Hello Marjorie

This is a question which comes up often, but for which there is no straightforward answer. I hope the following rather lengthy explanation of the background will help you understand the situation, but feel free to skip to the end for the answer to your specific question.

London, as we know it, evolved from three ancient settlements:

The City of London has its origins in Roman Londinium, founded on the northern bank of the Thames in the first century AD.
The borough (in the old sense of “town”) of Southwark grew up opposite Londinium on the south bank of the river, around the end of the river crossing which later became London Bridge.
Westminster was founded 1000 years after the other two when Edward the Confessor built a monastery dedicated to St Peter and a royal palace on an island in the marshes to the west of the City.

By the Middle Ages, the City of London was the centre of trade, finance and industry, Westminster the centre of the court, government and the church, and Southwark the home of less salubrious activities – the smelliest trades and naughtiest leisure activities.

Over the centuries, the open country, hamlets and villages between and around these three began to be swallowed up, creating a metropolis which became one of the greatest and most populous in the world. A detailed map of the fortifications erected in 1642-3 by the Parliamentarian City of London against attack by Royalist forces shows a seamless conurbation from Westminster to Wapping on the north bank and Vauxhall to Bermondsey on the south. Although the name “London” still officially referred only to the ancient, self-governing City, its use was becoming wider in meaning, taking in a much larger area.

The expansion of London became even more rapid in the 18th century, with the middle classes moving westwards from the old City towards Westminster and beyond, whilst industry and the working classes migrated to the north and east and along the south bank of the Thames.

In 1700, there were just over 500,000 people living in metropolitan London. In 1811, there were well over 1,000,000. By 1861, the figure was nearly 3,000,000.

The County Issue

Until the late 19th century, metropolitan London spanned more than one county – Middlesex for those parts north of the Thames, Surrey for those to the south, and Kent for the south eastern districts. In itself, this was not a major problem, as the ancient counties had only a limited formal role (their main responsibility being the administration of justice). The principal cause of the chaos in London local government was the large number of separate vestries and districts, some large, some small, some rich, some poor, some honest, some corrupt, all trying to oversee their own little patch. Finally, in 1855, the Metropolitan Board of Works was established to take over the crucial task of co-ordinating improvements to the infrastructure of the seething, filthy, overcrowded capital. This was the first official body to define the boundaries of London (though it did so rather conservatively). But the MBW was not an unqualified success, not least because its members were appointed rather than elected and there were many accusations of corruption and mismanagement. It was abolished by the Local Government Act of 1888 which established the London County Council (effective from 21 March 1889) to which it gave (along with all the other newly created County Councils throughout England) control over the additional areas of planning, education and housing . In 1900, local government in London was reformed again with the division of the County into 28 metropolitan boroughs.

London continued to grow outwards at a remarkable rate, largely due to improvements in public transport which allowed people to live further and further from their place of work. In 1965, the County of London was abolished and the Greater London Council was formed, covering a much larger area, bringing in what was left of Middlesex, the City of London (which had managed to resist joining the LCC) and sections of Surrey, Kent and Essex and Hertfordshire. The 28 original metropolitan boroughs were merged into 12 and became known as Inner London, with the new areas forming 20 new boroughs in Outer London.

The Implications for Family History Research

Despite the fact that the inhabitants of Southwark didn’t wake up on the morning of 21 March 1889 and discover that they had suddenly become Londoners, the changes made on that date do have serious implications for those of us researching London ancestors. For perfectly understandable, practical reasons, suppliers of genealogical data use counties as a major search criterion. Ancestry really struggle with this and you will find many anomalies, such as Battersea being classified as "Surrey" in their 1871 census transcript but Lambeth is "London". Their location of civil registration districts according to county is even more bizarre (and not just for London) so it is always better to hop over to FreeBMD which has a very clever system of mapping registration districts so that you should get the right results, irrespective of the time period you are searching on. Ultimately, the best way to negotiate the minefield is to understand the background and be flexible.

The Problem of Recording London Family History

As well as the difficulty of knowing which county to search in, a more intransigent problem is how to record an event in London. There are three logical choices:

1. You record the event in the contemporary county - i.e. if a birth occurred in Marylebone in 1888 you record it as having happened in "Marylebone, Middlesex". The obvious difficulty with this approach is that the next child, born to the same parents in the same house two years later, would need to be recorded as born in "Marylebone, London".

2. You record the event in the ancient county, irrespective of when it occurred. So all events in, say, Marylebone, would be recorded as "Marylebone, Middlesex", even up to the present day. The obvious problem here is that Middlesex no longer officially exists (though many people who live in the outer fringes of it still choose to include the word in their address).

3. You record the event according to the county the location is now in. So anything that happened in the area covered by modern-day London would, strictly speaking, use "Greater London" as the county - i.e. "Marylebone, Greater London" right back to however far your tree stretches. This is odd in more ways than one: not only would it look very odd for an event in the 18th century, but the term and concept of "Greater London" are rarely used by Londoners. If you are going to go down this road, the simple name "London" is preferable and this is the approach now used by the LDS for the FamilySearch website.

As you can see, all three approaches have some elements of consistency and some degree of anachronism. None of them work perfectly, so you will need to do what all London researchers have to do and pick the one that offends you least.. But, having made your choice, do be consistent. The worst compromise is to float randomly between the three!

Best wishes

Caroline