Genealogists Magazine
Genealogists Magazine — published as the Genealogists' Magazine — is the quarterly journal of the Society of Genealogists in London, England. First issued in April 1925, it has now been published for more than a century, and it carries articles on family history sources, methods and research for genealogists. It is the official journal of Britain's national genealogical society, and back issues, in digitised form, form part of the research resources available to the society's members.
The Society of Genealogists
The Society of Genealogists was founded in 1911 as a place where professional genealogists and amateur enthusiasts could meet. From its earliest days the society campaigned on behalf of family historians — it was instrumental, for example, in preventing the destruction of the original returns from the 1911 Census — and it devoted much energy to indexing records at a time when cataloguing of archive collections was limited. At its heart is its library, described as the largest specialist genealogical library outside North America, with particular strengths in runs of genealogical and local history magazines, alongside archives of papers deposited by genealogists as a result of their searches.
The society was originally called the Society of Genealogists of London. On 12 September 1924, by special resolution of an extraordinary meeting, and with the permission of the Board of Trade, it omitted 'of London' from its name. That change came only months before the launch of its journal, and the magazine therefore belongs to the period in which the society was consciously presenting itself as a national body for genealogy in Britain, rather than a purely metropolitan club.
Foundation in 1925
In April 1925, following the demise of the periodical The Genealogist, the Society of Genealogists began its own quarterly journal, the Genealogists' Magazine. Bibliographic records in WorldCat describe it straightforwardly: a journal in English, published by the Society of Genealogists in London from 1925, and styled in some listings as the official organ of the society. The society itself notes with pride that the magazine is now over one hundred years old, the first issue having appeared in 1925.
The launch year was a busy one for the society in other respects too. In the same period Percival Boyd began work on the marriage index that bears his name — Boyd's Marriage Index, compiled over many years from transcribed English parish registers, which by the time of Boyd's death in 1955 contained over six million entries. The magazine and the index were products of the same impulse: to make the raw materials of family history accessible, organised and permanent, at a time when most parish registers and probate records could be consulted only by visiting scattered record offices and registries in person.
What the magazine publishes
The Genealogists' Magazine carries articles on all aspects of genealogy. Its subject matter, as the batch description of the title summarises it, is family history sources, methods and research. In practice that means articles explaining particular classes of record — parish registers, wills and administrations, monumental inscriptions, apprenticeship and occupational records, military and maritime records, and records of Britons overseas — alongside studies of individual families, transcripts and indexes of original documents, and discussions of research method: how to interpret evidence, how to prove a line of descent, and how to avoid the errors that arise when people of the same name are confused.
Historical examples show the magazine's international reach within its British frame. Research by Major V. C. P. Hodson was published in the magazine between March 1932 and December 1933 under the title 'Some Families with a Long East Indian Connection'. Other articles of relevance to researchers of Britain's imperial past include 'Indian Inscriptions, Lists and Locations' in March 1935, and 'British Monuments, Bencoolen Sumatra and Bihar India' in June 1940. Such material reflects the society's collections, which include transcripts, monumental inscriptions and correspondence relating to Britons in India and elsewhere overseas, much of it gathered under schemes organised by the society in the twentieth century.
A journal of record for a century of research
A quarterly journal published continuously for a hundred years accumulates a value greater than the sum of its issues. Articles in the Genealogists' Magazine have preserved transcripts of records, pedigrees worked out by researchers who are no longer alive, and corrections to published genealogies that exist nowhere else in print. An index to the magazine covering Volume 1, from April 1925, through to Volume 25 in 1996 was prepared and long maintained as an archived web page, allowing researchers to find articles by subject across seven decades of publication.
Digitised copies of the Genealogists' Magazine are available to members of the Society of Genealogists as one of the society's online databases. That digitisation matters practically: a family historian tracing a line discussed in the magazine in the 1930s can now read the article from home rather than travelling to the society's library in London, and can search across the society's digitised collections alongside it. The magazine thus continues to work as a research tool long after its articles were written, in a way its founders, working in the age of the card index, would have recognised and approved.
Place within the society's work
The magazine is one strand of a wider educational programme. Education has long been an important part of the society's work: it has held lectures since its early years — the first monthly lecture was held in 1916 — and it continues to run lectures, workshops and courses for family historians at every level. The journal complements that teaching in print, publishing considered articles rather than the ephemeral news of the family history world. Simon Fowler, a former editor of a national family history magazine, writing about the society for a history of the historical profession, emphasised the society's library, its indexing tradition and its campaigning role — the context within which the Genealogists' Magazine has always operated.
The society also treats its journal as part of the wider exchange of genealogical scholarship. Other societies that produce a digital journal containing substantial historical content are invited to exchange it for the society's quarterly Genealogists' Magazine — a modern version of the exchange arrangements between learned societies that have operated for as long as journals like this have existed. Through such exchanges the society's library builds the runs of genealogical and local history periodicals for which it is known, and the magazine travels to libraries and societies well beyond its own membership.
Genealogy then and now
The world in which the Genealogists' Magazine began was one in which genealogy was practised by a relatively small number of professionals, antiquaries and dedicated amateurs, working from original documents, printed visitations and county histories. The world it serves a century later is vastly larger: family history is one of Britain's most popular pastimes, millions of records are available online, and DNA testing has added a scientific dimension the founders could not have imagined. Yet the problems the magazine addresses — how to find a record, how to read it, how to weigh evidence and how to record a conclusion honestly — are unchanged, and its articles on sources and methods remain directly useful to the modern researcher.
That continuity is the magazine's distinction. Many family history magazines have been launched for the popular market; the Genealogists' Magazine is instead the journal of a learned society, written largely by researchers for researchers, and published without interruption since 1925. It documents, in its own evolving pages, the development of British genealogy from an antiquarian pursuit into a disciplined, evidence-based field of study.
Editors and contributors
The magazine's contributors are drawn from the society's own world: professional genealogists, archivists, librarians, academics and experienced amateur researchers, many of them members of the society. Articles are typically the product of original work in archives rather than summaries of other people's research, and the magazine has carried studies by figures closely associated with the society's great indexing and transcription projects. Research published in its pages — for example the East India studies of the 1930s noted above, and Simon Fowler's account of some of the society's special collections, published in the magazine in 2000 — shows the range from record-based family studies to institutional history. That contributor base gives the journal a character distinct from commercial family history titles: its authority rests on the research of the community that reads it.
Readership and availability
The magazine is received by members of the Society of Genealogists as part of their membership, and is held by libraries in Britain and overseas that maintain runs of genealogical periodicals — WorldCat records holdings under both its early description as the society's official organ and its later description as the journal of the Society of Genealogists. Its London base places it at the centre of the network of archives, libraries and record repositories — The National Archives, the London archives and the society's own library — on which British family history depends.
For the directory reader, the essential facts are simple: the Genealogists' Magazine is a quarterly journal, published in London by the Society of Genealogists since April 1925, devoted to family history sources, methods and research, and now more than a hundred years old. Its longevity, its learned-society character and its digitised back run make it one of the foundational periodicals of British genealogy.
