Chartist Ancestors
What did your family to in the revolution?

Millions signed the three great Chartist petitions of 1839 to 1848. Thousands were active in those years in the campaign to win the vote, secret ballots, and other democratic rights that we now take for granted.

Chartist Ancestors lists many of those who risked their freedom, and sometimes their lives, because of their participation in the Chartist cause. The names included on the site are drawn from newspapers, court records and books of the time, from later histories and other sources.

I would like to thank the many historians, researchers and the descendents of those associated with Chartism who have helped with this site since it was launched in 2003.

Mark Crail, Editor

How to...
Make the most of your visit to an archive or records office

Research your trade union ancestors

Find Chartist records in the National Archives

© Mark Crail

Chartist names
Chartist land company subscribers in Wigan

This page lists all those named in the Chartist land company share register with Wigan, Lancashire addresses. It includes 69 people, and includes a small number of double entries (see explanation).

During the 1840s, more than 70,000 people subscribed to the land company in the hope that they would be allocated land on one of the colonies of smallholdings established by the Chartist movement to rehouse industrial workers.

Find out more about the Chartist Land Company and understand the context for these names. See other towns for which we have lists of subscribers to the venture.

The lists were transcribed by Professor Jamie Bronstein of New Mexico State University during the course of her PhD research in the early 1990s. Chartist Ancestors is grateful to her for persmission to reproduce the lists here, believing that many family historians will find something of interest in them.

Professor Bronstein is also the author of Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800-1862 (Stanford, 1999).

A note of warning
There are likely to be many inconsistencies and errors in the lists that follow. Many of the would-be shareholders themselves may not have had a consistent way of spelling their own name and address and may have used informal versions not found on official maps and documents. Details from whatever written application they sent to the Land Company's offices were then copied by hand into a leather-bound ledger by clerks who may have had to guess at handwriting and abbreviations. Some 150 years later, these ledger entries were typed into a spreadsheet for private academic study. And finally, a further decade and a half on, they have been converted from one redundant software package to a more modern program, and some tidying up has been carried out before publication.

If entries here do not entirely tally with those for what may be the same people in the 1851 census or in other sources, then human error at one or some of these stages may be the explanation. Similarly, census entries also go through similar processes, and similar errors occur.

Find out more about the Chartist Land Company

Find out more about Chartism on this website, or browse the Chartist Ancestors Bookshop.

More history resources

Trade union history: union family trees,
A to z listing of 5,000 UK unions and more

Everything about Chartism and the Chartists

History guides and eyewitness accounts from mytimemachine

Tribune Magazine

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