WHITEHOUSE FAMILY HISTORY CENTRE

WFHC collection of miscellaneous material not fitting into the other categories.

LINKS & COMMENTARY (all files are in MS Excel or Word)

APPRENTICES 110418.xls (45kB, 124 lines of entry, 3 pages landscape) is a collection of apprenticeship indenture information arranged in date order and derived from 4 sources:

IR - The Inland Revenue Board of Stamps ledgers relating to indentures on which stamp duty was paid.

CRISP -  The Crisp collection of over 1500 indentures held at the Society of Genealogists, London.

SRO - Some Staffordshire indentures indexed by Diana Grant, who has donated her index to the Staffordshire Record Office: see http://www.staffsnameindexes.org.uk .

WLHC -  Some Worcestershire indentures indexed by the Worcestershire Library & History Centre, Worcester.

The Inland Revenue Board of Stamps ledgers are preserved at The National Archives, Kew, under the class IR 1.  In more detail, the government imposed stamp duty on certain apprenticeship indentures from 1st May 1710. This tax lasted 100 years, but the ledgers have been indexed fully only from the beginning to about 1774.  The indexes are in the form of a typescript made between the wars by the Society of Genealogists (SoG), where they are housed at present.  They contain about a quarter of a million entries extracted from the ledgers.  There are two series, from 1710 to 1762, with gaps, and from 1763 to about 1774, indexed by name of apprentice. This WFHC transcript covers only the periods indexed by the SoG.  The ledgers are the original record: the indentures have not been retained.

The IR 1 piece numbers run consecutively in two series, “town” and “country”.  The names are slightly misleading, as the town registers record those in which the stamp duty was paid to the Stamp Office in London, no matter where the apprenticeship was to be served. The present index covers IR 1 “town” pieces 1-27, from October 1711 to November 1773, with gaps (a) before October 1711, (b) between August 1721 and “January 1722” (presumed 1723 in the Gregorian calendar), (c) “March 1726” to “March 1729” and (d) August 1733 to April 1735.  The IR 1 “country” pieces covered are 41-58, running from May 1710 to April 1774, with gaps (e) from “January 1725” to November 1728, (f) from November 1731 to April 1741 and (g) from April 1745 to October 1749. It appears therefore that quite a few of the registers have gone missing and the Public Record Office, as it was then known, merely numbered the survivors with consecutive piece numbers.  The years referred to are those when the indenture was stamped and recorded in the ledger.

The ledgers continue until the end of the tax, the last “country” register ending in 1808 and “town” one in 1811.  However, those after 1774 have not yet been indexed, apart from a few incomplete indexes to masters made by the Inland Revenue clerks. Work on the post-1774 period has begun at the Society of Genealogists, but will probably take many years to complete.

The existing SoG indexes are magnificent for the time at which they were made, but are not error-free.  8 entries had to be rejected as clearly Whitehorn(e) and they do not state the term of the apprenticeship, which is included in the present transcript.

Apprentice boys were normally bound to their master for 7 years, usually starting at age 14, but some were younger, especially if their father had died.  Fewer girls were apprenticed.  Stamp duty was payable on the “premium”, which was the term for the amount paid by the parent to the apprentice master.  The master had to pay the duty, which was at 2½% for premiums up to £50 and 5% if the amount was over £50.  While most premiums were under £20, a few amounted to hundreds, probably representing a stake in the business.

The reason that so few entries appear for Whitehouse is doubtless that only privately arranged apprenticeships were dutiable and then only if a premium was paid.  Parish apprenticeships were also excluded from duty.  These were for children in the workhouse or from families receiving poor law relief, for example those in Wednesbury parish mentioned in my newsletter of 2nd July 2010.  The two Wednesbury parish apprenticeships found are typical, in that the children were sent to other parishes, here Manchester and Dudley. The reason for this was that once an apprentice had served his master for 40 days, he could gain settlement in his parish of employment, so if the apprenticeship terminated, he might again become a burden on the parish’s relief funds.  It was therefore advantageous for one parish to arrange an apprenticeship in another.

The ledgers use many abbreviations, of forenames and occupations.  These have been “normalised” in this WFHC transcript by expanding the abbreviations and correcting spelling.  Only the ledgers survive as public records, not the original documents, so the transcript gives all the relevant information available.

The WFHC transcript is arranged by order of the date of the indenture with dates before 1752 in the old (Julian) calendar translated into the modern (Gregorian) calendar.  This date is often many months earlier than the date of payment of the tax and still earlier than the ledger date.

The SRO index gives the forename and surname of the apprentice, his age and parish, but only the surname of the master.  The index does not cover the whole of Staffordshire and the Whitehouse part of it contains several errors

(corrected or annotated in my database). The two Wednesbury apprenticeships were derived from my own research and therefore contain more information than the other entries.

CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL RECORDS

A project to index hospital records has been launched as a joint project between Kingston University’s Centre for the Historical Record and hospital archives in London and Glasgow. See http://hharp.org .

The following table shows records of 9 Whitehouse patients admitted to children’s hospitals, from 1875 to 1911, taken from the website.  Some inessential details, e.g. names of referring doctors, have been omitted.

Fore-name of White-house child	Date of admission	Age	Address	Hospital	Disease, Outcome & Remarks. WFHC comments appear in square brackets	Date of discharge or death
John	1875-11-29	8y 0m	23 Lower Marsh: Lambeth	Evelina	Hernia : cured [WFHC 063 414]	1876-03-13
Mary	1879-06-30	6y 11m	19 Newhall St: Popham Rd: New North Rd: N London	Gt Ormond St	Anasarca: relieved	1879-08-07
Henry J	1879-11-10	4y 0m	23 Cumming St: Pentonville	Gt Ormond St	Abscess knee: cured [WFHC 197]	1879-11-27
Henry	1880-01-28	4y 5m	23 Cumming St: Pentonville	Gt Ormond St	Disease knee: cured; parents: Henry Joseph (Spectacle Maker) & Caroline Alice [WFHC 197]	1880-04-06
Henry	1880-04-08	4y 0m [sic]	23 Cumming St: Pentonville	Cromwell House	Amputation thigh: relieved [WFHC 197]	1880-05-20
Henry	1881-07-27	5y 10m	23 Upper Cumming St: Pentonville	Gt Ormond St	Abscess limb: cured; has been in before [WFHC 197]	1881-08-08
Henry	1881-08-17	5y 10m	23 Upper Cumming St: Pentonville	Gt Ormond St	Abscess limb: died after 102 days; amputation at hip joint; abscess in stump [WFHC 197]	1881-11-27 (calculated)
Mary J	1882-03-13	9y 7m	22 Queensberry Rd; Essex Rd: N London	Gt Ormond St	Tubercular peritonitis: relieved	1882-05-18
Emma	1887-03-08	11y 10m	1 Bellward Ct: Whitecross St	Gt Ormond St	Hysteria: discharged to Cromwell House	1887-03-08
Emma	1887-03-17	11y 10m	1 Belward Av: Whitecross St	Cromwell House	Hysteria: recovered; previously had measles & scarlet fever	1887-03-31
James	1898-05-14	0y 4m	423 New City Rd: Barony LKS	Glasgow Children’s	Empyema [pus in pleural cavity]: cured; Episcopalian; parent: James (Traveller)	1898-06-25
David	1900-01-26	3y 1m	98 Garbraid Av: Barony LKS	Glasgow Children’s	Chronic eczema of the scalp: improved & relieved; Established church; parent: Samuel [sic] (Reservist)	1900-02-19
David	1900-03-28	3y 1m	4 Wood St: Partick: Govan	Glasgow Children’s	Eczema capitis: cured; Established church; parent: David [sic] (Reservist)	1900-04-30
Samuel	1906-11-28	5y 9m	28 Devonshire Mews (West): Devonshire St: W London	Gt Ormond St	Rheumatism: relieved & discharged to Cromwell House	1906-12-17
Percy	1910-10-04	8y 2m	1 Wrottesley Rd: Plumstead	Gt Ormond St	Hernia: cured	1910-10-15

FIRE POLICY 080925.xls (22kB, 27 lines of entry, 2 pages) started from the index of the insurance policies of the Royal Exchange Assurance and the Sun Fire Office for the period 1775-1787.  This was a University-led project some years ago.   It covers RE policies 65962 to 102744 and Sun Fire Office policy register Volumes 253-342.  It has been extended to include the “Place in the Sun” project, covering Sun Fire policies from 1808 to 1839.  The registers are deposited at the Guildhall Library, London. The index covers the names at the head of the policy.  In the newer series, all the premises insured by Whitehouses are in or near London, but the older series includes some provincial ones.

GWR SHAREHOLDERS 080327.xls (39 kB, 113 lines of entry, 3 pages) is an index to Whitehouses involved in the transfer of shares in the Great Western Railway Company from 1835 to 1910.  It relates only to transfers that did not occur by simple sale.  However, these shares were “blue chip” and held for long periods, so it has been estimated that 75% of the total number of shareholders is covered.  It is stated that about 90% of the transfers resulted from death, 4% marriage, 4% power of attorney, 0.5% change of name, 0.2% lunatics, 0.1% bankrupts and the balance miscellaneous.  About 92.5% of the events occurred in England & Wales, 3.5% in Scotland, 0.7% in Ireland and 0.6% overseas.  (Presumably some were indeterminate, as this does not add to 100%). 

The Whitehouse entries have been extracted from the index published on the FindMyPast website.  There are 27 events (transfers), in some of which the Whitehouse was not the shareholder, but merely an executor or a declarant who confirmed the identity of another person.  Some are instantly recognisable, so the WFHC reference has been added against the first line of the event.  The appearance of a Whitehouse as an executor in the will of a person of different surname could throw up interesting questions.  For example, why was Richard Whitehouse of  Handsworth, the Birmingham gun engraver, an executor of the will of William Marsh of Oldbury ?  He is no known relative and Richard never lived in Oldbury.

The Registers themselves are not publicly available and can be seen only by ordering a copy of the relevant pages from the Society of Genealogists, for which a fee is charged (currently £10), using the Volume, Folio and Entry reference shown.  The transcription work was carried out by Frank Hardy FSG and other volunteers from the Society and took a very long time to complete, so it is difficult to find fault with this arrangement.  The only additional information in the register, not in the index, is in most cases the occupations, but these were often merely “gentleman”, “spinster” etc.  Some illegibly signed names of recipients were also omitted.

All but 2 of the 27 events extracted were the deaths of shareholders, here shown as “Shareholder, D”.  “Recipient” means the person to whom the “documents” (share certificates ?) were sent by the GWR shareholders Registrar, possibly a beneficiary to whom a specific bequest of the shares was made.  There are many events in which no recipient is listed, presumably because the shares were transferred to the executors, who might later have sold them to realise money for the estate.  That later sale, being an ordinary commercial transaction, would not appear in this register.

Sometimes, people of the same name are listed twice with different addresses.  Probably they are all one and the same person, e.g. a deceased who died at one address, but whose normal residence was elsewhere.  However, since there is no way of telling from the register whether they are the same person or, e.g. father and son of identical names, they are listed separately.

As usual, downloaders are recommended to sort the index into event order, sorting by Database ref. and then by No.  Abbreviations follow the same form as in the census index, except that “Widow” is written in full.

LUNATIC ASYLUMS 070924.xls (35 kB, 120 lines of entry, 2 pages) is an index to Whitehouse patients admitted to the county lunatic asylums in England & Wales, covering The National Archives pieces MH94/12 to 29 and 105.

The years covered are 1846 to 1890, but there is a gap from 1885 to 1888 for which records of state-aided patients are missing.  Although the first piece available is MH94/12, covering 1846, the numbering suggests that there is an earlier one, also missing.  Nearly all patients were state-aided and thus indexed as “pauper”.  In the WFHC file, all patients are “pauper” unless noted as private in a “Remarks” column.

In “Beyond Bedlam”, Journal of One-name Studies, July-September 2011, pages 29 to 31, Roger Goacher summarises the history of lunatic asylums.  The few asylums built in the 18th century were charitably funded.  The Lunatics Act of 1808 permitted county magistrates to fund new asylums from the rates, but only about 20 were built before 1845, when the Lunacy Act and County Asylums Acts were passed.  The Lunacy Act established a Commission responsible for inspecting and visiting asylums and laid down procedures for the admission and care of patients.  These Acts set in train the proper provision of care for the mentally defective and by 1914 there were 102 asylums housing 108,000 patients.  Surprisingly, the new asylums were modelled on the country house estate.  They were grand, spacious, airy buildings, often in an elevated position, with extensive grounds, often in a rural setting.  The Lunacy Commissioners demanded that land should be provided for exercise, recreation, gardening etc.  By the early 20th century, however, the early reformers’ aims of respite, rehabilitation, recovery and release had been severely compromised by overcrowding, high staff turnover (owing to poor pay and difficult working conditions), reductions in specialist care etc.  Much more detail can be found in Andrew Roberts’ website http://studymore.org.uk/mhhtim.htm .

The MH94 records enable one to search for possible lunacy in one’s ancestry. The patient records of many asylums have been preserved in archives and can be seen so long as they are more than 100 years old.  For example, detailed patient records for many Whitehouse ancestors can be found in the Burntwood Asylum books held by Staffordshire Archives.  Reports on the condition of the inmates can occupy many pages.

For general information about this class of record, see “Lunatic Ancestors” by David T. Hawkings,  Family Tree Magazine July 2007, pages 18 & 19.

PASSPORT APPLNS 1851-56 & 58-62 081230.xls (17kB, 13 lines of entry, 1 page) is an extract from the index to passport applications.  Its content is minimal, but some of the more famous Whitehouses are recognisable and are identified in a comments column.

PATS 1617-1901 070727.xls (48 kB, 215 lines of entry, 5 pages) is an extract of Whitehouse patent applicants at the UK Patent Office, as listed in the printed indexes, from the earliest times to the end of 1901.  The earliest patent granted to a Whitehouse was in 1774. In the period extracted, patents and applications were numbered in a separate series for each year.

A famous invention by a Whitehouse

Arguably the most famous Whitehouse was Cornelius, who invented continuous welding of tubing. His patent is numbered by the year and the number within that year, 1825 No. 5019. It lasted for 14 years from grant. At that time, patents did not have claims defining the monopoly, but page 3 contains a statement of the principle of the invention, which is to heat the tubes of iron (the metal sheet bent into tubular shape) nearly to the point of fusion, withdraw them from the fire and pass them through dies or holes, by which the edges of the heated iron may be pressed together, and the joint firmly welded. The patent was printed in 1857 and a copy is provided here as 1825-5109 040130.doc (contains scanned-in pages, 446 KB). Cornelius Whitehouse's patent is highly unusual because it was amended on the petition of James Russell, to whom he had sold the patent. The amendment (not copied here) was to correct a trivial clerical error, but it contains details of the terms on which Cornelius assigned his rights and the difficulties that James Russell experienced in meeting a deadline for filing the patent specification with the proper authority.

Genealogical value of patents

Generally, patents do not contain much of genealogical value. The patent specifications give only the name of the town as the address - in the case of Cornelius, Wednesbury. - and sometimes an occupation. A pilot study has revealed that the indexes relate to patent applications.  If the application never proceeded to a patent, the specification was not retained and so is not available. I have therefore included a column "Pat ?". "Yes" means that I have seen the specification, so it is available in the British Library. "No" means that I have ordered the specification and found it to be unavailable. The blank spaces mean that I not investigated availability.

The value of patents is as a "talking point" or decorative item for a family tree that has been arrived at by other means. The missing day and month part of the date for some 1889 patent applications arises from an official indexing error, which I have been able to rectify only partially.

Early US Patents

The British Library holds an index of US patentees for 1790 to 1847

There are two entries under WHITEHOUSE, both for Turner WHITEHOUSE:

WHITEHOUSE, Turner:  Lock, door:  Class 2  p. 49 (2)  - found

WHITEHOUSE, Turner:  Locks, mortice:  Class 3 p. 50 - not found

The first entry shows:

Door-lock;  T. WHITEHOUSE, Boston Mass  Sept 8, 1837 No. 377

Door-lock;  T. WHITEHOUSE, Boston Mass  Jun 14, 1838 No. 783

Until 1836, US patents were not numbered.  There are no Whitehouses in

"Early Un-numbered US Patents 1790 - 1836", Research Publications, Ind., Woodbridge CT USA, 1980

The British Library has an index of US patentees in yearly volumes from 1872 onwards.

Thus, there are no records here of US patentees from 1848 to 1871.

SEDGLEY MANOR ROLLS 100328.xls (140 kB, 695 lines of entry, 16 pages)

The Sedgley Manor Rolls have been extracted by Janet Rowley, a WFHC correspondent.  She has kindly provided her Whitehouse data, which I have transferred to a spreadsheet and indexed to make it searchable by name.  The period covered is 1614-1803. The Lord of the Manor had legal jurisdiction, devolved from the Crown, and held Court sessions for dealing with criminal and civil matters.  Civil matters frequently related to land transactions and probate.  The tenants of the Lord held land under the legal status of copyhold (so called because the tenancy was recorded in the court rolls and the tenant was given a copy).   Rents were low, being fixed by custom of the Manor, but when land changed hands, it was described as surrendered.  The Lord levied a large “fine” on the new owner.   Copyhold was valuable because there was a right of inheritance attached to it, but death of the copyholder caused a surrender.  More about the Manorial system can be found in “How to locate and use manorial records” by Patrick Palgrave-Moore, pub. Elvery Dowers (1985).  More about the Sedgley Manor specifically can be found from the website http://www.sedgleymanor.com .

STAFFS RECUSANTS LIST

This extract from the Staffordshire recusants list, kindly sent to me by Catherine Coleman, is notable for one Brewood family in 1767 which takes up 7 of the 10 entries.

Forename of WHITEHOUSE recusant	Year	Place or parish of abode	Notes
Mary	1758	Longbirch	[WHITAS] Communion List [presumed Longbirch]
John	1767	Brewood parish	1 year old; 1 year residence; son of Thomas WHITEHOUSE - cordwainer
John	1781	Black Ladies	Confirmed May 27th 1781 at Black Ladies
Mary	1767	Brewood parish	40 years old; 40 years residence; wife of Thomas WHITEHOUSE - cordwainer
Mary	1767	Brewood parish	5 years old; 5 years residence; daughter of Thomas WHITEHOUSE - cordwainer
Richard	1767	Brewood parish	9 years old; 9 years residence; son of Thomas WHITEHOUSE - cordwainer
Samuel	1678-79	Tipton	Nailer
Thomas	1767	Brewood parish	3 years old; 3 years residence; son of Thomas WHITEHOUSE - cordwainer
Thomas	1767	Brewood parish	Weaver [sic: Cordwainer ?] ;  41 years old; 16 years residence
Winnifred	1767	Brewood parish	7 years old; 7 years residence; daughter of Thomas WHITEHOUSE - cordwainer

TRAFALGAR, BATTLE OF

The battle of Trafalgar on 21st October 1805, in which 33 British ships engaged and defeated an equal number of French and Spanish ships in a 6-hour battle, is widely regarded as the most significant British victory of the century.

The National Archives’ website ( http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/trafalgarancestors/ ) enables searches to be made for those who fought at this battle, which numbered 18,000 plus.  Just two Whitehouses were found:

Whitehouse forename	Age	Place of birth	Rank	Ship	Ship’s Pay Book No.	TNA reference
Richard	20	London, England	Ordinary Seaman	HMS Defence	SB 389	ADM 36/15942
William	25	Stafford, England	Able Seaman	HMS Orion	SB 435	ADM 37/18

Re William Whitehouse’s record, “Stafford” probably means the county, not necessarily the town.  To be an Able Seaman, one must be over 20 and have 5 years’ experience at sea.  The record shows the following Service Details for William:  “Comments from Anson”.  I was informed that this entry means that he served previously on a ship of this name.