The Poor Laws Project
There have been a number of Poor Laws passed by Parliament dating back to 1547. The purpose
of the Poor Laws was to provide a level of protection to those who had fallen on hard times;
wives whose husbands had deserted them, breadwinners suffering major illness, etc.
Workhouses were built to provide shelter to the needy, and taxes were levied on the better off to
pay for the running of the workhouses. Determining if an individual or family was entitled to
Poor Law relief was the job of Overseers of the Poor who were appointed by each and every parish,
and the concept of a person's "settlement" was introduced to determine which parish had the responsibility
to pay this relief.
Hence, whenever there was any doubt as to which parish should be providing the required relief, there
would be a formal "settlement examination" of the head of the family involved. These were run by Justices
of the Peace, and would be signed by the examinee. Because the examinations were all about where the
examinee was born, who their dependants were, where their parents lived, who were the fathers of illegitimate
children, etc they are extremely valuable records for doing family history.
The main problem with Poor Law records is that there was never any legal requirement to keep particular
records, nor any central filing of the records. The records were simply part of a large quantity of
administrative paper work being produced at parish level, and
subject to the vagaries of each church choosing to retain its records or not. Hence for West Middlesex as
a whole only a fraction of the original Poor Law records are available today, with most, but not all,
of them now available at the London Metropolitan Archives.
An estimate of the surviving Poor Law records for our area is given on the
Poor Law Records page under the Research tab.
In March 2021 the website was updated with all 5600 Poor Law records that we had access to, some by online
access, others from typed transcripts made by Society members in the 1980s and 1990s. This data was also sent to
Find My Past, and may be called Phase 1 of the project. There remains a further 4500 Poor Law records to
examine and transcribe, which is Phase 2. The detail of these
records can be found in our Online Guide to our Poor Law records.
Phase 1 took a long while to complete as settlement examinations typically run to a page each,
requiring a lot of selective typing for each record. Phase 2 is to visit the London Metropolitan Archives
in particular and transcribe a further 4,000 settlement examinations, and 500 removal orders.
Anyone who is ready to help undertake this
major task should make themeselves known to the
Projects Co-ordinator.
|
|