- 4th April 2016
Popular family history website, Find my Past, is now available for free at the Hive. Find my Past contains four billion names including parish registers, military records, school records, census and directories, all of which are useful sources of information for tracing your family history. For the first time, researchers will be able to use...
- 1st April 2016
Charred oat grains If you were to imagine the medieval farming landscape along the western borders of England and Wales, you would probably not think of fields of oats. Wheat is more likely to spring to mind, and probably sheep too. However, recently Worcestershire Archaeology has excavated an archaeological site at Mytton Oak on the...
- 30th March 2016
Conservation work has begun on a series of volumes relating to Police records of Worcestershire. Thanks to a grant from the National Manuscripts Conservation Trust, conservation work will be undertaken on approximately 70 volumes that are currently in a ‘Poor’ or ‘Unusable’ condition. The West Mercia Police Authority archive includes the administrative and operational records...
- 24th March 2016
This week’s post is by Rosie Pugh, one of our volunteers, who used one of the autograph books in our collection to research Hartlebury Castle’s role as a VAD hospital in The First World War and some of the soldiers who went there to convalesce. When my interest in archives was piqued last summer and...
- 21st March 2016
Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service staff are currently engaged in a 15 month joint project with Shropshire Archives to make available the archives of West Mercia Police deposited with them. Some of the work involves sorting, assessing and listing material transferred from the Police Headquarters at Hindlip. Other work involves retroconverting or enhancing lists and...
- 19th March 2016
Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service have acquired the Commission of Array for Worcester City, 14 September 1642. The significant piece of local history was kindly bought for the county by the Victoria & Albert Museum, Friends of the National Libraries and Worcester City Council. Dr Adrian Gregson with the Commission of Array The Commission of...
- 17th March 2016
Within the Lyttelton Archive we have Maud Lyttelton’s diary of 1902/3. She kept a diary over several years, meeting many different society people, and she was not afraid to be honest with her options, making this a fascinating read. Within her diary she describes St Patrick’s Day in 1902, when she was in London with...
- 11th March 2016
The Mayor of Worcester, Cllr Roger Knight, and Cllr Lucy Hodgson, County Cabinet member with responsibility for Localism & Communities, visited the Archive and Archaeology Service today to look at Worcester’s City Charters. The charters, previously held at the Guildhall, were moved to The Hive for us to look after, joining the rest of the Worcester City Archives....
- 1st March 2016
During building work at Worcester’s Royal Infirmary between 2007 and 2010, as it was undergoing the transformation from former hospital to the University of Worcester’s City Campus, our archaeologists were brought in to investigate the history of the site. An excavation was carried out in the southern part of the grounds of the Infirmary, which...
- 10th February 2016
On Tuesday 16th February we are running a themed behind the scenes tour as part of Love Worcester. We’ll be looking at some of the evidence for Tudor Worcester in our collections and showing you were they are kept, in parts of The Hive you don’t normally get to see. One of our most famous...