Archive

Today we mark Explore Your Archive 2015 by looking at the life of a man who worked as the first County Surveyor for Worcestershire.  Joseph Garrett was born in Gloucestershire. He worked as a road surveyor and, according to his obituary in the Worcester Journal he became head surveyor in Kidderminster in 1877. He became the...

Today we mark Explore Your Archive 2015 by looking at the extraordinary life of a man who worked for a short while as House Surgeon at Kidderminster Infirmary and went on to take part in one of the early Arctic Expeditions.  A chance discussion with a researcher in our Original Archive Area led to the...

Worcestershire’s historic past is made up of multiple layers of lives: sometimes dramatic, sometimes tragic, sometimes unacknowledged and occasionally forgotten. Staff at Worcestershire Archive Service discover hints of these people every day when helping researchers to explore the archives, however, we rarely get to find out more about them. To mark the Explore Your Archive 2015 campaign,...

Would you like to go behind the scenes here in The Hive? Would you see some the archive ‘treasures’ and handle real archaeological objects. As part of Explore Your Archive we are offering another of our popular tours which take you past the ‘staff only’ doors. Archive Strongroom – come and see where we store...

Jean North interviewing Mrs Hewlett  Getting Started It’s 20 years since the then Hereford and Worcester Record Office took its first tentative steps into the world of oral history.  The first project was quite an ambitious one – a five year project to record local people’s reminiscences of World War II.  Valuable support came from...

Tea and Testimony:Discovering the extraordinary lives of ordinary people Worcestershire’s historic past is made up of multiple layers of the lives of its residents – sometimes dramatic, sometimes tragic, sometimes unacknowledged and occasionally even forgotten. Many of these people, though ordinary, actually had an extraordinary impact upon the world. Worcestershire Archive Service has a wealth of...

To mark the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt (25 October 1415), we wanted to show you a document in our collections issued by Henry V several months before the famous victory over the French. Worcestershire has long been associated with Agincourt.  Michael Drayton’s 17th-century poem The Battaile of Agincourt famously evoked the Worcestershire...

On Friday 6th November we are running our WWI in the Archives workshop. There is a lot of interest in this period, and this workshop The first part of the workshop will look at how you can trace a soldier within the records held here. Many people are working on projects researching men listed on...

Next week we will bid our Skills for the Future Trainee, Sarah, a fond farewell. She has worked incredibly hard and achieved a lot since starting with our Service in July 2014. Staff and customers alike will be sad to see her go, but we look forward to hearing about her next steps. Here, Sarah...

On 13th October WAAS Manager Victoria Bryant and User Services Manager Lisa Snook travelled to The Lowry in Salford Quays to attend the Discovering Communities Discovering Collections conference 2015.  In fact, they didn’t just attend – Lisa gave a paper on a project that we have been working on over the summer to learn more...