So today has been Christmas cake-making day mark two. I was going to be restrained and only make one but when I learned that the descendants would be descending I thought a second would be in order. I don’t do cooking. The only exceptions are Christmas cake, Christmas pudding and chutney. Christmas cake making (something I’ve been doing for forty years) has a ritual of its own and this extends to the utensils that have to be used. Firstly, the mixing bowl. You can still buy bowls like this but this one was I believe a wedding present for my parents in 1947. The eggs are always cracked into a glass Snoopy mug (late 1970’s vintage), using a bone handled knife that was also a parental wedding gift. The flour is always scooped out using a plastic mug that was mine when I was a toddler. The recipe is always the same, although this year I used gluten free flour for the first time. I always add extra mixed peel. I used ground almonds instead of whole ones. There was a year when I couldn’t get ground almonds and we tried doing things to whole ones in a blender – not the greatest success! In the days when I had assistants, strict turns were taken with adding the ingredients. It still feels odd making the cakes by myself but it is part of Christmas, just like the tree.

My Family History website offering for today is another London-centric one, apologies for that but I am attempting to be vaguely alphabetical. So do take a look at Booth’s Survey of London. Charles Booth was an influential social reformer and his extensive surveys of Life and Labour in London, undertaken between 1886 and 1903, created a mass of source material that can be very useful for those who have London ancestors. Even if your own family did not live in London, the conditions he described would be equally applicable to large towns and cities elsewhere. His survey investigated working conditions, poverty, migration, leisure and religion. He created a series of colour coded maps, which indicated the social class of each street. These ranged from ‘upper class’ to ‘lowest class, semi-criminal’. These maps are available online and can be searched and freely downloaded. The maps were based on his findings, which were recorded in 450 notebooks that are in the custody of the London School of Economics. Some of the notebooks are viewable on the website; consulting the remainder requires a visit to the London School of Economics’ Library. The notebooks can be searched by keyword, enabling references to particular streets to be identified.

My own ancestors owned a grocer’s and tea dealer’s shop on Kingsland Road, Hackney in the second half of the nineteenth century. From Booth’s maps I can see that it was identified as ‘middle class, well-to-do’ (makes a change for my ancestors). The notebooks tell me that ‘Kingsland Road is a first rate market street in the shopping place of the neighbourhood.’ ‘Saturday is the great marketing night’.

From Booth’s Poverty Map http://booth.lse.ac.uk