Queen Victoria’s Common Cohort: An Update – Peter Burnhill

The idea for a collaborative One-Place Birth Study was floated in an article in September 2024's edition of Destinations:

"… identify all those in your One-Place Study who were
born in the year 1819, likely using infant baptism as a proxy.
Then, with information about ‘the Place’ … construct a
summary biography for each member of that birth cohort by
following-up events throughout the duration of their lives."

Details on how to participate are given at the foot of this post.

#Born1819 Cohort Study

When writing up material my One-Place Study, * I came across a collection of papers entitled Victoria’s Victorians: Generation Born in 1819. **  Using the National Dictionary of Biography (DNB), supplemented by some autobiographies of urban working class men, this examined the contemporaries born in the same year as Queen Victoria and her Prince Consort. Inevitably, that meant something of a top-down perspective, excluding the everyday experience of the overwhelming majority in 1819, women and those born into rural villages.

Hence, the invitation to contribute is open to all who have a One-Place Study or Family Tree. Crowd-sourcing biographical information about individuals born in the year 1819 will provide a corrective counterbalance for the experience of the #Born1819 generation, especially of common folk born into rural villages.

That invitation was turned into one of the 165 videos which featured in ‘All About That Place 2024’

Since then early participants have been helping to shape the project. I am beginning to collate those contributions to create a shareable and network-accessible database.

A big thank you for the approach to work with members of the Few Forgotten Women project. With useful background summary of the history of the times, they devoted a FFW Friday to research the lives of girls born in 1819 in two specific parishes. This has resulted in twenty-six (or more) well-documented stories, mostly from Norfolk and Shropshire. https://www.fewforgottenwomen.com/1819stories>

Those FFW biographies included Hannah Collins, one of seven girls in my OPS’s baptismal register. I’ve since written up one more biography and I am knee deep in research on two others. Quite apart from being a contribution to the project, the focus on micro-history for each of these has rewarded me with several insights I had previously missed.

How to Contribute

Participation in the #Born1819 Cohort Study is a two stage process. The initial step is to define, and report, who is in the 1819 Cohort, likely using infant baptism as a proxy. That means transcribing, or else copying, what is found in the parish registers – or their equivalent.

The second stage is both more interesting and more demanding, drawing upon the skills with source material possessed by local and family historians. The first port of call is likely the parish registers for burials and weddings, supplemented by the registers of deaths and marriages (which came into force in England in 1837) are the first port of call. Then comes the 1841 Census, by which time those in the birth cohort are aged 22, followed by the 1851 Census with improved record of ages and occupation.

Parishes can vary a lot in size and for larger parishes, it might therefore be sensible to limit focus on only five individuals at a time.

Further guidance on Stage One is available in the following documents at this link

• Born 1819 Cohort Readme Document
• Stage One 1819 template
• Stage One example - as transcribed

Please send contributions and queries to me at peter.burnhill@one-place-studies.org

References

* Aldershot Before The Army Came <link: https://aldershotvillage.net/ >

** Helen Kingstone, Trev Broughton, Victoria’s Victorians: The Generation Born in 1819, Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 24, Issue 4, October 2019, Pages 415–418, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcz045

Freely available at https://openresearch.surrey.ac.uk/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/Victorias-Victorians-The-Generation-Born-in/99513416202346