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 
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