St James’ Community Heritage Project

We’re delighted to announce that our latest partnership project application to the Heritage Lottery Fund has been successful. We’re supporting St James’ Church in Upton St in Gloucester, in a one-year project collecting memories of the St James’ Church Community and its relationships within the Barton and Tredworth area of Gloucester. We will also scan heritage material from residents within the parish, and particularly those connected with the Church and its CofE School. Both the recorded memories and the scanned images will be preserved at the Archives, and edited material will also be available on our partnership website, www.bartonandtredworth.org.uk, where you can keep up to date with the project’s progress.

A Tale of Two Solicitors – the records of Messrs Sewell, Mullings and Logie (D1388)

I’m Jane Heward, and I am the new Cirencester Project Archivist at Gloucestershire Archives. I have recently finished a 21-month project at Cambridgeshire Archives cataloguing the records of the Bedford Level Corporation (the organisation who drained the Fens between the 1630s and 1650s, and maintained many of the drainage works until the 1920s). Before that, I was an archives trainee at Glasgow University Archives in 2010-2011 and completed the UCL Archives and Records Management course in 2011-2012.

The former offices of Messrs Mullings, Ellett and Co at No. 12 Park Street, Cirencester

In November 2013, Gloucestershire Archives was successful in its bid to the National Cataloguing Grants Programme for funding to catalogue the records of Cirencester solicitors Messrs Sewell, Mullings and Logie, formed from the merger of the practices of Messrs Mullings, Ellett and Co and Messrs Sewell, Rawlins and Logie in 1991. The records are extensive – 632 boxes were included in the project brief, and a further two collections (D181 and D182) contain related material. At present, only 43% of the collection is “box-listed” (meaning that only a summary of the contents of each box is recorded), and just 18% is available through either the paper catalogues in the Searchroom or the online catalogue.

A Lost World in a Footnote: the Victoria County History

For nigh on twenty years I came here occasionally, sent by archaeologists to look at large maps, and I was always intrigued by the tiny glass-fronted room where the duty archivist watched over us – the goldfish bowl, as the staff call it, apparently. Strange that for more than two years now I have sat in that same room, toiling over parish histories and supervising the Victoria County History (I’ve even heard a whisper that it’s now called the headmaster’s study, but I’m not supposed to know that).