Borthwick Newsletter - August 2022

Posted on 29 July 2022

Welcome to the Borthwick's August newsletter.

August in the Archives - delve into our catalogues with this month’s featured description

August Theophilus Beauharnais, 26 year old patient at the North and East Ridings Lunatic Asylum [later Clifton Hospital]. Occupation: states he is a scene painter. Admitted: 13 August 1856. Discharged: 10 August 1857. [Clifton Hospital Archive, NHS/CLF/6/5/1/2/419]

What’s New?

A very warm July has brought the culmination of the first phase of two projects, the launch of another, and some staffing changes to the Borthwick. First of all we are delighted to say that this morning we launched our digitised Parish Register collection on Ancestry.com! This means you'll now be able to search our parish register baptisms, marriages and burials as part of an Ancestry subscription. We'll have access to Ancestry available for free onsite at the Borthwick, and many local libraries also have a subscription, so do have a look at the provision in your local area too.

Today we are launching four main record series, which you can search or browse:

Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812

Baptisms, 1813-1920

Marriages, 1754-1936

Burials, 1813-1995

There's more to come as part of our partnership with Ancestry, so watch this space for more updates as we move through the second phase of the work. Massive thanks have to go to our digitisation team - Mary, Lauren, Monique and Carrie - for all their hard work!

The Ancestry team hard at work

As Ancestry goes live, we’ve also begun work on another exciting project that will last through to the Spring of 2023. You might remember that in August 2021 we took in more than 300 boxes of material from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. Now, thanks to a generous grant from the JRRT, cataloguing work has begun on the archive, with the new deposit eventually being added to the existing JRRT Archive on Borthcat. The new material dates from the 1960s and marks an important shift in the work of the Trust to overtly political causes in the UK, Europe and Southern Africa. Already the cataloguing project has turned up some fascinating files on grassroots community campaigning, the inner workings of the Liberal, Labour and Conservative parties, support for one parent families, and the Anti-Apartheid movement. You can find out more about the project via the JRRT project page on our website.

To accommodate the work, for the next eight months Sally-Anne Shearn will be seconded to the role of JRRT Project Archivist, with Lydia Dean taking over as Collections Information Archivist. Lydia was previously the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust Project Archivist and has a particular interest in our environmental and natural history collections. You can find out more about her work on our dedicated Environment and Natural History Collections Website, which was created by Lydia to mark History Day 2021. Most recently Lydia and Sally-Anne have been working on the records of the Women’s Land Army in North Yorkshire as part of an ongoing project to make these unique records more widely available.

Finally, over the last five weeks we’ve also had a student intern working with us to update and augment our LGBTQ+ History research guide on the website. Fedor Topolev-Soldunov has been with us on a 120 hour paid internship from the Department of History, and has done some detailed research into our collections to highlight new stories. The draft text is now complete, and we’ll be building the new web pages over the next few weeks. Watch this space!

New Accessions

We received additions to six of our existing collections in July. We added microfilmed records relating to the university estate and its buildings to the University of York Archive, along with records of the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies, 1956-1992. We also received new Parochial Church Council records, 1972-2017, to add to our Dunnington parish archive. Although we have already begun work on cataloguing the main archive, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust deposited a very welcome additional box of materials relating to research for a history of the trust and its work, carried out in the early 1990s, and lastly we’ve added new letters and papers to the archive of Guyanese artist, Aubrey Williams, relating to his links with York Art Gallery and with the University of York.

New Catalogues

Number of archival descriptions on Borthcat on 1st August 2022: 100,249

In July we added the full catalogue of our Womersley Collection to Borthcat. The Womersley Collection relates to the Hawke family of Womersley Park in Yorkshire. The Hawkes connection to Womersley began with the marriage of Edward, 3rd Baron Hawke, and Francis Anne Harvey, heiress to the estate, in 1798, but the archive dates back more than a century before this. It includes personal records relating to the Hawke and Rosse families, as well as records concerning the running of the estate. Intriguingly, some of the earliest items in the collection are something of a mystery! The collection includes the records of an unknown London merchant which date back to 1679, when Charles II was on the throne, listing stocks of cloth and canvas, pepper, ginger and French wines. We also have a list of personal expenses by another unknown individual, covering 1704-1719, giving a detailed account of expenditure on clothes and food, a ‘militia account’, a list of creditors and debtors, and even a planting plan for a garden. Who exactly these individuals were, and how they came to be part of an archive which, for the most part, tells the story of a family and estate from the mid 18th century onwards, remains to be discovered.

Borthwick Out and About

On Wednesday 6th July our Access and Digital Engagement Archivist, Laura Yeoman, presented a paper at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds. Entitled ‘Rules of Enfeoffment: Parish Landholding in Medieval York’, Laura spoke about her recent work on the surviving medieval feoffees deeds for the churches of St Martin’s Coney Street, St Michael’s Spurriergate and All Saints Pavement. Feoffees were nominees (such as clergymen, churchwardens or parishioners) appointed by churches to manage their land. Laura has been using the deeds to study parish land acquisition between the Statutes of Mortmain in 1279 and 1290, and the Statute of Uses in 1535.

Archive of the Month: York Diocesan Mothers’ Union

What is it? The records of the York section of the national Mothers’ Union, an organisation established to support mothers to raise their children in the Christian faith.

Where can I find it? The catalogue of the York Diocesan Mothers’ Union is available on Borthcat.

Why is it Archive of the Month? The Mothers’ Union is today a worldwide organisation, but it has its roots in the parish of Old Alresford, near Winchester, and the efforts of the rector’s wife, Mary Sumner. Mary’s intention was to bring mothers of all social classes together to provide mutual support and training in motherhood. She began the organisation in 1876 and the idea spread rapidly. By 1892 there were some 60,000 members in Britain and branches were also established in Canada, New Zealand and India.

The Mothers’ Union was, and is, an overtly Christian organisation and the history of its York branch reflects this close association with the Church of England. Founded in 1891, the York Diocesan Mothers’ Union owes its existence to Augusta Maclagan, a personal friend of Mary Sumner and the wife of the then Archbishop of York, William Maclagan. Augusta became the first President of the York Branch, later followed by Dora Pennyman, and in 1913 York was chosen to host the first Mothers’ Union Conference to take place outside of London. The conference was held in York Minster and the YDMU archive includes financial papers for the conference, detailing provisions for a tea for 3000 mothers!

The surviving archive captures the long history of this organisation and the way it both reflected, and shaped, attitudes towards women and motherhood over the course of the 20th century and beyond. It includes governance papers and the records of individual Yorkshire branches such as Hessle and Norton, as well as a range of fascinating ephemera such as news cuttings, Mothers’ Union journals, scrapbooks, and even a child’s reminiscences of Mary Sumner herself. The archive also has a rather unexpected link to one of our other collections, the Hickleton Papers, the records of the Wood family, Earls of Halifax. The 2nd Viscount Halifax was an avid collector of ‘true’ ghost stories, and it was YDMU President Augusta Maclagan who supplied the information about one such alleged haunting, at Glamis Castle in Scotland, home of the future Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. A book of the stories collected by the Viscount was eventually published in 1936 and you can read the spooky story, The Secret of Glamis, on the Internet Archive!

We’ll be back with more news in September.