The National Archives of the United Kingdom are of the most important research libraries and archives in the world. They are the national repository of old records for the United Kingdom. Because Britain ruled so many countries between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, with British rule at one time or another covering Ireland, the United States, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Egypt, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Jamaica and over two dozen other small and island nations, a huge array of historical documentation concerning not just the United Kingdom, but significant parts of the world and its people, are housed in the National Archives. It is therefore one of the most important archives globally for the study of genealogy and family history. Archivists and scholars began cataloguing the collections here in the nineteenth century and publishing calendars or full transcriptions thereof. This, in tandem with digitization projects over the last forty years, has made considerable portions of the vast holdings of the National Archives available without visiting the physical archives in London.[1]
History of Britain and its empire
To get a sense of the sheer scope of the documentation held by the National Archives of the UK, one needs to be aware of just how vast the British Empire grew to be in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as there are records at the National Archives pertaining to virtually every country Britain became involved in. Through a process of centralized state expansion, England came to dominate the entirety of Britain in late medieval and early modern times, meaning that the National Archives hold a huge number of documents relating to not just England, but also Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Ireland itself became what could rightly be considered to be England’s first colony in the sixteenth century.[2] This was then followed by the creation of the Thirteen Colonies of North America in the seventeenth, along with the settlement of various parts of the West Indies at that time.[3]
As significant as these early activities were, they were dwarfed by what occurred from around 1750 onwards. It was in the late 1750s that the English East India Company began a series of rapid conquests and expansion in India that resulted in British rule being established over the entirety of the subcontinent by the mid-nineteenth century. Canada was acquired from the French in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years’ War. The First Fleet arrived to Australia and began establishing the British penal colonies there in the late 1780s, followed by New Zealand in the 1810s and 1820s.
The creation of the Singapore colony in 1819 and the conquest of Hong Kong during the First Opium War twenty years later saw an expansion into the Far East. The Dutch colonies at the southern tip of Africa had already been acquired during the Napoleonic Wars and from the 1870s onwards Britain began conquering new territories across Africa almost every year, eventually bringing Egypt, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria, amongst others, under British control here. English and later British activity in each of these regions produced a considerable amount of documentation by colonial administrations on the ground and as the metropolitan government corresponded with its colonial officials. The overwhelming majority of these records are housed today in the National Archives in London, making it one of the most important repositories of historical documentation anywhere in the world.[4]
The National Archives of the United Kingdom
As early as the 1610s there were efforts by the English official and sometime keeper of the state records, Thomas Wilson, to impose some order on the very large archive of documents owned by the English government and known broadly as the State Papers. He began cataloguing these and storing them in such a manner that mold, water and vermin would not destroy them, while also making it easier to identify which records were which.[5]
This work was continued intermittently in the two centuries that followed, but it was really the Victorians in the nineteenth century who transformed the State Records, dividing them up thematically and geographically, giving them number codes and then cataloguing them systematically. They did this under the auspices of the Public Records Office, founded in 1838. This was the direct predecessor of the National Archives.[6] The Public Records Office continued its work from its old building on Chancery Lane in London until 2003. Then, in order to modernize the system and expand its premises, it was moved to Kew in London and was also amalgamated with associated bodies such as the Historical Manuscripts Commission and Her Majesty’s Stationary Office to form the National Archives of the United Kingdom.[7]
Genealogical research at the National Archives
There are records stored in the National Archives relating to almost every conceivable corner of the United Kingdom and its empire. When it comes to England itself, there are records going all the way back to the Domesday Book of the mid-1080s. This is one of the first great genealogical sources for England in and of itself, being a record of major landholders across England in the aftermath of the conquest of the country by William the Conqueror and the Normans from 1066 onwards.[8] Thereafter all manner of governmental records produced in England between the twelfth and twentieth centuries are stored in the National Archives, along with voluminous documentation for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, although some records for these countries have been devolved to archives like the Public Records of Northern Ireland.
Almost as significant are the records held at the National Archives for other countries. The example of Ireland is instructive. The 26 counties that make up the Republic of Ireland today are independent of the United Kingdom, but there was an English lordship that controlled parts of the island between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, and it was completely controlled by England/Britain in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This resulted in the vast State Papers Ireland series, a collection consisting of millions of pages of records dating from 1509 down to 1782, being produced. As these are records of the English/British colonial government they were not repatriated to Ireland after independence and are still found in the National Archives at Kew in London today.[9]
Similarly, there are millions of documents within other major collections such as the State Papers Colonial series, the Records of the Dominions Office and the Records of the Commonwealth Office which cover the extensive colonial history of places like the Thirteen Colonies of North America between the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 and the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783 and the sending of the First Fleet to Australia in the late 1780s down to the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901.[10]
Many parts of the collections at the National Archives were either published extensively or ‘calendared’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Victorian archivists and librarians began to try and impose some sort of order over the truly enormous volume of papers which were stored in the State Paper offices. These calendars placed collections like the State Papers Ireland series into number cataloguing systems and then provided synopses of the documents which were then published, detailing, for instance, who wrote a letter, who it was sent to, the date of it and a few points on the topics broached in it.[11]
These calendars and full published transcriptions have been supplemented in recent decades by ground-breaking projects to digitize millions and millions of pages of various collections which are now available to consult through databases around the world. All of this has made the holdings of the National Archives much more accessible in one format or another and the truly staggering array of genealogical documentation housed there available to the world at large.[12]
Explore more about the National Archives
- England & Wales, Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Index of Will Registers, 1384-1858 records collection on MyHeritage
- United Kingdom, Royal Air Force Personnel records collection on MyHeritage
- Effective Use of England’s National Archives Website at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Citizen Archivist Opportunities at the National Archives at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
- ↑ https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/2023/how-ireland-served-as-a-laboratory-for-the-british-empire/
- ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/thirteen-colonies
- ↑ https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Timeline-Of-The-British-Empire/
- ↑ Albert J. Schmidt, ‘Thomas Wilson, Tudor Scholar-Statesman’, in Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 3 (May, 1957), pp. 205–218.
- ↑ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/legislation/public-records-act/history-of-pra/
- ↑ Sarah Tyacke, ‘The New National Archives 2003’, in Alexandria, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2006), pp. 41–54.
- ↑ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/domesday-book/
- ↑ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/state-papers-ireland-1509-1782/
- ↑ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/other-countries/
- ↑ https://www.gale.com/intl/essays/c-s-knighton-calendars-editors-1856-2006
- ↑ https://www.gale.com/intl/primary-sources/state-papers-online
[{Category:United Kingdom]]