Talking about my career as a teacher last night on MyT reminded me that I had never got round to writing about the world of archives, for which I originally trained. During my first degree in modern languages I became interested in medieval French language and literature. Old and Middle High German never held the same attraction. I then moved on to study medieval Latin and paleography and diplomatic – that is old handwriting styles and the different forms of documents issued by different authorities.
A lot of such knowledge is only useful if you end up working in the Public Record Office or the Vatican archives or somewhere equally high powered. Local record offices concentrate on local parish records, local landowners and local government records. Not all vicars can be persuaded to deposit the parish records, though they usually regret that if their church burns down and everything in the parish chest is reduced to ashes. These are the sort of records most useful to genealogists, though if your ancestors got transported to the colonies for a felony, then the Sessions records are also good.
London has a large number of record offices, from the Public Record Office, under the aegis of the Master of the Rolls, to the India Office archives, which have some amazing artefacts as well as documents. It is the number of parishes in London that causes the most problems for family historians. There were over 100 parishes in the City of London alone at one point. So anyone arriving to look for an ancestor with a fairly common name really had to know in which parish he/she lived. I was always on the look-out for a name like Ichabod Shufflebottom that would stand out from the rest, but never found one.
Archivists have to learn how to deal with damaged documents and to prioritise repair work. The repairer is a very skilled craftsman and does wonderful work, but needs to be told which document needs treatment first. As there is always a long back-log of of collections waiting to be catalogued and indexed, so there is always a long list of documents waiting for repair.
Archives, like libraries, always come bottom of any list of projects on which money should be spent, but are definitely in the top ten when it comes to cuts. Shortsighted? Of course, until everything is either on microfiche or transcribed. But then the records are all very British – not “multi-culti” enough, I expect.
Boadicea's Chariot 
Thanks for this, Sheona. Very interesting. I’m not sure it would be a career I would have ever considered, although I did want to be a librarian when I was about eight years old.
Sheona; very interesting, as Ara says. I will return for a proper read later – when the squashed grape throwing contest in the lounge is over…; )
Thanks Sheona.
I’ve spent years and years working in the National Archives (formerly Public Records Office), first in Chancery Lane and latterly at Kew. It’s almost home from home, although a lot of the people I knew who worked there have now retired.
Unfortunately, the NA no longer seems to be interested in anything other than family history which, of course, makes money. It seems to be dramatically reducing the numbers of people who know about anything other than family history. At least, they now allow people to photograph the material – which makes life easier for people like me who have had to travel half way around the world to use the Archives.
All the material I work on is parchment which survives much better than paper, so it’s always sent to the back of the ‘Preservation’ queue. Although, I was really delighted that Preservation used my work to restore a 90 foot roll to its original condition from a couple of hundred scraps of parchment.
I once knew a vicar who wouldn’t part with his registers – he gave them to me on ‘long term loan’ so that I could work on them. I gave him a transcript back in return!
As you say, the London ‘Local Archives’ are a bit of a mess: the Metropolitan, Guildhall, and Westminster. The Guildhall is temporarily shut, and the records are accessible at the Metropolitan Archives – who told me that they will probably remain there for the foreseeable future. However, Ancestry have already put on line images of most of the parish registers from both the Guildhall and the Metropolitan and seems to be making a start on those from Westminster.
As to your multi-cultural bit – I’ve noticed that most of the Archives now have a notice asking people to make note of any ‘foreigners’ in the registers!
My ideal job would be the person who names roads and streets so your knowledge and training would be fantastic. Out would go the many roads named after the romantic poets and in would come names with relevance to the local history. Wordsworth Drive v Dinosaur Tooth Drive. Which would you choose?
Isobel
I lived in Milton Keynes for some years. Whoever was initially responsible for the names of the estates and roads had done their research very well – they were related to the history of the area.
Fascinating, Sheona.
That’s interesting Boadicea. My block of flats ahs a pretentious name that has no relation to the area, but is built o n the site of a Victorian steamworks and laundry. I would love it to be named Laundry Court. There was also a tobacco factory nearby but the street is named after a politician for his national rather than local fame. I quite fancy living in Tobacco Factory Street.
Ooh! Isobel – that’s so Politically Incorrect! You don’t stand a chance of getting the council to agree to that change!
That’s one of the things I really love about wandering around the centre of towns in the UK – the names of the roads and lanes reflect the past.
Boadicea I haven’t even tried! I go for political correctness most of the time as I think generally it’s about sensitivity to each other and commonsense. However, you are probably right and the commonsense bit would not be too much in evidence at the council who haven’t quite grasped what its about.
Many schools in south London have been taken over by Lord harris of carpet fame who has turned them into academies (don’t go there) and called them after himself. so the old names with their historical connections have gone and we have increasing numbers of Harris Academies…
Apparently the regeneration of Elephant and Castle could also result in names being lost and replaced with the names of the developers.
Oh No! Isobel! Another area I know well…
Once upon a when, I taught history in the Lambeth area. I threw out the ‘grind through the ages’ and set up a course which looked at the local area and what the students could find out just by looking around them. It was, even then, a multi-ethnic school. They all loved it. How do I know? At the end of the year 59/60 students opted to continue with history compared with the normal 8/60.
It being nearly mid-night, I must depart!
I may have to have a chat with you in private Boadicea!
Local history is a great way into a love of history, widespread in London schools until the 1980s when Margaret T’s government introduced the national Curriculum and the philosophy of education underpinning why and what should be taught went by the board in the increasingly politicised focus and the Empty Vessel Theory.
Sweet dreams. I’m about to go out into the rain
Sheona; sorry for the delay; this blog has been one of those fascinating reads that I kept meaning to come back to…
I think local and national archives are so important, and it’s such a shame they are dismissed and treated as so unimportant. I have been trying to do a bit of research on a particular chapter of my local history -the siege of Lathom House in – but since there is literally nothing left of the place, having been literally torn apart by the roundheads in the civil war, it is proving very difficult. There is a lot of stuff on the likes of Wikipedia, but you never can be totally sure of its accuracy …So I find my most useful tool was local libraries, and the helpfulness of their librarians. I found out, with their help for example, that some of the local historic hotels and part of Ormskirk Parish Church are built from stones plundered from Lathom House; that Shakespeare and his players frequented the place, and that it was the inspiration for Richmond Palace. Anyway, sorry for sort of going off on a tangent here – I could go on forever about this – but I think that the job of archivists and local librarians is so important because this information is like treasure, which, if not preserved properly, will be lost to future generations.
Claire.
When I first started working in the PRO, one almost needed a letter from God to get access to the documents… it is, thanks goodness, no longer the case.
A lot of my ‘academic’ friends and acquaintances were rather scathing about family historians. They are no longer so, after I’ve given my lecture on how Joe Blog’s interest in his family has ensured that the archives are in the Public Eye and unlikely to be quietly shut down!
Isobel – certainly!