Researching the People of the Flaxmill by Penny Ward

Penny Ward, Trustee of the Friends of the Flaxmill
Maltings

As the Friends of the Flaxmill Maltings is a community organisation it was natural that the main focus for any historical research we did would be the social history of the people who worked in the Flaxmill or lived in the housing that grew up around it.

How were we to go about this? All the people who had worked at the Flaxmill were long dead, and their stories had passed out of living memory. Before we could ask questions about their lives, we had to know who they were. To do this we had to look for sources that would at least give us the names of these people.

The 19^th century censuses that can now be viewed online were an obvious starting point, and in early 2012 a couple of us resolved to simply transcribe the details of every person recorded in the Castlefields and Ditherington area in the earliest available Census, that of 1841. I designed an Excel spreadsheet for us to record the Census information in a tabular format, and when they were completed I imported those tables into an Access database.

More volunteers joined us, so we then set about capturing the Census data for the same area for 1851, 1861, 1871 and eventually 1881. The Censuses gave us not only people’s names, but their occupations, their ages, their place of birth and their family groupings. However, they only covered the second half of the 90 year history of the Flaxmill, and only gave us snapshots of the situation at 10 yearly intervals.

So, I looked for other sources. We did a trawl through the printed and microfiche parish registers picking out people whose occupations seemed to link them to the Flaxmill.  I transcribed the names of all the Parish Apprentices assigned to the Flaxmill by the Shrewsbury parishes, as well as the people who in 1851 were renting one of the Flaxmill allotments. Shropshire Archives made us aware of the “Church Rate” books. These record every householder in the parish and what they had to pay annually, primarily for poor relief. These survive from 1799.

All these lists of names have been imported into the Access database, and we are now able to move to the next phase. For any surname, it is possible to generate a list of all records relating to individuals with that surname, and from that ask questions and begin to tease out family stories. The Shropshire parish registers became available to search online in April 2014. Using these we can find out, for example, what an individual’s father’s occupation was when they were born, or sometimes when they were married. We can link the young unmarried girl to her married older self, by finding out who she married. All these records are fed back into the database, so that all the time more details are being filled in.

Record by record we are populating the Flaxmill and the streets around it with real people who actually lived there rather than anonymous shadows. So far we have uncovered many fascinating stories and discovered so much about the lives of certain families associated with the Flaxmill, such as the France and Clift/Cliff families – from illegitimate births to the personal tragedies of losing children as young as two years of age.  We would love to hear from anyone who can shed further light on these people and their stories.

Courtesy of Shropshire Archives

Our work will continue with the opening of the Visitor Centre on 24 November and, we hope, gain further momentum by being located on the site that inspires it, and that our visitors will include the descendants of the hundreds of people who laboured there.

Read more about the research on the Friends of the Flaxmill Maltings website; follow us on twitter @flax_maltings and use the #flaxmill hashtag; or like and look for further updates on Facebook

Find out more about the Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings regeneration project at Historic England

Penny Wardis a Trustee for the Friends of the Flaxmill Maltings and Historic Environment Records Officer for Shropshire Council.