By Theodore M., London Oratory School
The Society of Genealogists offers work experience to students of genealogy, library studies, history and related disciplines and provides real-world project opportunities associated with our library and archival collections.
For the duration of the first week of June, I was privileged enough to spend my work experience at the Society of Genealogists where I spent four days organising various small collections left by people to the society.
The first collection that I organised was the Garden School collection. This comprised of various school reports, news articles regarding the school and small postcards. It was a collection donated by June Bennett from her time attending and teaching at this very forward-thinking school. It had no exams, no homework and for as much as possible, the lessons were taught outside. I spent time organising the various documents and photocopies into chronological order, removing all the staples because of the rust which could ruin the paper. I replaced the staples with archival brass paperclips. Following this, I wrote up the dates, a description and the provenance of each document so that the contents of the folder could be easily found. The huge number of photos, postcards and newspaper articles reveal how important this school was to the life of June Bennett and it offered a truly fascinating insight into the past.
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The next collection I dealt with was the Bogle collection. This was slightly larger than the previous one with a lot of typed documents originating in the late 1940s and during the First World War. These documents were all found by James Bogle in April and May of 2007, and they were typed up meticulously as he tried to unravel his family heritage, much of which was based in South Africa. Among these documents was the war diary of one of his relatives, James Oliver Lindam. He fought in the Gallipoli campaign in the First World War and his description of life in the trenches and on the Gallipoli Peninsula reveal how truly awful his experience of war was. He paints a picture of suffering in heat and cold throughout his diary, and this offered a riveting perspective from a lesser-known angle on this campaign. Furthermore, this collection housed a small summary of the Lindam family’s contribution in the Napoleonic Wars with members of the Lindam family fighting at the Battle of Waterloo. This collection had many documents dated from the same month so they had to be organised in alphabetical order rather than chronological order. This took up a lot of space and time to figure out where each document would fit in.
One of the most riveting small collections was the correspondence of the Savigny family as they traced their heritage back from Canada to England and further back to France. Led by John J. Savigny, the family consulted parish records stretching back to the 1500s to find any mention of their surname. They found their family fled from France because of the persecution of the Huguenots in their village of Savigny. Next, the family became cutlers in London and spread overseas to Canada where John J. Savigny was based, sending out huge quantities of letters to his family including a mention of his first time using a lap-top computer!
In contrast to the Savigny collection where all the documents were typed up and simple to understand, the Bourne collection was truly difficult to understand. For the first time, I came across the original 19th century documents! These were incredibly fragile and stored in a plastic wallet to keep them from harm. The old handwriting and different spellings were so difficult to read that I was barely able to discern was the collection was about. It seemed to be about a community spread across the islands of Antigua, Dominica, Demerara and Nevis, parts of the West Indies. The papers are dated in the second half of the 19th century. One letter is from the Rev. John Frederick Bourne resigning his position as Rector of St. Paul’s, Demerara because he has been persuaded to join the Swedenborg Church. These unusual documents could not be moved around too much due to their fragile state, so I decided only to handle the photocopies of the original document to ensure I did not damage anything. These were painstakingly put in chronological order and put back into the folder to be archived.
Having completed so many small collections, I had the necessary experience to move on so I was given the ‘Unknown collection’. This consisted of a group of documents which had not yet been read and nothing was known about them, not even who donated them. After reading them, I decided to name them the Howe collection. It was all the documents of a woman named Barbara Howe who left school and went on to train to become a teacher at various schools, including her own school. She eventually becomes assistant headteacher and then headmistress. She taught at over 15 schools in her career and often had guidance on how to write pupil’s school reports, unfortunately none of which were found in the collection.
After each folder containing a collection was labelled, it was time to put them in their final archiving folders. Many of the older documents and newspaper cuttings in the collections were larger than A4 which made these folders very useful for protecting the documents. These cream coloured folders and cotton tying tape are also acid free, which helps to preserve the documents for the future.
This experience has been fascinating and has given me an insight into the world of archiving. From old school reports, to newspaper cuttings and beyond, these documents revealed the lives of various people throughout the past two centuries and to witness this has been a real privilege.
More on these collections
These small collections are available to view in the library by completing our Visit Booking & Collections Request form.
Bogle (151), Bourne (36), Garden School (153), Howe (40), Savigny (35)