London Guilds: Are there categories for the Companies? Can that be started?

Question

I have ancestors that were members of several of the London Companies: Fishmongers, Weavers, Tin Plate Workers and so on.  Is there a category for them?  A template?  If not, can they be created?

BTW - the records from the companies can be a genealogical delight!
Thanks

Answer 1

For those who don’t know, these guilds - better known as livery companies, because they did not all evolve from guilds - are not all professional bodies. Some are essentially charitable organisations now. As you say, some of them have a treasure trove of genealogical information.

There are already categories for some of the livery companies. You can find them at https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Livery_Companies_of_the_City_of_London

It would be easy to create categories for more livery companies but they should be sub-categories of that umbrella livery company category.

Comments

Thank you!  I searched for Companies and Guilds - forgot about Liveries.

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What about creating a template for them?  I don't speak "wikitree" well enough, but for the 1776 project there's a template that proclaims profiles that are part of the project?

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If you want to go down that track, perhaps you should link up with the England project? It has a sub-project on occupations.

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So, I've tried to create an entry for the Worshipful Company of Weavers, but instead I seem to have created a category?

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Worshipful_Company_of_Weavers%2C_City_of_London

and it's not appearing here:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Livery_Companies_of_the_City_of_London

Help?

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I have sorted that. The Weavers Company needed to be a category itself. To make it a sub-category of the general City of London livery companies category, you have to include [[Category: Livery Companies of the City of London]] - if you go to the Weavers Company category you created and click on edit, you will see what I did.

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Got it!  Thank you!

Answer 2

Just in case anyone doesn't know about it, http://www.londonroll.org has searchable records for a lot of the livery companies.

Answer 3

The approach to naming of the Livery companies of the City of London (for wikitree categorization) is worthy of consideration. 

In modern times they are often referred to as worshipful companies but in earlier documents they were referred to (using the Skinners as an example) as "the company of Skinners" or the "Skinners' Company" or the "Mistery of Skinners". Apparently, Mystery is derived from the French, metier, for trade. In the end I went with the naming style as used on the City of London website which employs the style "Skinners' Company".

http://liverydatabase.liverycompanies.info/

https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/about-the-city/history/Pages/livery-companies.aspx

regards, Steve

 

 

Comments

I had dealings with some of them in my working life and they were always referred to as ‘The Skinners’ Company’ or ‘The Drapers’ Company’ rather than by their more formal and ponderous titles of ‘The Worshipful Company of ....’ I agree it would be desirable to have a standard approach to their category names on Wikitree.

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I think a naming convention for the 100+ liveries of London would be great.  Their own website has "Worshipful Company" in its title, but that would also make alphabetizing the category of Livery Companies meaningless.

How does such a naming convention come to be?

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Wikitree allows the members of its community to add categories so categories do arise 'organically', e.g. I added "Livery Companies of the City of London" as a subcategory of the "City of London" and then added some of the subcategories of the "Livery Companies of the City of London" such as the "Skinners' Company". 

In addition to members creating categories there is a wikitree project for Categorization which works to manage the category hierarchy. The Categorization Project Team sometimes make adjustments to categories that members may have created (for the purposes of managing the hierarchy and for standardisation).

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project:Categorization