Archive

If you were following our blog posts in November you will remember our series about Dandy Row which we featured as part of the Explore Your Archive campaign. We began to research the history of this small terrace of houses after finding a photo in the archives which dated back to about 1900 and subsequently...

Love is in the archives, and you can find out more on Tuesday 17th February at our workshop about parish records, which will be held at The Hive. Within the many parish records held here at Worcestershire Archives are the parish registers, including marriage registers, and the baptisms which then resulted from many of these...

Christmas and New Year is traditionally a time for families to gather and this may have inspired you to start researching your family history. But where do you start? It is always best to start with what you already know and work backwards. Record all the information that you know, your date and place of...

Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of Winston Churchill, one of the most notable figures in British and world history 75905 – photographer RJ Collins Churchill came to Worcestershire to receive the Freedom of the City of Worcester in 1950. It was a very memorable event for the city, and when the subject...

My name is Sarah Ganderton. I love museums, charity shops, crafts, movies, chocolate and warm woolly socks. I joined the Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service as a Skills for the Future Trainee in July.  This is through a Heritage Lottery Funded project called Growing Worcestershire’s Treasures.  On our training scheme seven of us have the...

Christmas is upon and in the season of good will we bring you evidence of how the same sentiments we value at this time of year still rang true even amongst those fighting in the trenches during the First World War. An extract from the 1st Battalion Worcestershire Regiment War Diary  for Christmas Day 1914...

Our Learning and Outreach Manager, Paul Hudson, has found a festive treat of a story amongst our Quarter Sessions papers: “Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat…” …so goes the rhyme, and until recently many families had a goose at the centre of their Christmas meal. So it was a bad time for you...

Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service have been awarded a one year grant by the Wellcome Trust to conserve and catalogue the historic archives of Powick and Barnsley Hall Hospitals.  Powick Hospital was founded in 1852 as the Worcestershire City and County Lunatic Asylum and Barnsley Hall was opened in 1899 to relieve the pressure on...

This week brings us to the end of our Treasures of Worcestershire’s Past series of posts. Number 52 is the final in the series as it has now run for a full year. The last post has been chosen by Sarah Ganderton, Archive Assistant who is working with us as part of the Skills for...

Recently, Rhonda Niven, Conservator for the Archive and Archaeology Service, presented me with a neat, dried bundle of plant material that had been found pressed between the pages of a Croome Estate inventory dated Oct 2nd 1819. The question was, ‘what was this material?’ The most likely at the time seemed to be hay or...