Hi Gareth, Although Peter Higginbotham's site is interesting it does not seem to me to be very relevant to my enquiry since Mary James and her children did not live in a workhouse but in a cottage in Redstone. I know that the Royal Commission on the Poor Law recommended in 1832 that outdoor relief be abolished and that paupers should be forced to live in workhouses if they wanted any assistance but according to the article on the Poor Laws in Wikipedia "the recommendation of the Royal Commission that 'outdoor relief' (relief given outside of a workhouse)[55] should be abolished – was never implemented." Furthermore the Wikipedia article goes on to say: "Despite efforts to ban outdoor relief parishes continued to offer it as a more cost effective method of dealing with pauperism. The Outdoor Labour Test Order[64] and Outdoor Relief Prohibitory Order[65] were both issued in order to try and prevent people receiving relief outside of the workhouse. Despite these later edicts it is notable that the Poor Law Amendment Act did not ban all forms of outdoor relief.[66]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Poor_Laws Therefore if outdoor relief continued to be provided in Pembrokeshire in certain cases after 1834 (and I don't suppose there would have been much point in describing someone in the census as a pauper unless they were in receipt of assistance) where would such information be recorded? Presumably (and I could be wrong here) the workhouse records would only have dealt with people in workhouses and not those receiving outdoor relief. Roy On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 5:06 PM, Gareth <tirbach@clara.co.uk> wrote: >>In the 1861 census a relative of mine, Mary James, was described as a >> "pauper." Does that mean that she would have been receiving financial >> assistance from the authorities? > > Hi Roy > Peter Higginbotham's excellent site should tell you all you would want to > know about paupers and workhouses - mayb take some digging around as there's > a lot on there > http://users.ox.ac.uk/~peter/workhouse/index.html > > Gareth > Genuki Wales http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/wal/ > Help Page http://home.clara.net/tirbach/hicks.html > Cwmgors/Waun http://www.tytwp.plus.com/Waun/Waun.html