Visiting archives

[Phoenix]

Covid halted my in person for several years. Having revisited TNA in several years, I was struck by how few researchers there were.

During the course of my visit, I discovered

• divorce papers (where, intriguingly, the petition was missing!)
• chancery cases which highlighted family relationships and in one case a copy of a will not previously known to exist as the original was destroyed in WW2
• Prize papers for ships captured by the navy

There is such a huge variety of records which are never likely to be available online. In the past, I've used a huge variety of documents. Today, I'm in danger of thinking that if it isn't onlne, it doesn't exist.


I know that none of us are getting any younger, and that I'm very lucky to live in the London area, having access to so much stuff, but is anyone else looking at original documents any more?

[kiterunner]

The navy prize papers are on The Genealogist website, Phoenix, or at least some of them are.

[Olde Crone]

Chancery cases led me to a very useful one which had been ongoing for over 70 years. It concerned one small field which turned out to have been in the family for at least three hundred years. There were family trees going back to before that, along with land transfers, wills etc - all scattered over TNA catalogue...... I know that I never got a complete picture, or all the documents, but those which I did were of fantastic help.

(The judgement of the court in the end was that the field should be divided in two equal parts....)I

OC

[ElizabethHerts]

OC, chancery cases are a mine of information.

Through family history research, my mother was in contact with a lovely man who had painstakingly researched one branch of our family. He worked in London and spent his lunch hours in the record office!

He wrote a book on his family, the Pursers. They were closely linked with my Jeffcoat family and there was a contested will where there were no children and bequests to wider family. The chancery case rumbled on for decades but produced many documents, some of which I have (copies). I'd love to go to the NA and see the originals for myself.

After my mother died Mr Purser and I kept in touch until his death in his late 90s. We never met but he was delightful.

[Phoenix]

Originally Posted by kiterunner

The navy prize papers are on The Genealogist website, Phoenix, or at least some of them are.

The ones I've been looking at haven't been digitised yet. I'm attending a zoom lecture on the subject, given by a good friend who sadly died shortly after it was recorded, so perhaps I can learn a bit more then.

[Olde Crone]

My archive visiting days are over but I still harbour the worrying idea that not everything in every archive has been properly catalogued. This anxiety is revived every time I read somewhere that some important document has been found in a random box!

OC

[Phoenix]

As we work through, trying to turn our HQ into a viable library, we keep on coming across comments about how our predecessors were trying to do the same thing.

Some forty years ago, it was reckoned that only 30% of Croydon's local archives were catalogued. On a recent open day, a friend saw exactly the records he wished to consult. They do not appear in the catalogue, so I doubt he'd be allowed access.