Five steps to finding your trade union ancestor
Finding your trade union ancestor in the records left by their trade union can be a difficult process. It can require access to specialist publications or a personal visit to archives with which even experienced family historians are unfamiliar. The five steps to finding your trade union ancestor set out below suggest an overview of the work you may need to do to get results. This is journey that may take some time, and like all such research projects there are no guarantees about what you will find.
Despite the vast volume of trade union records that survive, far more has been lost or destroyed because no one ever thought that they would be needed in future, or because the organisation concerned simply blinked out of existence when the occupation or industry it organised disappeared or the last of its members retired or moved on to other occupations. That, however, is pretty much the stuff of all organisational histories, and with persistence and good luck you may be able to make a connection with your ancestor’s life as a trade union member.
Step 1: What did your ancestor do?
Start with what you know. What did your ancestor do for a living? Census records from 1841 onwards typically provide an individual’s occupation, and the 1921 census also includes information about the name and business of their employer and their place of work. But a census entry (or family memory) can often be frustratingly vague: if they were a weaver, do you know if they worked with cotton, poplin or silk – and were they a weaver, or perhaps an overseer; if they were a shoemaker, could they perhaps have been a cordwainer, a closer, a gentleman’s shoemaker or a ladies’ shoemaker? Unions, especially in the nineteenth century, might recruit only very specific groups of workers, and of course, your ancestor might well have changed jobs during the course of their lifetime. The more specific you can be, the easier it will be to pin down the correct union or unions. The Modern Records Centre at Warwick University has an online glossary of trades and occupations which you may wish to consult.
Step 2: What unions covered that trade or industry?
More than 5,000 trade unions are listed on Trade Union Ancestors. Try to answer this question by searching the site to see if there possible unions covering your ancestor’s trade or industry in the A to Z listing on this website. But while in step one, your aim was to narrow down the options as far as possible, in drawing up a shortlist of possible trade unions, you should widen the search criteria and think laterally. So if you are searching for a shoemakers’ union, search for shoemakers, cobblers, cloggers, bootmakers and cordwainers. In some cases, trade unions organise widely within an industry, so it is worth expanding your search again. For example, at the turn of the twentieth century many local authority manual workers were members of the Municipal Employees Association. It is also worth being aware that unions sometimes competed for members: so while the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF) was the main trade union organising train drivers, some were members of the National Union of Railwaymen (which to add to the confusion also organized some groups of bus drivers).
Step 3: Where and when were they working?
Some unions had a geographical focus. This can be a big help if, for example, you are looking for a stonemason and are aware that the United Operative Masons Association of Scotland operated entirely separately from the Friendly Society of Operative Stonemasons of England, Ireland and Wales. Similarly, the Lancashire cotton industry had a profusion of often small trade unions which organised in only a single town. More importantly, however, you need to know whether the unions in your list of possibles was operating at the time your ancestor was working. Narrowing down your target unions at this stage is perhaps the most difficult step in finding your trade union ancestor. For this you will almost certainly need access to the six-volume Historical Directory of Trade Unions, and for that you will almost certainly need to consult a specialist library. Using this, you can weed out those trade unions which would have been perfect … if only they hadn’t come into being the year after your ancestor retired; or might have been a great fit … if only the sole record of this union and its activities wasn’t just an uninformative passing mention in the records of another organisation. Even those trade unions which still survive in some shape or form are unlikely to have retained the name they started with. The trade union family trees on this website may help you trace them through mergers and amalgamations, and help guide you towards the location of their archives. So, for example, the Postmen’s Federation, founded in 1891, became a part of the Union of Post Office Workers in 1919, which in turn went through a series of name changes before merging with the union for post office engineers in 1995 to create today’s Communication Workers Union. So in tracking down records relating to a pre-first world war postman, you need to find out where the CWU archives are to be found.
Step 4: What records survive and where are they?
Trade unions are nothing if not great record keepers. Although relatively little survives from the period when their very existence was legally questionable, archives from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards provide a rich source of material. The largest repository of trade union papers is undoubtedly the Modern Records Centre at Warwick University, which houses a vast collection of material, other substantial collections can be found at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford, in the National Libraries of Wales and Scotland, and in local records offices. Specialist records dealing with agricultural trade unionism can be found in the Museum of English Rural Life at the University of ReadingMaterials may include admission books (recording the fact of a member joining the union), membership registers (providing a snapshot of members at a point in time), minute books recording the meetings of national or local bodies, branch returns to head office, and annual reports.
Step 5: What will these records show?
It is worth sounding a note of caution at this stage. Even if you have tracked down the right union and found your ancestor’s name in its admission books, you may discover very little about them. These are not employment records but administrative documents recording only the bare minimum of information needed by the union. If you are very fortunate, the record may show that your ancestor was in a particular occupational group within the union (as can be the case for records of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers) or perhaps tell you that they claimed one of the union’s friendly society benefits (in the event of the death of a spouse, illness or injury). But you may strike it lucky: trade union journals (many of which can be found at the Trades Union Congress Library Collection held by London Metropolitan University as well as at the Modern Records Centre) may carry news of your ancestor’s union activities, and it is possible that an annual report may record their retirement after many years as a union member. If they played a significant role in the union, they might even feature in one of the many history books commissioned and published by trade unions, especially in the middle years of the twentieth century.
Research resources for trade union history
Further research on this website offers links to organisations you need to know about, including the Working Class Movement Library, TUC Library Collection and the Modern Records Centre.
Books: details of the Historical Directory of Trade Unions and a short list of books about the histories of individual trade unions are listed here.
Trade union family trees can be found here, and a listing of more than 5,000 trade unions can be found in the A to Z listing which begins here.