway, most transcription errors can be
overcome by the judicious use of wildcards. But it's important to understand
just why there are more errors than
usual.
First of all, there was a war on - the enumerators don't seem to
have been as careful with their handwriting as one would have liked. The fact
that they were using fountain pens probably didn't help - there tends to be too
much ink, so that some of the details disappears into a blob. And the
transcribers also had to decipher entries that had been crossed through.
However, the biggest challenge for the transcribers
was the result of privacy concerns - these records were not due to be opened
until 2040, by which time everyone recorded would have been over 100 years old.
This is why we could initially only see records for
people who were born over 100 years ago, or whose death had been recorded in
the register (some other records have since been opened up for people who are
known to have died).
This meant that the transcribers
weren't given an entire page to work with - instead the page was divided into
columns of data, and these were given to different transcribers, none of whom
could see the entire entry for any individual, making it much more difficult for
them to interpret the handwriting. This ingenious process also generated errors
even when the transcribers got it right - on some pages the columns of the
transcription were 'out of sync' when the page was reassembled, so that part of
one record was combined with part of the next record. Such errors look
ludicrous to us, seeing complete entries, but the transcribers of that page
might not have done anything wrong.
I'm never one to criticise transcribers
because it's not a job I would want to do, even though (and, perhaps, because)
I'd be very good at it - but in this instance the challenges were greater than
usual, and we have to remember that what we see isn't
what they saw. Because in most cases the enumerator only wrote down the last
two digits of the birth year it was relatively easy for years to migrate from
one century to another.
For example, I saw an entry for a
schoolgirl whose birth year had been indexed as 1883 - this was obviously incorrect
when you saw the entire record, but viewing the birth year in isolation I would
have made precisely the same mistake (and I suspect you would too). Only if I
had known that the individual concerned was still at school might I have deduced
that the enumerator intended the entry to be read as '33', not '83'. (Many
thanks to that schoolgirl, now a LostCousins member,
for allowing me to see her record before it was closed.)
Note: when you able to consult the original record
the transcription acts only as a finding guide; this means that errors in a
transcribed record, no matter how ridiculous they seem, are generally of
relatively little consequence.
How to search the 1939 Register
There are two ways to search - you can
search for a Person, or you can search for an Address. But most of the time
you'll want to search for a person, because you can include location
information in a person search if you want:
As you can see, the Person Search page
looks quite similar to the page we see when we search
the 1911 Census at Findmypast, but with the addition of the Birthday field. All of the fields are optional, even the name - so you can
start with a very broad search and narrow down by adding more information.
Tip: less is more when it comes to
searching at Findmypast - the less information you
enter on the Search form, the more results you'll get! Should you get too many
results you can always add more information and try again.
Note that there are boxes on the form
for the National Archives references - the piece number, and the item number. I
suggest you record these for the households you purchase as they'll provide a
quick way of finding the record again. And who knows, perhaps one day we'll add
the 1939 Register to the list of censuses supported by LostCousins?
When you search by Address there are
far fewer boxes on the form:
I suspect that the Address search will
be used mainly by people who want to find out who was living in 'their' house
in 1939, or who want to find out information about their neighbours - I looked
at the house where I grew up - most of the neighbours are well over 100 by now (some
of them seemed like it at the time, though most of them were younger than I am
now!). But the Address search it will also come in handy if you have trouble
finding someone using the Person search, either because their name has been mistranscribed or because they were using an assumed name
(like one of my cousins, who had left her husband and in September 1939 was 'living
in sin' with the man she married after the war).
For more information about searching
please check out this article on the Findmypast blog (you
don't need to be a Findmypast subscriber).
Pitfalls to avoid when searching by address
Searching by address sounds simple, but
there are some complicating factors that you need to be aware of:
What's the difference between locked and closed
Locked
households are households you haven't
viewed before; unlocking a household allows you to see the open records in that
household. If you have a Findmypast subscription
which includes the 1939 Register then you can unlock as many households as you
want - whether a household is locked or not is more relevant if you are using credits
to access the Register, or if your subscription has expired.
Closed records exist in both locked and unlocked households
- they are records that you can't see because the person is recorded as having
been born less than 100 years ago, and their death has not been confirmed.
Closed records can usually be opened by submitting a death certificate, but you
need to know where the individual was living in 1939.
Closed records are NOT indexed
If a record is closed then you won't
find that person in the index, no matter how you search. For example, when the
register first launched my mother was not in the index, and because she had
been evacuated I didn't know where she was living.
Fortunately Findmypast opened an additional 2.5 million records
in December 2015, having used a sophisticated algorithm to match death index
entries against register entries - this was possible because the death indexes
from 1969 onwards include the individual's date of birth. Millions more records
have been opened subsequently.
There are still many records which are
closed, even though the person is now deceased - unfortunately the National
Archives, who hold the registers, and have ultimate responsibility for deciding
which records can be opened, have to take a
conservative approach to avoid breaching the privacy of living people.
However if you can work out where someone was living, and
have their death certificate, you can open the record.
How to work out who the hidden people were
When you view the handwritten images you see an entire page - other than the closed
records, which are blanked out. Usually the inhabitants of a household are
listed in the same way that they would be on a census, starting the father and
continuing with the mother and the children in descending order of age; lodgers
and visitors are likely to be at the end.
You won't always be able to see where
one household ends and the next begins, but you can easily work it out from the
way in which the entries are numbered. Remember, you know how many open and how
many closed records there are in a household from the transcription (it isn’t always
obvious from the image of the register page).
This means that in most cases you'll be
able to work out whose records are hidden, by combining what you can see or
deduce with your own knowledge of the family.
Tip:
in a few cases you might see a small part of a closed record - perhaps the
descender from a letter 'y', 'g', 'p', or 'j'. The position of the descender
may help to confirm that the hidden person was named 'Mary', or 'George'.
Who should we be looking for, and why?
Often the most interesting revelations
are going to come from researching people who aren't close relatives. For
example, as mentioned above, I discovered one of my Dad's cousins living with a
man who wasn't her husband, and that solved several mysteries for me. It also
indirectly enabled me to identify several cousins who are still living - so
much from just one household!
I also found it interesting looking at
neighbours, some of whom I remembered from my childhood in the 1950s - and I
discovered a lot that I hadn't known about a family friend who my mother had
worked with during the War.
How much you learn will depend not so
much on how much you already know, but on how open you are to making new discoveries - indeed, the more you know, the
easier it will be to expand your search outwards, to more distant relatives.
What you find in the register won't be an end in itself, but
a gateway to yet more information - once you know precisely when someone was
born it's usually easy to find their death (assuming they died between Q3 1969
and 2007), and that makes it easier to fill in the gaps in between.
The rather fuzzy photo on the right is the only known
image of the opposite page of a register - we normally only see the left-hand
page and the first column of the right-hand page. I grabbed this shot from a
video on the Findmypast blog, and whilst it’s hard to
make out any of the detail you can get an impression of the sort of notation you
might find (given the opportunity).
I have a copy of my own record from the
NHS Central Register, from which I've been able to deduce that many, perhaps
all, of the notes relate to people moving from one NHS area to another. (I'd be
interested to hear from anyone else who has obtained a facsimile copy of their
index entry - often you only get a printout.)
Fortunately we're probably not missing out on very much by not
seeing that right-hand page - frustrating as it is not to be able to see it!
Insights we
can get from identity cards
Although it has many things in common
with a census, the 1939 Register for England & Wales is at heart a list of
identity cards issued, together with the names and details of the holders. Take a look at this extract from the register:
©
Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London,
England and Findmypast
Note the Enumeration District letter
code at the top left - ENFT. This formed the first part of the Identity Card
number for every person in that district, and comprised a three
letter code (ENF) for the borough or district, in this case Horsham, followed
by a single letter (T) identifying the specific enumeration district.
The second part of the number was made
up of the Schedule Number and the Sub-schedule Number.
For example, the number of the Identity Card issued to the first person on the
page, also the first person in the Enumeration District, was ENFT 1:1 whilst
the number for the last person in this extract was ENFT 3:25
Thanks to LostCousins
member Mike I'm able to show you the Identity Card for Lilian Bramley, which
confirms that her number was indeed ENFT 3:25
This isn't, of course, the Identity Card
she was issued in 1939 - it has her married name, and her new address, But the
number of the card is exactly the same, because that's
how the system worked. If you go back to the 1939 Register entry you'll see
that it shows the date in 1950 that the register was updated, probably
1/3/1950, and also a three letter code AFG, which also
appears on the Identity Card. This is the three letter
for Deptford, the borough to which she had moved.
Tip:
you'll find a table of boroughs and their three letter codes here (although it isn’t complete).
When the National Health Service
launched in 1948 it was natural to use the same numbers to identify patients,
and although identity cards were abolished in 1951 (the circumstances are
described in this BBC News article),
the National Register was repurposed as the NHS Central Register until it was
eventually computerised in the decade up to 1991. And, as you can see from the
Medical Card below, which was issued in 1976, Mrs Bramley still had the same
number, with its Horsham borough code, even though she had by now relocated to
Hertfordshire.
In the second part of this article - which
follows - I'll be looking at another example of how Identity Card numbers were
used, both during and after the war.
Note:
something that won't be apparent from the register page is that the maiden name
of Margery Holman, the lady of the household where Lilian was staying, was Boot
- she was the youngest daughter of Jesse Boot, the founder of Boots the
Chemist. Isn't it amazing what we can find out if we only look?
How the numbers from identity cards were used
In the previous article I described how the numbers on
identity cards came about, and explained that - whilst the numbers were originally based on a person's
whereabouts in September 1939 - they didn't change when someone moved house, or even when a woman acquired a new surname as
a result of her marriage. Indeed, because - in England, at least - the same
numbers were used for NHS cards even after identity cards were abolished at the
end of 1951 some people kept their numbers for half a century.
Now I'm going to show how identity card
numbers - references from the 1939 Register - were used by employers during
World War 2, focusing on The Preston Sheet Metal Co. in Willesden, north west
London. In the process I'll provide some examples from the company's own
records, and then show the corresponding entries in the 1939 Register.
The chances are that someone reading
this newsletter will be related to one of the people who worked for the company
but as the examples I've chosen all related to open records in the 1939
Register I don't think that I'll be intruding on anyone's privacy. (Either way,
I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who knows of the company.)
©
Image copyright Peter Calver 2017 All Rights Reserved
The book I discovered hidden amongst the
photo albums of the auction lot contained handwritten records of employees - and
the very first entry was for Leslie Robert Foskett
who joined the company c1929 when he would have been 16 years old. My next step
was to search the 1939 Register, looking for a Leslie Foskett
born around 1913 - and there was only one:
Note that whist the address is
different, the Letter Code, Schedule, and Schedule Sub Number (BXAE/116/1)
match the information given in the company's records. And we now know what sort
of products the company was producing - panels for aircraft.
©
Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London,
England and Findmypast
Intriguingly there's a closed entry in
the register immediately below the entry for Leslie Foskett,
although the transcription doesn't mention that there are any closed records in
the household. A search of the GRO marriage registers showed that in the second
quarter of 1939 Leslie R Foskett married Phyllis J
Payne, and since there was someone of that name whose birth was registered in
Willesden in 1918, I suspect that the closed record relates to her.
Going back to the records of The Preston
Sheet Metal Co. you'll notice that there is a column headed 'Registration
Number', and that the reference shown for Leslie Foskett
is WPF 10097. Looking at the other entries I noticed that these references only
appear when there is an entry in the 'Labour Exchange' column, so I suspect
that they have nothing to do with the 1939 Register or identity cards, but
might indicate an employee who was sourced from the relevant exchange (these
establishments still survive, but we now call them 'Job Centres').
Most of the entries attributed to the St
Mary's Rd exchange are prefixed WPF, though a few have the prefix EXX, and I
spotted one HFL - perhaps someone reading this article will be able to
interpret these references?
As with the 1939 Register there's a
right-hand page in the book of employee records, but this time we can see what
it says:
©
Image copyright Peter Calver 2017 All Rights Reserved
This suggests that whilst Leslie Foskett was in a 'reserved occupation' at the start of the
war, in 1942 he became liable to being called-up for military service - though
he seems to have avoided it, judging from the notes. But not everyone working
for the company was as fortunate - Victor George Childs was called up in July
1943:
©
Images copyright Peter Calver 2017 All Rights Reserved
You can see his entry in the 1939
Register below - note that he was working as an assembler of water heaters in
September 1939:
©
Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London,
England and Findmypast
Of course, The Preston Sheet Metal Co.
didn't only employ men - there was a war on, and everyone had a part to play,
including Edna May Booth, who worked in the Bomb Doors department:
©
Image copyright Peter Calver 2017 All Rights Reserved
As you can see from her identity card
number she wasn't a local - in September 1939 she'd been living with her family
in Bedwellty, Monmouthshire:
©
Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London,
England and Findmypast
But coming up to London did have its
benefits - in 1946 Edna married Frank H Lowe. Edna died in 1971, just as they
would have been celebrating their Silver Wedding.
Without ordering their marriage
certificate I can't be sure who her husband was, but I'd like to think that
this was him, living in Edmonton, Middlesex (north east London):
©
Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London,
England and Findmypast
This is a rare example of a serving
soldier recorded in the 1939 Register - I imagine he was home on leave. Frank
Hector Lowe junior lived until 2003, and died in Hackney registration district,
not far from where he was living in 1939 or from where Edna died in 1971.
Tip:
you will find a list of reserved occupations on Guy Etchells'
website here.
Track down evacuees using LostCousins
The evacuation of millions of British
schoolchildren during World War 2 will have had a lasting effect, not only on
their lives, but also on the lives of the families with whom they were
billeted. Having found my mother on the 1939 Register I wondered how feasible
it would be to track down members of the family she lived with - and realised
that one way of doing this would be to use the My Ancestors page....
Whilst you can't enter people from the
1939 Register on your My Ancestors page (at least, not at the moment), many of them will also have been recorded on
the 1911 Census. I've therefore created a new category in the Relationship
or category dropdown menu - WW2 evacuation - so that I and other
members can search for relatives of the people who looked after the evacuees in
our families during the war.
Here's the first ever entry using this
new category:
I'll let you know if I get a match! In
the meantime, why not see who you can find?
Extending your tree beyond 1911 using the 1939 Register
If your family comes from England or
Wales, and you have either a Findmypast.co.uk or Ancestry.co.uk subscription,
you'll not only have access to fully transcribed GRO birth, marriage, and death
indexes but also to the complete England & Wales 1911 Census. By combining
these two resources you'll probably find that you can add dozens of new
relatives to your family tree - without spending a penny on certificates!
Here's how I generally go about it:
(1) Where there are married couples on
the 1911 Census and the wife is of child-bearing age (typically up to 47) I
search the birth indexes for children born to the couple using the family
surname and mother's maiden name. The rarer the surnames the more confident I
can be about identifying the entries, especially if I also take
into account the choice of forenames, the timing of the births, and the
districts where the births were registered.
Tip: even if the surnames aren't
particularly rare, the surname combination might be - a search for marriages
where the bride and groom have the same surnames will help you gauge how likely
it is that the births you've found belong to your couple.
(2) I then check to see whether I can
identify marriages involving relatives who were single in 1911. This is
generally only possible when the surnames are fairly uncommon
(but see below).
(3) Having identified these post-1911
marriages, or possible marriages, I look in the birth indexes for children born
to the couple using the technique described in (1) above. Sometimes the choice
of forenames will help to confirm whether or not I've
found the right marriage.
(4) I next look for the deaths of the
couples whose children I've been seeking. If the precise date of birth is
included in the death indexes, as it is for later entries, this often helps to
confirm not only that I've found the right death entry, but also - in the case
of a female relative - that I've found the right marriage. Even if I don't know
exactly when my relative was born, the quarter in which the birth was
registered defines a 19 week window (remember that
births can be registered up to 6 weeks after the event). Why does this work
best for female relatives? Because they will have changed their surname on
marriage, so their birth will be registered in one name and the death in
another - and there will be a marriage that links the two.
Tip: probate calendars can also provide
useful clues - often one of the children, or the surviving spouse, will be
named as executor or administrator. You can search the calendars from 1858-1966
and 1973-95 at Ancestry, or from 1858-1959 at Findmypast;
if you don't have access to either of these sites, or want to search for more
recent wills, you'll need to use the free Probate
Service.
(5) Now I start on the next generation,
the children who were recorded in 1911 or whose births I have been able to
identify as belonging to my tree. I look for both marriages and deaths, because
if I find the death of a female relative recorded under her maiden name, this
usually indicates that she didn't marry, and even for a male relative the place
of death might help to determine whether a marriage I've found in an unexpected
part of the country.
(6) Having identified marriages I then
look in the birth indexes for children born to those marriages - and continue
this process until either I reach the present day, or I get to a point where I
can't tell with reasonable certainty which entries relate to my relatives. Mind
you, when it comes to more recent generations there are all sorts of additional
sources of information - including social networking sites, Google, searches of
the electoral roll (see the next article) or even the phone book (not everyone
is ex-directory).
Here are some key dates to bear in mind
when searching:
2nd April 1911 - Census Day
1st July 1911 - from this date the
mother's maiden name was included in the contemporary birth indexes (the new
indexes online at the General Register Office website include this information
from 1st July 1837)
1st January 1912 - the surname of the
spouse was included in the marriage indexes
1st January 1966 - from this date the
first two forenames are shown in full in the birth indexes
1st April 1969 - the precise date of
birth was included in the death indexes and the first two forenames were shown
in full
During the 20th century middle names
are more consistent than they were in the 19th century - there is less of a
tendency for them to appear or disappear between birth, marriage, and death.
Unfortunately, for more than half a century after 1910 only the first forename
was shown in full in the birth and death indexes, and the marriage indexes only
show one forename for the whole period after 1910 - so a perfect match on the
second forename is only possible if the relative was born before 1911 and died
after March 1969.
What can you hope to achieve by
following the techniques I've described? In my case I was able to extend some
lines forward by as many as four generations, although three is more typical.
In the process I added hundreds of 20th century relatives to my family tree,
the majority of whom were still living.
Since the 1939 Register was
released I've been able to extend my tree further by confirming that many of
the marriages I'd noted as possible marriages did indeed involve my relatives
(the fact that precise birthdates are given is a really big help).
One of the best things about the 1939
Register is the way that it continued to be used after the War - and so the
surnames of many women were updated to reflect marriages (and divorces) that
took place in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s or even later. This makes the 1939
Register more useful than a static census, and since it was released I've added
dozens more relatives to my tree, most of whom must still be living.
Note: there will often be other
resources that you can draw upon, including parish registers (some online
collections extended beyond 1911), newspaper announcements (iannounce is
good for recent events, the British Newspaper Archive - also at Findmypast -
for early 20th century events). Burials recorded at Deceased
Online are another great source (for example, there may be
other family members in the same grave). Historic Phone Directories up to 1984 are online at
Ancestry. Ancestry and Findmypast each have historic Electoral Rolls -
Findmypast covers much of the country, but Ancestry is best for London.
How evacuation was planned in 1939
In 1939 each area of the country was
assigned one of three roles:
I was fortunate to find a document online at the HistPop website which details which areas came into
which category, and I suspect many of you will find it very interesting to look
up the areas where your family lived. It's about 12 pages long - use the Previous
Page and Next Page links at the bottom to navigate;
my understanding is that areas not specifically mentioned were Reception areas.
Of course, trying to predict which
parts of the country would be safe from the Luftwaffe wasn't a precise science
- one member wrote to tell me that his family moved "out of the frying pan
into the fire" when they relocated!
When Britain declared war on Germany in
September 1939 it was a sad day, but it wasn't a surprise. Evacuation forms
were circulated to parents as early as May 1939 (see the article below about Operation Pied Piper), and it turns out
that plans for the issue of identity cards were being formulated as early as
1st December 1938, when the General Register Office circulated a memorandum to Registrars of Births and
deaths about:
"proceeding immediately with
certain of the preparations for the 1941 Census, as a means of providing for
the institution of a National Register at very short notice, should a national
emergency arise."
Qualifications desirable in an enumerator
When a further memorandum went out from
the General Register Office on 6th January 1939 it stated that:
When you've seen as many pages from the
National Register as I have, you'll know that the enumerators didn't always
live up to those high standards - even handwriting that appears neat can be
hard to read if the letters are written inconsistently, or confusingly.
The fact that subsequent amendments to
surnames were made in block capitals suggests that even at the time the
handwriting was causing problems.
With the threat of
war looming, the British Government prepared plans for mass evacuation. During
WW1 Germany had bombed London and other targets using Zeppelin airships (you
can read more about it here), but now the enemy had modern bombers
(over 1000 were operational by September 1939), and the bombing of Guernica in 1937, during the Spanish
Civil War, had demonstrated the devastation that could be wrought. Preparations
started long before the war: this form headed Government Evacuation Scheme is
dated May 1939 - note that mothers were asked if they wanted to go with their
children.
Operation Pied Piper went into action
on 1st September 1939, two days before Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime
Minister made his momentous radio broadcast to the nation:
"This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin
handed the German Government a final Note stating that, unless we heard from
them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops
from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.
"I have to tell you now that no such
undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war
with Germany."
Children had assembled in school playgrounds on the
morning of 1st September, each with a luggage tag attached to their coat, and
carrying bare necessities: their gas mask, underwear, pyjamas or nightdress,
plimsolls, toothbrush, comb, soap, and a face flannel. Over half a million
children were evacuated from London alone during September, and my mother -
then 13 years old - appears to have been one of them, because on Registration
Day (29th September) she wasn't at home with my grandparents.
Over the course of just three days
around 1.5 million mothers and children were sent from towns and cities into
the countryside, mostly by train - you might this Southern Railways poster interesting. However, because
bombing raids on cities didn't materialise in the first few months of the war,
many children went back home - over half had returned by January 1940, despite
Government warnings (I believe my mother was one of
them).
There were further waves of evacuation
during 1940, and my mother's school was evacuated toFinnamore Wood
Camp, Marlow, Buckinghamshire on 22nd April - you can see a
photo here which shows some of the schoolgirls.
My mother wasn't amongst them, however - my grandmother wouldn't allow her to
leave home again - and so my mother left school and spent the duration
supporting the war effort, working at the nearby Ship Carbon factory, which
made carbon rods for cinema projectors and searchlights.
A smaller number of children were
evacuated overseas, a story told in the book Out of Harm's Way, written by an evacuee -
but this programme came to end when the SS City of Benares was sunk in
September 1940, killing most of the children on board. However
some children were evacuated privately even after this incident.
In 1939 the country was divided into
more than 1400 administrative areas, each of which was assigned a three letter code, such as CJL for Bromley in
Kent and ZDJ for Portmadoc in
Caernarvonshire (larger areas may have had more than one code, in which case
the code in the table is the first in the block). When you find one of your
relatives you'll see that a fourth letter has been appended to the end - this
specifies the enumeration district.
You will find a table of codes and
areas here
and a more comprehensive list here.
More codes were added after 1939.
When, in February 2007, I asked to
inspect the 1939 Register under the Freedom of Information Act I was rebuffed by
the Office for National Statistics - it's covered by the 1920 Census Act, they
claimed. Absolute rubbish, but for a while they got away with it, whilst I went
through the appeals process. Then I got a phone call from the Information
Commissioner's Office to tell me that whilst they were minded to allow my appeal, the records had been transferred from the
ONS to the NHS, so the whole process would have to start again!
Unfortunately by this time my father, who was in his 90s, was
becoming frail and I was having to look at care homes - I just couldn't spare
the time to do it all again. But fortunately I wasn't
the only one trying to get access to the Register, and eventually, thanks to
the efforts of Guy Etchells and others, it was agreed
to provide information from the Register, subject to a fee of £42 per household
(which wasn't refundable under any circumstances). Not a cheap option, but it
was better than waiting until 2040 as the ONS had insisted when I first contact
them!
Then, in March 2014, came the moment
that family historians had been waiting for - Findmypast
announced that they had signed a deal with the National Archives which would
see the register becoming available online within 2 years.
· Use the Advanced search - it'll save you time
· Middle names are not usually shown, only initials
(even though it would appear that full middle names
were recorded on the original household schedules)
· Closed records are NOT indexed, so will not show up
in searches, nor will people who were in army barracks or similar institutions
· The register pages are like the enumerators'
summaries that we see for the censuses up to 1901 - the entries have been
copied from the schedules completed by the householders, so we don't get to see
our ancestors' handwriting
· The references displayed are in this format
Ref: RG101/1100C/019/36 Letter Code: CCVZ
where RG101 is the National Archives reference for the
1939 Register (this doesn't change)
1100C is the piece number
019 is the item number (it identifies a specific page but I
couldn't see the number in the image)
36 is the line number on the page - again it's not shown, but you
can count down
The Letter Code refers to the area - there's a guide to these codes in
the TNA blog, and also see above
· You're also given the Schedule Number and Schedule
Sub-Number but can't search using this information; people in the same
household have the same Schedule Number (the Sub-Number is the line on the
Schedule, usually 1,2,3,4 etc)
· Make a note of the references - they'll enable you
to find the page again instantly (and you never know, one day we might use
these records at LostCousins!)
· National Registration Day was 29th September 1939,
but someone who is listed may not have arrived until the next day (assuming
they were not registered elsewhere)
· 'Unpaid DD' means 'Unpaid domestic duties'
· To open a closed record by uploading a death
certificate start from the household transcription, but DON'T click Check
if you can open a closed entry. Instead click Update the record,
and choose Ask us to open a closed record from the drop down menu
· Take a look at this blog entry, posted by Findmypast
in November 2015
· The register was a working document - though it was
created in 1939 it was amended and annotated as people moved, married, and
died; most of the annotations are on the right-hand page, where we can't see
them, but there are some on the left-hand page (see below for a guide to
abbreviations)
· Sometimes a woman's surname will have been crossed
out and another surname written in - this is usually a name change on marriage;
in the Search results the surname in 1939 will appear in brackets; if there are
more than two surnames all but the most recent will be in brackets
· In these cases you can
search on any of the surname (you don't have to tick the surname variants box),
but the entry you want probably won't be at the top of the
search results because of the way they are sorted
· If you're very lucky you may find someone whose
name changed on adoption (they would have had to be adopted after the creation
of the register, otherwise you wouldn't see the birth name)
· On the right hand side of
the register you can sometimes see a note such as 'ARP warden'
· You might see an alias recorded, for example a
'Harry' in my family tree was noted as 'o/w Henry'
· Occasionally the date of death is recorded on the right hand page - check it against the GRO indexes to make
sure
· My aunt's year of birth was erroneously transcribed
(by the enumerator) as '76' rather than '16' which meant her record was open
when it should have been closed - were she still with us she would have been
absolutely delighted!
· Sometimes you'll see a note such as "See page
14"; in this case there will usually be an arrow to the left or right of
the image - click the arrow to see the other record
· When there isn't an arrow you are likely to find
the individual listed twice in the Search results
· If your relative was in an institution of some kind
you should be able to see all of the pages relating to
that institution by clicking the left and right arrows
©
Copyright 2017 Peter Calver
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