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Following article posted
November 12, 1999 Vol. III No. 22
By:Barney Tyrwhitt Drake,
Barney@tdrake.demon.co.uk
Finding Prominent 20th Century Ancestors In The British Isles
Due to the 100 year embargoes on viewing the contents of the British censuses (and the lack of indexes when they first come out), it is often difficult to trace ancestors and relatives from the early years of this century. If your family had members who were successful in public life or public service in Britain and its Commonwealth, there is an excellent finding aid on CD-ROM to get your research back on track. It's called Who's Who.
Who's Who first appeared in printed form in 1897 from the publishers Adam and Charles Black. They saw a niche in the market for brief biographical information, sparked by our natural inquisitiveness about anyone who is rich or famous. The information in Who's Who follows a strict convention that the person concerned fills out the information that will be published themselves, using a questionnaire with fixed headings. Some are verbose, others are concise, but all are subjective! The other important convention is that the editors of Who's Who decide who will be in it, not the aspirants.
The annual printed version of Who's Who is a massive tome that you may have seen making library shelves bulge. Finding someone in it can be a long task and cross-references to names of marriage partners is non-existent. As people die, their last entry in Who's Who is added to the occasional publication Who Was Who. The problems of finding people and their interests has been addressed by the 1996 and 1998 publications of the first 100 and 102 years respectively of Who's Who on CD-ROM. This is a joint publication by A&C Black and Oxford University Press (http://www.oup.co.uk/) that sells for around 250 pounds in the UK, so it is not a casual purchase. Your local genealogical reference library may well have a copy though. If not, lobby your librarian!
A typical entry in Who's Who is shown in figure 1., for one of my very distant cousins.
Figure 1.
Click here for a full sized, clearer image.
Not only does this provide information about the geographical area where an individual lived and worked, but it tells you who they married, who their parents were, where they were educated, and what they published. All references that you will be able to follow up in other source repositories such as census indexes, school records, library catalogues, BMD indexes, and local archives. British eccentricity often comes to the fore when listing recreations.
What kind of people are listed in Who's Who? The spectrum has varied over the last century as the relative perceptions of important jobs has changed. In the early years Who's Who was strong on the military and colonial administrators. Everyone with the rank of Brigadier or higher in the Army was included (and equivalents in the other service). Other common groups were the gentry and nobility, politicians, and authors. With time there has been a decline in the number of military listings and an increase in the number of industrial ones. Women were noted for their absence in early years, now they are correctly much more prominent.
The Help file summarises what can be done with this database:
Look up an individual entry (a biographical record) in seconds
Find an entry on the basis of the person's gender, title, place of education, field of interest, or occupation, not just by name
Identify groups of individuals associated with the same field of interest, profession, place of education, recreation, address, title, or award
Look for a word anywhere in the text
Refine your search by combining several search terms across several indexes, specifying dates of birth or death, using wildcards, or specifying gender
Order the results of a search by frequency or alphabetically
Print or save entries for further reference.
For the family historian the main attraction of the CD-ROM version is that it is searchable by any word. You can enter the surname that you are researching and the software generates a list of all the entries that contain that word. When I do this for my PRENDERGAST ancestors it can throw up a lot of red herrings from winners of the Prendergast Greek Scholarship, but it's easy to weed these out using the more powerful combined search that lets you specify multiple search words and which fields to search in. Since Who's Who lists parents of people and their spouses, it can take you back much earlier than 1897. In researching my 3 x gt grandfather, Dr. Thomas OXLEY (1805-1886), I entered his forename and surname into the Combined search words screen, specified a lookup on Personal details (where fathers are to be found), and the 3 entries in Figure 2. came up:
Figure 2.
The last of these turned out to be an unknown son-in-law whose military career and children I am now investigating. This typifies the utility of this index. It doesn't tell you a huge amount about a person, their relatives, or their career, but it is an excellent springboard for leaps into other archives. In total there are many thousands of entries on the CD-ROM, so it's well worth a browse next time you're in the library. You never know what you might find!
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