Wednesday 9 May 2018

Big upgrade to the Chartist Ancestors Databank

The Chartist Ancestors Databank has had a major update. Thanks to the addition of a three big new data sets listing Chartist women, Londoners and France-based Chartists, the running total of names now exceeds 14,000.

You can find out more about the Chartist Ancestors Databank and download the full databank itself in Excel format here.

The latest additions to the data were kindly donated by Peter Cox, whose team of U3A members spent many hours at the National Archives transcribing names from the Chartist Land Company share registers.

Find out more about the project here and here.

I have also now been able to add a new filter, making it possible to identify male and female Chartists. This has largely been a manual task, allocating individuals based on their first name or title (Miss or Mrs as women, Dr and Rev in this era always as men).

In a number of instances, we have neither name nor title to go on, so unless there is some other evidence – delegates to national conventions were all men, for example – I have left these as unknowns. In reality they would have overwhelmingly been men.

If you are trying to find a Chartist, the databank is a good place to start. You are also free to use it for any additional analysis or in genuine research projects – but please attribute the source. You may not use it for commercial purposes.

Download the databank.

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