|
|
|
Interested in soccer trivia? Visit the newest and best soccer trivia website at www.soccertrivia.org.uk
|
Tracing Footballer Ancestors The Records For
those who suspect they have ancestors who played professional footballers,
records are available to help you with your research. The most obviously
place to start are the census records. A census was taken in Britain every ten years after 1801 (except during the Second World War). Until 1841 the census was basically a headcount of the numbers of people (male and female), houses and families in a parish or township. From 1841 the census lists the name of everyone in the house, the address, approximate age and occupation. The original census
returns for the 1841-91 censuses for England, Wales, the Channel Islands and the
Isle of Man are kept in the Family Records Centre in London.
However, those for your particular country should also be available in
the local record office. The 1901 census for England and Wales is available online at http://www.1901census.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ The 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881 and 1891 census returns hosted by Ancestry.co.uk can be searched for free. For a fee images of the returns can be downloaded. Neither
the Football Association, the Football League or the clubs themselves admit to
having many early records. The
National Football Museum, on the other hand, is home to the world's greatest
football archive. Located underneath two stands at Preston North End’s
Deepdale Stadium, the objective of the National Football Museum is to preserve,
conserve and interpret the greatest collections of football memorabilia in the
world. It is the Museum's intention
to open up this archive for academic research in the near future. For more details contact the Museum at The National Football
Museum, Sir Tom Finney Way, Deepdale. Preston, PR1 6RU or email them: enquiries@nationalfootballmuseum.com The
Scottish Football Museum, situated at Hampden Park, Glasgow, is one of the
city’s leading attractions. Objects on display include the world’s oldest cap and match
ticket and the Scottish Football Association Challenge Cup (the world’s oldest
national trophy). You can
also visit the museum's own website, www.scottishfootballmuseum.org.uk The
Association of Football Statisticians has produced a number of volumes of Who’s
Who in the Football League 1888-1915 and 1919-1939, as well as The
Early Years 1863-1888 which list the players, the clubs they were with and
the seasons they played. The AFS is
currently building a database of every player, every club and
every match played in professional football ever as part of its Genome Project. They already have 270,000 matches, 46,000 players and 8,000 teams,
with results going back to the earliest matches in the 19th century. See http://www.11v11.co.uk Most
clubs have histories and many of these list players and describe key men in some
detail. The quickest way to
make contact with a club is through their official websites where queries will
often be forwarded to an official club historian.
It is also worth checking unofficial sites run by fans, as they will
often take a closer look at the history of the club and even some of its more
obscure players. Newspapers are a major source of information. As early as 1892, Charles Edwards wrote: ‘Saturday evenings are devoted to football symposia, and the newspapers issue special editions one after the other, with from three or four columns of reports and gossip about the results of the days games and the players’. The collection of British football programmes and club magazines in the British Library Newspaper Library is likely to be amongst the finest of its kind anywhere in the world. The holdings listed date from the 1890s onwards and they include substantial runs of titles, notably those for Charlton Athletic (1934 onwards), Clapton Orient (1907-1939), Everton (1904-1939), Kilmarnock (1929-1940), Manchester City (1924-1969), Manchester United (1910-1934), and various Lanarkshire (1929-1940) football clubs. In addition to these, the Newspaper Library also maintains major runs of periodicals relating to football. Long-running titles from around Britain include: Burton upon Trent's Football Mail (1946-1978), Nottingham's Football Post (1903 onwards), Ipswich's Football Star (1946-1975), Inverness's Football Times (1904-1976), and Cardiff's South Wales Football Echo (1919-1939).
|
