Investigations of a Dog

In a previous post I mentioned experimenting with taking photos at the Public Records Office/National Archives. Getting good photos is only part of the problem. The real work starts when you get them home. How do you organise them and make sense of them? It should be no surprise that Zotero is really useful for this, but I’ve discovered a few tricks to make it even better.

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Yesterday I went down to the Public Records Office (call it by its name!). I think I picked the wrong day. As well as the disruption from the building work, the ordering system broke down so I couldn’t order any documents for the first hour.

One consolation of the delay was that I had plenty of spare time to look at the First World War service records on microfilm. This time I was lucky to find a record for Thomas Wenham, my great-grandfather’s older brother (those for William and Charles hadn’t survived, which is exactly the ratio you’d expect from the burnt papers). Tom joined the reserves in 1915 but wasn’t called up for active service until 1916. He was initially in 19th Sherwood Foresters, a reserve battalion recruited in Lincolnshire, but then he was posted to 8th North Staffordshire Regiment, with whom he went to France. On 7th June 1917 he was wounded in the head by a shell at Wytschaete and was sent to hospital in Etaples, then returned to England. He survived but wasn’t fit for combat any more so served at home with the Royal Defence Corps. In 1918 he returned to France with the Labour Corps to guard prisoners of war. So out of three brothers known to have served in the war, all three were wounded in action, one died, and one was captured.

Then on to the real work: SP28 aka the Commonwealth Exchequer Papers. I tried photographing a whole account book to get an idea of how long it would take. The book was about 150 folios with writing on both sides, so about 300 images altogether, which took about an hour and a half. Quality is a bit variable because I didn’t use a camera stand (usually I find they’re all in use; this time there was one free but I then realised I couldn’t attach my camera to it!). Some images are perfect but others are so blurred that I can’t read them. It was also totally exhausting, but not as bad as copying them out by hand. I’m looking into the feasibility of a project which might involve photographing 20 or 30 entire boxes. That looks like it could be long, difficult and expensive.

Over the last week I’ve been exploring the possibilities of Your Archives, the wiki based site set up by the UK National Archives where users can contribute their own knowledge and transcripts of documents. The site has huge possibilities, and so far I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. To start with I’ve been mostly concentrating on First World War records, as the Great War Forum provides both an immediate audience and lots of potential contributors. Getting these people involved could make a very big difference to the project. I think it’s going to take to get a critical mass of GWF regulars using Your Archives regularly, but I’m trying to lead by example. It turns out that I’m not the first forum member to contribute to YA as another member had submitted some information about Labour Corps medal rolls a few months ago. However, that didn’t lead to lots of other people contributing. Can we change that?

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Your Archives is a wiki based site launched by the UK National Archives which allows users to contribute information and about, and transcripts of, documents held by the NA (and also information to supplement the National Register of Archives). Despite being excited about the possibilities of the site, I’ve been too busy to actually get involved. But today I finally registered and started contributing. I’m pleased to say that the terms of use now make it clear that restrictions on re-use of content don’t apply to transcripts of documents which are covered by waiver of Crown Copyright, and don’t apply to fair dealing under UK copyright law.

To start with I put up a transcript of a report on prisoner of war camps in the First World War, which you can see here. My first impression is that the site is very easy to use. Anyone who can use a web forum or a blog shouldn’t have any problems with it. The help pages are still very basic and there’s no style guide, but the easiest way to work out how to do things is to look at existing pages for examples.

I’ll be adding more contributions whenever I have time, and I’m also trying to encourage other people to contribute. I’ve posted on the Great War Forum asking people there to get involved. Between them forum members have a huge amount of relevant knowledge which needs to be more accessible. There have been some concerns raised on the forum that information is increasingly hard to find there because there’s so much of it. Your Archives could help to improve this situation, at least for the information which is within its remit, as a wiki based site would make the content much more accessible than a forum. It remains to be seen how many people will actually get involved. And if you’re reading this post and have any knowledge about TNA/PRO documents or other UK archives, go and sign up! Now!

Yesterday I went to that London. I spent the afternoon in the Public Records Office (it will never be the National Archives!) looking at seventeenth century wills and more First World War stuff. The most exciting discovery is that the PRO has started a wiki in which readers can contribute their knowledge of the documents. This is a fantastic idea, as some classes are very poorly catalogued and barely documented at all outside the class lists. I’m thinking particularly of SP28, which is a very important source for the English/British Civil Wars and Interregnum, and which I know an awful lot about (probably more than most PRO staff), so I’m looking forward to contributing. At present it’s in beta and only seems to be available at Kew, but I hope they’ll put it on their website soon.

Afterwards I went up to the IHR to hear Patrick Little’s paper on Cromwellian studs. It was interesting to find out more about horses in the 1650s as my thesis stopped in 1646. Patrick pointed out that whereas most histories of the period ignore Cromwell’s interest in breeding and racing horses, or put it down to the utilitarian aim of breeding cavalry horses, there is a lot of evidence that a common interest in horses was an important aspect of social and political networks during the protectorate. The paper also got me thinking about bloodlines and heredity, which I’d like to look into a bit more as it has possible implications for patriarchy and masculinity.

I hope it wasn’t too intimidating for Patrick to be asked questions by Peter Edwards and me. Peter knows more than anyone about horses in early-modern Britain. He was an unofficial mentor to me during my PhD and has given me all kinds of help, but this was the first time I’d seen him in person since I came back from my career break so it was good to catch up.

Expect some proper posts next week, if I survive the upgrade to WordPress 2.1. It seems to be going wrong for other people, but it hasn’t caused any problems on my test blog on localhost.