Writer and historian Denise Bates sent us a message recently to explain what The British Newspaper Archive and the family history records available at findmypast have helped her discover about a nineteenth-century mining family. Denise wrote Pit Lasses: Women and Girls in Coalmining c1800-1914 after discovering her great-great-great-great-grandmother listed as a miner in the 1841 census and wondering what her life would have been like.   ************** Many people are surprised to learn that until 1842, women and girls worked underground in coal …