Using legal records to research social history

Author / Creator

Worthen, Hannah, author

Available as

Online

Summary

This case study will provide the questions that students can use when they first approach legal records for their own historical research and the tools when they want to go deeper into understandin...

This case study will provide the questions that students can use when they first approach legal records for their own historical research and the tools when they want to go deeper into understanding them. Using the example of the 'Will and Testament of Mrs Frank Leslie', a twentieth-century socialite who bequeathed almost her entire estate to the cause of women's suffrage, it will suggest a methodology that can be used when considering legal sources for social history, as well as suggesting other historical approaches. In doing so, it will provide a framework for students to understand and use legal sources for their own research. Legal documents are compelling sources for historians. They are windows into the ordinary experiences of people in the past and into the society that they lived. Within legal sources, we can find the disagreements, the crimes, and the hopes of ordinary people who might not have touched the historical written record in any other way. Yet, using and interpreting them can provide challenges. Historic legal systems were complex, as were the documents that they produced, and even within one particular place at one particular time, there were a vast array of different legal structures. Despite this, they can be of enormous value to lots of different types of historians who are interested in finding out about the lives and experiences of people in the past.

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