Trade union members’ registers

Trade unionship began in the late 18th century with the start of the Industrial Revolution. By 1892, more than 1.5 million people were members in the UK. Just under 100,000 were women, mostly working in textile factories and mills.

Significant collections of trade union records can be found in the Working Class Movement Library in Salford (wcml.org.uk); these include print unions, gas workers, boilermakers and shipwrights. In addition, the Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading (merl.reading.ac.uk) holds records of agricultural trade unionism, while the Trades Union Congress Library Collections preserved by London Metropolitan University include a wide range of journals, pamphlets, periodicals and other material (student.londonmet. ac.uk/library/using-the-library/special-collections/trades-union
-congress-library-collections).

Further important collections are held at the Labour History Archive and Study Centre at the People’s History Museum in Manchester (phm.org. uk/collections/labour-history
-archive-study-centre), and the University of Swansea which holds the South Wales Coalfield Collection (lisweb. swan.ac.uk/swcc).

Also, many local record offices and archives hold information for the smaller, local unions, while the National Library of Scotland’s manuscript collections in Edinburgh include extensive records of Scottish trade unions (www.nls.uk/catalogues/labour
-history/trade-unions/).

However, the most significant collection of archives from national trade unions is held by the Modern Records Centre (MRC) at Warwick University (warwick. ac.uk/services/library/mrc). The MRC has records from more than 250 unions, although not all include membership details.

Findmypast’s collection ‘Britain, Trade Union Membership Registers’ (search.findmypast.co.uk/search-world-records/britain
-trade-union-membership
-registers) includes material held by the MRC from 26 unions in all, including digitised images of the original record books – totalling more than 3.7 million records.

Membership registers from 21 of these unions can be searched by name, including the MRC’s most extensive and probably most significant series of membership registers from the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (1872-1913) and the National Union of Railwaymen (1913–1928). Before these were indexed they were very difficult to navigate, because there were 97 very large volumes arrange