Archive

What are Descriptive registers? Descriptive registers give information on a police officer’s period of service.  The registers can include information on previous public service such as time with another police force or in the armed services, together with pay rates and the stations in which they worked.  Details of promotions, transfers and reasons for leaving...

A building survey of a fairly ordinary 19th century brick stable block in the west of Worcestershire uncovered a peculiar set of objects. Nailed above the lintel to the entrance way was a pair of mammalian skeletal feet above an iron horseshoe. Plate 1 Horseshoe and paws nailed above a stable doorway (©WCC 2015) A...

Trooper Hal Wardale King, 2577, was the son of Mr. And Mrs. J. Wardale King, of Oldswinford House, Stourbridge, Worcs. He was killed in action  on 23rd April 1916, aged 21. Hal and his friend John (Jack) Preece joined Queen’s Own Worcestershire Hussars (Worcester Yeomanry) in September 1914. During his service with the Yeomanry Jack...

Guided tour of archive strong rooms, which gave the project its title, and areas usually off limits We are working with Archives West Midlands and Arts Connect to deliver a revolutionary new project which fuses archives and installation art. The project is called Strong Rooms, and the contribution of WAAS has been instrumental from the...

Lost Landscapes; Palaeolithic Life and Environment in Worcestershire.  Herds of Mammoths walking across the M5 at Strensham, Lions stalking through the Bredon Hills, the ice  and tundra spreading across the landscape…..which part of our Ice Age past are you most interested in?  Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service and Museums Worcestershire are currently running a short...

Popular family history website, Find my Past, is now available for free at the Hive. Find my Past contains four billion names including parish registers, military records, school records, census and directories, all of which are useful sources of information for tracing your family history. For the first time, researchers will be able to use...

Charred oat grains If you were to imagine the medieval farming landscape along the western borders of England and Wales, you would probably not think of fields of oats. Wheat is more likely to spring to mind, and probably sheep too. However, recently Worcestershire Archaeology has excavated an archaeological site at Mytton Oak on the...

Conservation work has begun on a series of volumes relating to Police records of Worcestershire.  Thanks to a grant from the National Manuscripts Conservation Trust, conservation work will be undertaken on approximately 70 volumes that are currently in a ‘Poor’ or ‘Unusable’ condition.  The West Mercia Police Authority archive includes the administrative and operational records...

This week’s post is by Rosie Pugh, one of our volunteers, who used one of the autograph books in our collection to research Hartlebury Castle’s role as a VAD hospital in The First World War and some of the soldiers who went there to convalesce. When my interest in archives was piqued last summer and...

Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service staff are currently engaged in a 15 month joint project with Shropshire Archives to make available the archives of West Mercia Police deposited with them.  Some of the work involves sorting, assessing and listing material transferred from the Police Headquarters at Hindlip.  Other work involves retroconverting or enhancing lists and...