Begin with the union, not the workhouse

Almost every family tree in England and Wales has a branch that leaned, at some point, on the poor law. Before 1834 each parish looked after its own poor, and the records of that older system — overseers' accounts, settlement examinations, removal orders — survive patchily in parish chest material. Then the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 swept that aside and created Poor Law Unions: groups of parishes, usually centred on a market town, each with a workhouse, an elected Board of Guardians and a paid master and matron.

So the first practical step is to establish which union your ancestor's parish belonged to. Union boundaries rarely followed county boundaries, and it is entirely normal to find a Shropshire village using a workhouse across the border in Montgomeryshire. Reference works and local record office finding aids list the parishes in each union, and most unions also had a name that reflects the town where the workhouse stood — that is the name you will usually search under, not the village.

Next, narrow the dates. The 1834 system ran until 1930, when unions were abolished and their functions passed to local authority public assistance committees. Records after that point look different and are often described as hospital or public assistance records rather than workhouse records.

Admission and discharge registers: the backbone of the collection

If one type of document survives for your union, it is usually the admission and discharge register, and it is where to start. Entries typically give:

• Date of admission and the register number
• Name, age and the parish from which the person came
• Occupation, marital status, and sometimes the number of children
• Date of discharge, with the reason — "own request", "situation found", "removed to another union", "died"
• Later in the century, a note of the ward or class to which the inmate was assigned

Read the running order of these registers carefully. A whole family may enter on the same day and leave on different ones, and a widow may reappear years later at the same workhouse door. Dates of admission also give you something rare in genealogy: a document tying a person to a precise place on a precise day, which can confirm a name that is otherwise too common to trace.

Creed registers and other records worth hunting for

From the 1870s, unions were required to keep creed registers, recording the religious persuasion of each inmate so that clergy of the right denomination could be admitted. They are unsentimental but wonderfully useful: a single line often gives name, age, parish, dates of admission and discharge, and the reason for leaving. Because they were kept continuously, they can bridge gaps where admission registers are missing.

Alongside them, look for birth and death registers kept inside the workhouse, medical officers' journals, masters' and matrons' journals, punishment books, and registers of the casual ward used by vagrants. Board of Guardians' minute books are the richest of all, though rarely indexed: they record individual cases, relief granted, families split up, and children sent out to service or apprenticed. Where the minutes survive, they can put flesh on a register entry in a way nothing else quite does.

Diet books and the texture of daily life

Dietary tables and diet books set out exactly what inmates received, meal by meal, and they are sobering reading. The Poor Law Commissioners issued standard dietary scales, and the guiding principle was less eligibility: conditions inside the workhouse were to be no better than those of the poorest labourer outside it. Expect bread, gruel, suet pudding, cheese and small quantities of meat, with the aged and the sick on a slightly more generous scale than the able-bodied.

These books tell you what your ancestor ate on a Tuesday in February, which is a startlingly intimate detail to recover from an archive. Combine them with punishment books — offences such as "talking in the ward" or "refusing to work" — and you begin to see the institution as a place of rules, routine and frequent small rebellions.

Family separation: what the records reveal

The 1834 system deliberately separated inmates into classes: able-bodied men, able-bodied women, the aged and infirm, and children. Husbands and wives were housed apart, and children over the age of seven were normally separated from their mothers. Later orders softened this slightly, allowing mothers to keep very young children with them, but for much of the nineteenth century a workhouse admission could split a family in a single afternoon.

The registers show this plainly if you look for it. Family members admitted together appear in the same admission sequence but may be assigned different wards, and their discharge dates often diverge. Children's registers, school registers and apprenticeship indentures can trace what happened next, and it is worth following siblings separately from that point — one may have been sent to a relative, another into service, another into an industrial school or emigrated.

Where to look, and what may be closed

• County and borough record offices hold most union records, including admission registers, creed registers and Guardians' minutes. Search their catalogues by union name as well as by parish.
• The National Archives holds central government correspondence with unions in class MH 12, useful for disputes and unusual cases rather than routine entries.
• Census returns from 1841 to 1921 list workhouse inmates on institution schedules, and can confirm which building your ancestor was in on census night.
• Local newspapers report Guardians' meetings, inquests and cases of destitution, often naming individuals and quoting the master's evidence.

One caution: records containing personal detail from the early twentieth century, particularly medical and children's records, are often closed for around 100 years. Ask the record office what can be consulted and whether a closure period applies. And if your search draws a blank, remember that most people who received poor relief never entered the workhouse at all — they took outdoor relief in their own homes, recorded in relieving officers' books, which survive less often but are well worth a look. Every register entry is a life, not just a line, and these documents reward patience more than almost any other family history source.