County Record Offices and Archives - AJCP

Browsing County records in the M Series of the AJCP

Access to original historical records forms the basis of research for historians and genealogists. Through the AJCP we can visit some of the records of the various counties across the UK, free and from the comfort of our homes. 

Be sure to look for your County of interest in the M series Read the Guide for the County then browse the records to discover the gems within.

Here are some of the Counties that have records digitised in the AJCP and start with the letter C.

Cambridgeshire Record Office - Cambridge, Huntingdon

Cheshire Record Office

Cleveland County Archives

Cornwall County Record Office

Cumbria Record Office

Cornwall

The description of the records filmed at the Cornwall County Record Office include:

"journals of voyages from Melbourne to America, Plymouth to Melbourne and Adelaide to Gravesend; correspondence and legal documents of families including the Victor Family, the Adams Family, the Carlyon Family; emigration lists; mining records; memoirs of Hannah Glasson and papers relating to the Bonython Family."

Some examples 

From the Diary of Capt. John T Short of St Ives comes this excerpt from a list of people who left the Parish of St Ives and emigrated to Australia in 1854. 

View the complete list at https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1042988855/view

The 35 page Memoirs of Mrs Hannah Glasson contains a wealth of material for the family historian not just for her descendants but also a picture of life in colonial America across a wide variety of American counties. 

It details a trip back to her parents' native Cornwall when she was 14 in 1859, then their voyage on the "Donald McKay" to Sydney. She wrote about her life in NSW, her subsequent marriage and life in New Zealand and NSW.

View the whole memoir at https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1043011450/view

How lucky are you if your ancestor was Richard Perry of Crowan? His journals kept on the steamship Northumberland  from Plymouth to Melbourne and Adelaide in 1873, and on the Lady Jocelyn from Adelaide to Gravesend  in 1876, are written in a beautifully clear hand and expressed in rhyming verse. Many pages include his signature, a precious find for the family historian.

Excerpt from https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1043016789/view

All of the above are from just one County - Cornwall

A miscellany of examples of records in other Counties

• Cumbria Archive - Scrapbook of photographs and press cuttings
• Cleveland County Archive - 1958 Letter of Hungarian refugee Elizabeth Kevi
• Cheshire Record Office - The costs of travelling around the world in 1889
• Cambridgeshire Record Office - List of emigrants to Victoria from Cambridgeshire 1840 -1870

Browse the M Series list for the wide variety of County and Archive Records, a rich source of material to add background and context to our family stories. 

Have you considered writing your life story and contributing it to a local archive for your future descendants?

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Previous posts in this series

A - About the AJCP | B -Browsing the Board of Trade

This post first appeared on https://carmelgalvin.info

Browsing the Board of Trade - AJCP

B for Browsing

B for Browsing, a starting point for examining how the records are presented and arranged.

What to choose for B?

In PRO series of the AJCP

• Board of Customs 
• Board of Longitude
• Board of Trade 
• British Transport Commission 

In the M Series

The choice ranges from records of the British Museum to the company of Bryant and May. Perhaps you may be interested in the records of the Bedfordshire or Berkshire Record Offices or the Brynmor Jones Library or one of the dozens of other Bs listed.

Let's jump into the records of the Board Of Trade from the PRO records.

The first thing seen is a Finding Aid or Guide for the available online records. On the left is a Table of Contents and the right side of the screen lists the contents of each digitised microfilm in further detail.

Additional historical information is often provided here in the guides.

These records range from 1784 - 1952. The majority of these records are handwritten, no OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has been applied. Browsing this collection however may reveal some details about our ancestors.

Finding Aid - Board of Trade

I have chosen to open the Fonds: Records of the Registrar General of Shipping and Seamen, 1826 - 1921, Under this heading I find:

• Certificates of registration of vessels registered at ports in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Prince of Wales Island. Certificates are grouped by year and then by port of registration
• Registers of certificates of competency. Masters and mates: colonial trade, 1870 - 1921 (issued to masters and mates employed on colonial vessels) as well as
• Registrar General of Shipping and Seamen. Registers of certificates of competency. Engineers: colonial, 1877 - 1921

Scroll down to see the list of films

• Choose the icon to the left of the file name to display the microfilm images. They will be displayed on the right of the screen.
• Choose any image to view in full detail.
• On the image now displayed there are options to magnify, go to full screen and navigate to the next image
• The option to Go Up a Level provides a Browse button that then displays the first 20 images on a microfilm

https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-743616214

Finding your ancestor

If you had an ancestor who was a seaman perhaps you will find him in the Certificates of Competency where details include place and year of birth as well as the place and date of the granting of the appropriate certificate. 

He may not have migrated to Australia or New Zealand but his certificate of competency may be in these records.

Some examples clipped from the hundreds of pages available.

https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1939828929/view

https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1939681250/view

https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1939952951/view

Another place to browse for seamen - Crew Lists from the Southampton City Record Office.

Just a reminder: these records are not indexed  - by browsing these records you may find the "old salts" in your families.

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Previous posts in this series

A - About the AJCP 

This post first appeared on https://carmelgalvin.info

About the AJCP

The AJCP

What is it? 

The Australian Joint Copying Project (AJCP) is a collection of unique historical material relating to Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific dating from 1560 to 1984.

50 years....

Yes, this project started in 1948 and continued for 50 years. 

Then from 2017-2020 the National Library of Australia undertook to digitise these films with completion in June 2020. Access to these records in now available directly through the AJCP portal or by searching directly in the Diaries, Letters and Archives category of Trove.

Throughout this month I will examine the various methods of browsing and searching this vast collection. There are more than 8.2 million microfilm images and 10 000+ explanatory pages of descriptive text. Some records will be taken from the PRO series, records now held at The National Archives of the UK, and some from the M (Miscellaneous) series, records collected from a wide variety of organisations, libraries and archives from across the UK.

As you can imagine 26 blog posts will only scrape the surface of this huge resource but there are some interesting finds along the way. Each letter of the alphabet will highlight a different range of resources.

A small beginning but much to be found along the way.

Here is a 14 min introductory video made by the National Library of Australia for those who have not yet had the chance to view it.

This post first appeared on https://carmelgalvin.info