Many of us want to know more about nurses from the past often for very different reasons. Some of us want to know about our family history, while others want to know about how their profession, or field of practice developed. Whatever the reason, it is an intriguing journey. As more materials are digitized so much more is available to us all if you just know where to look. This is where the Tracing nurses: a guide to British nursing sources for researching family and local history is an invaluable resource.
The guide starts with the basics - does a family member have some memorabilia, a hospital badge, a training certificate, and moves on to the cornucopia of online resources (registers of nurses, historical nursing journals, oral histories) and locations of non-digital archives. The guide is accompanied by two 'how to search' resources, how to search hospital records and how to search nursing registers on Ancestry.
Janet is researching two 20th Century nurses.
Mollie Murphy had an amazing life - she was a suffragette, she travelled to the Soviet Union twice and nursed in London and Spain during the Spanish Civil War. However, she is not famous and much of her life is invisible. The guide helped to ensure all the main sources had been explored, but also yielded unexpected gifts of extra resources and places to explore.
Mary Kerr was a village nurse in a small community in Cumbria, whose experience was brought to life though finding her qualifications, and the journey of her life and career, including an unexpected romance in her later years.
So, we wish you good luck on your search. It won't always be easy, nursing was, and is, a mostly a female profession, and women are less likely to have been documented in the past than men.
Do let us know if you have used this guide successfully or have suggestions for its improvement via the History of Nursing forum email honf@rcn.org.uk.
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