We visit the Family History department at the Mitchell Library.
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00:00In terms of the city, it has started to really grow.
00:04It becomes lots of migration from Ireland and across the Highlands,
00:08all crowned in places like High Street.
00:12It is a really enterprising city, so everything was run by Glasgow.
00:18Obviously they started the water, the locating,
00:21they ran the gas, the electricity, the telephone services,
00:24all of which we have records of.
00:26The other thing is public health, because there's a huge issue about public health.
00:30All these people crowded into these small areas.
00:33Huge issue about disease and everything, public health,
00:36which they did a lot of work to try and combat.
00:39Sometimes they did, because some of their medical officers
00:42of health are all renowned, so sometimes they managed to do that.
00:46But it's a very much changed city.
00:48It's becoming very large in all of these Irish and Highlanders
00:51and others coming into the city.
00:54They are very enterprising.
00:55One of the first things they started was the police force in Glasgow,
01:00which was founded in 1800.
01:03We have police records in terms of individual policemen.
01:07There's always been a dispute between the Metropolitan Police Force and Glasgow
01:12about which one was the biggest, until not that long ago,
01:16a member of the public complained to the Advertising Authority,
01:19and the Metropolitan Police were told that on no account could they claim to be the oldest police force.
01:24So victory for the citizen there.
01:27What we have here is, in terms of family history,
01:30we have lists of all the policemen from about the 1840s, 50s, right up to 1995,
01:37including the whole of Strathclyde.
01:38We've got names here of individual policemen.
01:45There's about 20% of these Irish, but the biggest amount of people are Gales from the Highlands.
01:51So really, really, lots of people coming in to join the police force here.
01:56And if we look at some of them, if you look at some of their records, there's a lot of people
02:01found drunk, they get reported for being drinking, or bringing in a civilian without due caught,
02:09but all of this about drunk, drink, drink, you can read pages of them.
02:13So I would always say, if you're doing your family history and you think the policeman's going to be
02:18very respectable, you may need to think again.
02:21To be fair, as it becomes later on, the Metropolitan Police is the same.
02:25As it becomes more professional, you get less of that.
02:28But a lot of people look to see when they see their family member,
02:31who they think they must be really good.
02:34They've in fact been fine drunk for a lot of things, in a lot of places,
02:38and bringing in civilians without due caught.
02:41Very popular, we have databases for all of these things up to 1932.
02:46So it's very easy for people to find their policeman ancestor.
02:49But a really important source in terms of that migrant community as well.
02:54Because that's, and people are always looking for their Irish or their Highland ancestors as well.