Poverty in the East End

Annie Macpherson & The Gutter Children is a post on the Spitalfields Life blog drawn to my attending by Jane MacNamara. Macpherson may not be well known in the UK but certainly is in the Home Child research community of Canada.

I was unaware that the emigration of Home Children which started in 1869 could be linked to London’s 1866 cholera epidemic.

By coincidence Ancestry has just updated the database London, England, Selected Poor Law Removal and Settlement Records, 1698-1930 covering the Poor Law unions of Bethnal Green, Hackney, Poplar, Shoreditch, and Stepney. It now has 469,314 records, up from 290,134 when I last mentioned it in March 2014. 69,884 records are for Examinations, 240,968 for Orders of Removal and 158,457 for Settlement Papers.

Clicking on the browse facility there's an indication we may in the future be able to find records for Apprenticeship Papers and Poor Law School History Sheets for Bethnal Green; and Register of Lunatics for Hackney.