The life of the poor in Swaledale & Arkengarthdale nearly 200 years ago is coming under scrutiny as part of a nationwide project.

With the support of the Friends of Swaledale Museum a group of volunteers are embarking on a study to unearth the hidden history of life for the local poor in the 19th-century. Working with the National Archives, they are cataloguing hundreds of letters, memos and reports held within the long-forgotten records of the Reeth Poor Law Union. Ultimately the scanned records will be made available online at the National Archives website. There local and family historians will be able to search by name, place, date and event, providing a level of detail found in no other records from the period. From the running of the local workhouse, to tales of family breakdown, greed and corruption, the records will provide a detailed snapshot of a key period in Britain's history.

It is estimated that around 80 per cent of the population of England and Wales in the mid-1800s would have been affected by the Poor Law Unions. Yet despite their historic value much of what exists in the files remains a mystery as they are poorly catalogued and underused. Reeth is one of 22 Poor Law Unions included in the 18-month project and around 250 volunteers across England and Wales will catalogue more than 100,000 pages of documents, covering from the mid-1830s to around 1870.

"The 19th-century saw a tremendous expansion in Britain's economy and huge increases in wealth and yet at the same time there was extreme poverty" said local coordinator Alan Mills. "These records that will help researchers, family historians and academics, find out what life was like for ordinary people."