#Born1819 Cohort Study
The idea for a collaborative One Place Birth Study was floated in an article for Destinations, house magazine of the Society of One Place Studies, a short video appearing as part of the “All About The Place 2024” event.
The invitation to be involved is open to all who have a One-Place Study or a Family Tree.
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 be sensible to limit focus on only five individuals at a time.
Further guidance on Stage One is available in the following documents:
Born 1819 Cohort Readme Document
Stage One example – as transcribed
Contributions and queries should be sent to peter.burnhill@one-place-studies.org
Background
Recent research for Aldershot Before The Army Came prompted me to think about how different age groups experienced the impact of the changes brought about the Camp and the arrival of the townsfolk. This meant investigating differences in the life experiences of successive birth cohorts, groups sharing year of birth. Contemporary contrasts in the media are between Baby Boomers, Millennials and Generation Z.
When writing up material for , I came across work carried out on the cohort born in the same year as Queen Victoria and her Prince Consort. The bicentenary of their birth was the occasion for the publication of a collection of papers entitled Victoria’s Victorians: Generation Born in 1819. *
* 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, doi 10.1093 Also freely available
That project used written biographies of others born in 1819, such as found in the National Dictionary of Biography (DNB), supplemented by some autobiographies of urban working class men. The inevitable consequence is neglect of both the experience of women and of all those born into rural villages, the overwhelming majority in 1819.
That gave rise to the idea of a collaborative One Place Birth Study. Early results have come from members of the Few Forgotten Women project, with twenty-six (or more) well-documented stories, mostly from Norfolk and Shropshire.