In early February 2009, I found myself heading to Cheshire Archives and Local Studies to take a look at an item in the collections there. Just a few days earlier, I\u2019d been working my way through an online catalogue in search of early modern (i.e., sixteenth and seventeenth century) literary manuscripts, when I\u2019d come across a reference which seemed intriguing, to say the least. I wasn\u2019t at all sure that the trip was going to be worth it \u2013 the catalogue description wasn\u2019t detailed enough for me to be sure that it was at all relevant. Still, worth a train fare, anyway.<\/p>\n
The catalogue in question is Access to Archives<\/a>, which contains listings for collections of papers held in record offices throughout England and Wales. It\u2019s a brilliant resource \u2013 not just because of the sheer volume and scope of the records it lists, but also because it allows you to get a good overview of individual collections once you\u2019ve come across items within them that seem interesting. So you can always get to see where a particular item fits within any larger collection, and get a quick grasp on the extent of a collection and how it\u2019s been catalogued. As a student of early modern literature, I\u2019ve long been used to working with the collections of big research libraries, which are often particularly strong in their holdings of literary manuscripts, and it\u2019s easy to overlook other repositories; but the strengths of the record offices lie not so much in a concentration of literary materials as in their inclusion in more miscellaneous collections, often of family papers. Rather than a manuscript that\u2019s passed through the hands of several sellers and buyers on its way to its permanent home, you can find yourself holding something that is still part of a collection that might have been assembled over centuries, and put together too not by a connoisseur or collector but in the course of everyday life. Of course, that\u2019s not always going to be informative \u2013 but it can also give you a powerful sense of provenance that can be very helpful to the researcher.<\/p>\n On top of that, this way of organising the data means that you can explore the holdings of the archives by browsing as well as searching. So once you\u2019ve come across something useful in a collection of papers, you can zoom out, as it were, to learn a bit about their history and extent, and you can see the major headings under which they\u2019re organised. Lots of collections of family papers focus, for obvious reasons, on documents relating to property and its transmission down the generations \u2013 deeds, wills, marriage settlements and so on. So those are often grouped together. Then you get things like correspondence, in which business affairs can also often predominate. The fun, though, starts once you get to the personal papers, or enticing categorisations such as \u2018Miscellaneous\u2019 or \u2018Literary and Miscellaneous\u2019. It was while browsing through just such a category in a collection of family papers that I\u2019d been brought up short by the description of this one particular item…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In early February 2009, I found myself heading to Cheshire Archives and Local Studies to take a look at an item in the collections there. Just a few days earlier, I\u2019d been working my way through an online catalogue in … Continue reading