The Society of Genealogists (SoG) is a UK-based educational charity, founded in 1911Fowler, S. Making History: Society of Genealogists, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Date unknown. Retrieved 2011-10-30. to "promote, encourage and foster the study, science and knowledge of genealogy". The Society's Library is the largest specialist genealogical library outside North America. Membership is open to any adult who agrees to abide by the Society's rules and who pays the annual subscription. At the end of 2023, it had 6,654 members.
History
The society was founded in 1911 by George Sherwood, Charles Bernau, Gerald Fothergill, Edgar Francis Briggs and Dr William Bradbrook.
It was the Hertfordshire antiquary, William Blyth Gerish, who suggested the foundation of the Society and his proposal, made in a letter to Notes & Queries, was taken up by Charles Bernau, the author of The Genealogy of the Submerged, a meeting was held, further invitations were sent out, and fifty interested people provided a fund to incorporate the Society. The document is dated 8 May 1911.
The object of the early members, who met in Sherwood's office at 227 The Strand, was to transcribe and index original material and to make it readily available in one place. The group's committees intended to form pressure groups to obtain easier access to records of all kinds.Society of Genealogists, 75th Anniversary Congress 1986, 3-4.
An early rapid growth in the collections, amongst them 43 volumes compiled by Mrs Vernona Smith on the West Indies, and 51 volumes of Berkshire material bequeathed by Frederick Simon Snell, necessitated the first move to larger premises from The Strand to the first floor of 5 Bloomsbury Square, in 1914.
In October 1911 a committee, chaired by Fothergill, had been appointed to communicate with the Registrar General and others with a view to gaining access to the Census Returns of 1841 and 1851 but although the Registrar General replied in January 1912 that 'administrative difficulties prevent their being thrown open as desired', the Public Record Office (now The National Archives) wrote on 6 June 1912 to say that the Secretary of State had authorised the production of the records at the Record Office of the Enumeration Schedules of both censuses 'on payment of the fees fixed by the Master of the Rolls, viz. 1s. for one piece, and 2s.6d. for each set of 10 pieces' and in 1952 the PRO was responsible for getting the Home Office and the Treasury to agree to the abolition of the fees for the inspections of both returns John D. Cantwell, The Public Record Office 1838-1958 (HMSO, 1991) page 451.
In 1916 the first monthly lecture was held and in 1919, whilst Lord Raglan was President, Queen Mary accepted patronage of the Society. In 1922 under the long Presidency of Lord Farrer work started on the transcription and indexing of the Apprentices of Great Britain (1710-1774), which Fothergill had recently discovered at Somerset House, and the society received from W.H. Welply eighteen volumes of abstracts of Irish wills and pleadings, following the destruction of the Irish Record Office that year. On 12 September 1924 by Special Resolution of an Extraordinary Meeting the Society of Genealogists of London, with permission of the Board of Trade, the Society omitted the 'of London' from its name.The Times, 5 November 1924. In April 1925, following the demise of the periodical The Genealogist, the Society began its own quarterly journal The Genealogists' Magazine, and Percival Boyd started work on the Marriage Index which bears his name. By the time of his death in 1955, Boyd had indexed the marriages in most transcribed English parish registers and the index contained over six million entries. The long secretaryship, 1930-50, of Mrs Kathleen Blomfield gave stability to the Society. In 1932 a debate on the 'Companions of the Conqueror' was held, with contributions by the Librarian Dr T.R. Thomson, Geoffrey White and others, Thomson having produced the first edition of his A Catalogue of British Family Histories in 1928.
In 1933 the second move took place, this time to a large room at Chaucer House, Malet Place, leased from the Library Association. In 1934 the Corporation of Trinity House gave the Society its large collection of petitions from the wives and children of distressed seamen, 1780-1854, and in 1935 Kathleen Blomfield organised the publication of the first edition of The Genealogist's Handbook. An important Silver Jubilee Exhibition was arranged for 1936 though, owing to the death of the King, it was delayed until 29 June-2 July 1937 and Queen Mary was unable to attend. An attractive Exhibition Catalogue, the cover designed by Claire G.M. Evans, and to which many experts contributed, listed some 273 exhibits and records and gave detailed explanations of their uses. One major section of exhibits was provided by The Eugenics Society.
The collection of parish register copies was always a priority for the Society and in 1924 it had published the first catalogue of the transcripts in its possession. In 1937 Kathleen Blomfield and Kendal Percy Smith revised this catalogue and two years later, with funds from the Pilgrim Trust, the Society published their National Index of Parish Register Copies listing 4,000 transcripts in other libraries. The balance of the funds were used in a vigorous campaign to microfilm parish registers under threat during the Second World War.
At the commencement of the war in 1939, Percival Boyd started compiling his 'unit sheets' on former inhabitants of London, writing 59,389 in the next fifteen years. The former judge Viscount Mersey was elected President in 1942 and helped to steer the Society through the difficult war years when the membership was less than a thousand. There was a considerable improvement in the 1950s. John Beach Whitmore's A Genealogical Guide (the second standard list of printed pedigrees) was published in 1953, and two years later Arthur Willis had produced the first of the modern guides to ancestry tracing, Genealogy for Beginners. The Society had taken a lease on a fine Victorian house (with the income from three flats above) at 37 Harrington Gardens, Kensington, in 1954, and on the death of Lord Mersey in 1956, Lord Mountbatten was elected President in 1957 and began to take an active interest in its affairs. George Sherwood, who was still tending the Document Collection, died in 1958, his wife continuing to do so for several further years.
Anthony Wagner's English Genealogy came out in 1960, when the membership had grown to 1,658, and a new era began with the fiftieth anniversary exhibition 'The Ancestry of the Common Man' in the panelled lounge in 1961. That year pressure was successfully brought to obtain the release of the 1861 Census Returns. A full-time Director of Research was appointed in 1962 when Mrs Cecil Mackay became the Society's Secretary, a post she held for fourteeen years. With John Sims as Librarian a more active programme of publications was commenced. In 1965 the first weekend course in genealogy was held under the sponsorship of the Society at Missenden Abbey in Buckinghamshire and in 1966 the Society began to publish a revision of the National Index of Parish Registers in many volumes, under the editorship of Donald Steel. Three years later the Society gave its active support to the foundation of the Association of Genealogists and Record Agents, and in 1975 joined the Federation of Family History Societies, it being one of the hosts of the 13th International Congress of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences held in London the following year. The exhibition catalogue became a guide to the Society's library which as Using the Library of the Society of Genealogists subsequently went through many editions. Alex Haley's Roots was published that year. The character of the Society had rapidly changed and the great modern movement in 'grass roots' genealogy was well under way. Following an appeal in 1968 the freehold of the house at 37 Harrington Gardens was purchased.
The Society had organised the opposition to the proposed removal of the Registar General's records from London in 1974, and the committee then formed developed into an influential Record Users Group. Both were actively involved in the discussion leading up to the important Records and Registers Measure regarding parish documents which was passed by the Synod in 1978. In another important field the Society had in 1975 obtained the co-operation of the Church of England in providing notification of threatened churches and churchyards so that their inscriptions might be copied.
In 1975 the Society had also sponsored the first of the English Genealogical Congresses organised by Stella Colwell with a small committee of members and the first of a very successfulk series of bi-annual day conferences had also taken place in London. The first Congresses had been at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and that in 1984 was at the University of York.Selected papers given at both were typed by Monnica Stevens and published in 1986. The library and collections continued to grow, the foundation of local family history societies in the mid-1970s doing much to increase the rate of transcription of parish registers and monumental inscriptons. Part of the work of the Genealogical Society of Utah too became available in the form of the International Genealogical Index which was first acquired in 1977 and which attracted many new searchers to the rooms.
In the 1970s the Society had taken an active part in the lobbying leading to the Parochial Registers and Records Measure passed by the Synod in 1978 which drew on the network of record offices being established across the country and the Local Government (Records) Act 1962 which allowed local authority record offices to acquire and care for records of local significance. The Measure required each diocese of the Church of England to designate one or more record offices in which all non-current registers and record over 100 years old must be deposited as well as all registers in which the arliest entry was 150 years old. The Measure also specified the exact conditions in which undeposited registers were to be held and made them subject to five year ly inspections by inspectors appointed by the bishop. The deposited books of baptisms and burials had to be available for research within reasonable working hours.
On 27 June 1979 by Special Resolution at the AGM, the name of the Society was confirmed as 'Society of Genealogists'. In 1981 it organised the first of a series of lecture tours to America and the following year a quarterly newsletter Computers in Genealogy was first published, regular meetings of computer enthusiasts taking place.
Lord Mountbatten had resigned as President to become Patron in 1978, when H.R.H. Prince Michael of Kent was elected in his stead. The investment in Harrington Gardens had proved a valuable one and a long search for larger alternative premises was rewarded when that freehold was exchanged for 14 Charterhouse Buildings, a strong building which had formerly housed rolls of silk, to which the Society moved in July 1984. Here there was a further rapid expansion in the collections and membership. In 1986 the latter was about 8,500 and an average of a hundred persons was using the Society's rooms every day.Genealogists' Magazine March 1984, vol.21, no.5, p.163-164; June 1984, vol.21, no.6, notice inside front cover.