Archive

Christmas is a time for charitable giving, and previous years we’ve highlighted St Thomas day Charities and the Robin Breakfast as examples. The Coventry Family of Croome used to hand out beef and bread to their tenants each Christmas Eve, as shown in these photos from the Croome archive held here in The Hive. Lord...

Lavinia Talbot née Lyttelton kept a diary from her teenage years right through to her 70s.  The diaries, now housed at The Hive, provide a unique window on her daily life, thoughts and feelings and in particular her reflections on life during the First World War.  1915 had been a difficult year for the Talbots...

“Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat…” It’s not just geese which got fat, lots of animals would be fattened up ready for Christmas. Therefore in December Fat Stock Shows were held to sell animals, and also reward farmers by offering prizes for the best animals in a similar way to summer agricultural shows....

Here at Worcestershire Archive Service we are committed to preserving and protecting the records that are deposited in our care. What happens though when items come to us in a less than desirable condition? Thanks to the very varied custodial histories of the collections that come to us, we can never be quite sure exactly...

For the final instalment of our Explore Your Archive feature we are looking at a very well known painter, Joseph Blackburn. Whilst Blackburn’s artistic works are famous across the world, details of his personal life are less clear; to date there appears to have been no confirmation of the details of his later life and...

Today we are looking at the extraordinary life of a Worcestershire resident who we actually featured a part of last year’s Explore Your Archive campaign too. As part of our feature on Dandy Row in 2014, we looked briefly at the life of Henry Martin. As a result of this initial work we were lucky...

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,...

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...