Category: Uncategorized
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Sarah Cowper’s Family Books: Research Interns’ Report
By Abigail Wilkinson, Charlotte Bell, Dion Reid, and Victoria Barnard [This summer, the Family Archives project was joined by four 1st and 2nd year undergraduate students as part of the University of Birmingham’s Research Internship scheme. Together, they have been working on the family books compiled by eighteenth-century gentlewoman Lady Sarah Cowper. They gave a paper on their research…
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Family Archives & their Afterlives Conference: a pupil’s perspective
By Lulu Frisson (student on a work experience placement in History at University of Birmingham) I had the amazing opportunity to do some work experience and attend the ‘Family Archives and their Afterlives, 1400-present’ History conference at Birmingham University last week, helping out at the registration desk with UoB students and listening to a broad…
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‘Intolerable and Insufferable Interference’: Financial Records as/and Family History
(or, why it was all my mother-in-law’s fault, by Henry Greswolde Lewis) Account books and financial records rank alongside legal papers and letters as the items that were most frequently preserved in early modern family archives. Initially, at least, I found this somewhat surprising. As records of money spent and received, accounts books are neither…
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Friction in the Archive
Last week I took a little jaunt to Lincolnshire to look at the collections of the Gregorys, a wealthy gentry family and one-time residents of Harlaxton Manor. I was on the trail of ‘last letters’ – that is, is incidences of people keeping the ‘last letter’ they received from a friend or family member before…
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CFP: Family Archives and their Afterlives, 1400-present
CFP: Family Archives and their Afterlives, 1400–present 27-28 June 2023 University of Birmingham From the muniments rooms of country estates to scrapbooks, photo albums, and boxes of papers and ephemera stored under the bed: our homes are sites of intergenerational collection and curation. We act as archivists, deciding which materials to keep, both for ourselves…
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Little boxes, little boxes…
In our second workshop on “Objects as Archives” Professor Jill Journeaux shared some of her thoughts – and beautiful artworks – on family inheritances. From place settings to lacework, her talk was wide-ranging and thought-provoking: are family dinner tables a form of archiving? Some audience members also shared stories about their own treasured family heirlooms. Perhaps…
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Breast is…a bet?
This week I’m away on a research trip to the East Sussex Record Office in Brighton (it scores 10/10 for scenic jogging routes and nice dinner options!). I’m mainly looking at the Frewen family collection, and particularly a series of intergenerational account books which were used by successive family members. Along the way, I came…
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‘Of no use’? Useless Papers and Useful Ideas
Welcome to the Family Archives in Early Modern England blog! In this space, I’ll be sharing some of my favourite finds and most perplexing papers as I voyage to family collections across the country. For my inaugural post, I thought I’d share the small scrap of paper which first got me thinking about some of these materials…
Family Archives and their afterlives in England, 1650-1838 