Welsh Journals

coalfield. The relative renaissance of the blast furnace, with the development of integrated steelworks and, from the 1960s, of oxygen-blown methods, saw fewer works become increasingly dependent on larger blast furnaces. Again, the lack of figures for 'furnace in blast' is no fault of the authors. Undoubtedly British Blast Furnace Statistics will soon become the starting-point for worthwhile research on the history of British iron smelting. It does not pretend to be a complete economic history but perhaps it is so good in what it does do that readers will have to be forgiven for expecting more. The meticulousness of the authors is perhaps highlighted best by a footnote [p. xxxiv] in which they point to the failure of the 'compilers' of the Royal Commission on Historical MSS to check the names of registered companies against Companies House records! COLIN BABER Cardiff STUDYING FAMILY AND COMMUNITY HISTORY: NINETEENTH AND Twentieth CENTURIES. Cambridge University Press, 1994: Volume 1, Ruth Finnegan and Michael Drake (eds.), FROM FAMILY TREE to FAMILY HISTORY (pp. 208, £ 35.00 Hb; £ 11.95 Pb); Volume 2, W T. R. Pryce (ed.), FROM FAMILY HISTORY to COMMUNITY HISTORY (pp. 256, £ 35.00 Hb; £ 11.95 Pb); Volume 3, John Golby (ed.), COMMUNITIES AND Families (pp. 240, £ 35.00 Hb; £ 11.95 Pb); Volume 4, Michael Drake and Ruth Finnegan (eds.), SOURCES AND METHODS: A HANDBOOK (pp. 256, £ 35.00 Hb; Ll 1.95 Pb). Historical research and writing have never been the exclusive province of professional historians. Alongside the few hundred academics who hold posts in the universities, the active membership of local and family history societies must top a quarter of a million. Still more remarkably, the National Trust is now the largest voluntary society in Britain, with over two million members, more than the Church of England. Alas, academics have usually been notoriously snooty towards the non-professionals, whose enthusiasm powers the tides on which the professional boats float. Now and then some professional historians recognize their mutual interest. One of the most striking instances was Peter Laslett's mobilization of an immense scattered lay team to read parish registers, in order to feed in the raw material which the Cambridge Group needed to analyse the demographic structure of Britain from the seventeenth century onwards. In a more diffuse way, both the oral history and History Workshop movements have also drawn much of their strength from amateur historians based