The Yorkshire Registers of Deeds, which date from the early 1700s until the 1970s, contain thousands of peoples’ names linked to property transactions across all three Ridings of the county. As such, they are an amazing resource for genealogists and local historians, but sadly underused because of their relative inaccessibility. My presentation will give a brief introduction to the Registers, highlighting the type of information available about people and places, families and inheritance, before focusing on their importance when researching women’s lives. The latter half of the presentation will reveal the significance of women’s capital investment in the growth of four Yorkshire towns in the late 1880s – Middlesbrough, Scarborough, Halifax & Hull – and challenge the perception that land ownership and property investment are often perceived as particularly male activities. Although the formal organisational lending sector was expanding during this period, the majority of mortgage documentation relates to peer-to-peer lending, the impact of which is missing entirely from published research.

Our speaker:

Dr Joan Heggie is an independent scholar, having retired from Teesside University, Middlesbrough after twenty years as a Research Fellow. She is also a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London.  Joan’s current research draws on the Yorkshire Registers of Deeds to investigate property transfers, particularly women’s role within transactions. The Registers of Deeds are particularly ‘name rich’ and therefore ideal for genealogists and local historians, as well as for academic research. Funded by the British Academy (2021-2023), Joan is using mortgage documentation to establish the level of capital investment in four Yorkshire towns across the three Ridings of Yorkshire in the late 19th century. The databases of all names indexed are freely available to search at: www.registerofdeeds.org.uk. The analysis and results of her first study of women’s involvement with property was published in 2019 by Boydell Press.

Joan’s wider research reflects her determination to make archives more accessible to the general public and academic researchers alike. From 2008-2010, she led the British Steel Archive Project in collaboration with Teesside Archives in Middlesbrough, which catalogued the entire British Steel Collection held on Teesside. Outputs from that project included the 2013 book, ‘Middlesbrough’s Iron & Steel Industry’, as well as a variety of academic and magazine articles. More recently Joan has been working on developing new ways of combining traditional historical research with new digital and genealogical methods to uncover the lives of interesting but ordinary women, such as the artist, Viva Talbot and farmer, Miss Jack May.