Marriage in the British Courts, 1870-1920: Law, Family, and Digital Archives

Ginger Frost, Samford University

The advent of large digital databases has transformed social and legal history. Searchable genealogical records, family trees, passenger lists, and newspapers allow the historian to go beyond the single snapshot of the one law case. Instead, s/he can trace the litigants both before and after they entered a courtroom, a process that transforms the social implications of these suits. This paper will examine three Victorian and early twentieth-century British legal cases to demonstrate the difference that digitized records make in historical interpretations. In Nagle-Gillman v. Christopher in 1874, a husband sued his wife’s family for control of her property from a separate estate. Using family trees and newspapers, the historian finds a much richer story behind this conflict than the original case indicated. In Carlin v. Carlin, a Jewish immigrant wife sued her husband for maintenance at the police courts in 1902, and census records trace the family for the next twenty years, leading to a surprising denouement. Finally, a divorce petition in 1917 began the complicated story of a Syrian Anglican clergyman with a German wife living in London in World War I. Fuller records explored issues of nationality and race that stretched decades beyond the wife’s petition. One should not overstate the value of digitized sources, of course; they offer a series of snapshots rather than a single one. Those involving global issues leave traces mainly in Western countries, and women remain more obscure than men for many reasons. Thus, historians should be wary of becoming too dependent on these sources. Nevertheless, the ability to find non-elite families over time offers a great advantage to those working in socio-legal history.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 9. Evaluating Data Quality I