Best websites for... agricultural labourers

If your ancestors worked on the land, you can find rich rural pickings online when researching your family, says Orla Thomas.

Most of us will have an ancestor who worked as an agricultural labourer at some point. In fact, the 1851 census records 1,460,896 people working as an “ag lab”, farm servant or shepherd – more than in any other field of employment. Only in 1871 did domestic service overtake it to the top spot.

Before the Industrial Revolution, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, many of our forebears would have toiled in Britain’s fields, but there are no websites devoted to studying them, says Ian Waller, author of My Ancestor was an Agricultural Labourer. “Data-wise, there’s nothing. But there’s a fair amount of commentary and historical information available, which is very useful because it will give you a better understanding of what an agricultural labourer did.”

Much of what has been published on agricultural labourers has been printed in paper form, so Waller recommends downloading academic articles in the form of PDFs. These documents – and other helpful sites – can be difficult to unearth, so on the following pages, we’ve done the hard work for you.

My Star Site

Mike Petty, family historian and former librarian

Google Book Search
http://books.google.co.uk

For 35 years, I was librarian of the Cambridgeshire Collection at Cambridge Public Library, and of all the websites I tracked down, the one I’m particularly excited about is Google Book Search, which is open to all and completely free.

Here you’ll find thousands of out-of-print books, digitised and searchable by any word or combination of words. I’ve found lots of books on there that I’ve never seen before.

The site includes many of the Board of Agriculture reports produced by Vancouver and Gooch. These are particularly useful as they look at the agriculture within a single parish; what was being grown and the hardships labourers were facing.

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