The Bank Managers Project 1851-1911

The 2014 mini project was on Bank Managers. Why Bank Managers? Well I put forward the suggestion to the FACHRS Committee because I hoped this would provide another interesting set of people to research and some fascinating avenues to get side tracked down as indeed has proved the case.

Those taking part once again rose to the challenge of researching the Bank Manager allocated to them from the 1881 census by answering the list of questions concerning the social status, migration, employment history and connections within their community of the individual. If people wished they could also research the Banks that the managers were employed by and what happened to them. This led researchers to the archives held on line by the big Banks (which had swallowed up the local Banks that many of the pre 1900 Bank Managers had worked for). RBS, Lloyds TSB, Nat West and HSBC all have very good on line archives and are well worth looking at. Bank buildings are also very obvious within towns and cities and in many instances in the past the Bank Manager lived on the premises this was another topic that was open to research and some people did indeed follow this up.

The Bank Manager research produced articles which appeared in the October 2014 and all the 2015 editions of the FACHRS Newsletter; including one intriguingly entitled “When is a Bank Manager not a Bank Manager”.

The information from the research was added to the project database. Data was loaded for 95 Bank Managers. A comparative analysis was done on 61 of them for whom data was more fully available. A final project update was produced using this data and appears in Volume 16 no 3 of the FACHRS Newsletter. (November 2015)

The completed research sheets (and narratives) are in pdf format and are available in the Bank Manager mini project section within the Members Pages for any member wishing to read about or to continue researching this fascinating topic.

Brita Wood
Bank Managers 1851-1911 Project Co-ordinator
Feb 2021