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This week’s Treasure is brought to you by Rhonda Niven, Conservator. Rhonda has chosen a selection of account and rent books from the Croome collection, the archives of the Earls of Coventry. These records were previously unavailable to the public owing to their very poor physical state but thanks to the work of Rhonda, made...

Working with the county’s archives we are used to reading and handling fascinating and unique documents, but we still get a thrill from something a little unusual with a story behind it. One such moment was a couple of weeks ago, when we opened an envelope which had been sealed for almost 100 years, when...

This week’s Treasure has been chosen by Margaret Tohill, Archivist. Here she tells us more about what stories can be gleaned from the family papers of the Moules of Sneads Green: The papers of the Moule family of Sneads Green contain a mix of property deeds, financial records and personal letters and photographs covering a...

This week’s Treasure is an embroidered purse chosen by Julia Pincott, Archives Assistant. Here Julia explains more about this unusual item, which has been found amongst one of the parish collections held within the Archive Service at The Hive: One of the more unusual items to be found in the Worcestershire Archives is a highly...

For the first time Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service has made available online an index to the Powick Hospital admission registers. Held within our secure strongrooms at The Hive we have a series of original admission registers for Powick Hospital, formerly known as the Worcester County Pauper and Lunatic Asylum. Staff have been working hard over several years to...

This week’s Treasure has been chosen by Adam Mindykowski, Historic Environment Countryside Advisor. Here Adam explains how using the LiDAR technique during surveying can bring historic features to life on our modern landscape: In 2007 an archaeological landscape survey of the Wyre Forest was commissioned as part of the Heritage Lottery Funded Grow With Wyre project....

This week’s Treasure is a will chosen by Vicky Fletcher, Archivist. Here Vicky explains why this will in particular sparked an interest: Whilst cataloguing some material from Worcester City Council, I came across a copy of a will from 1797 in which a widow is leaving her wearing apparell ‘except my Devonshire brown silk dress’...

This week’s Treasure has been chosen by Jonathan Brusby, Digitiser. Here he explains how he discovered so much more than first expected when working with a Victorian recipe book:    This treasure is a family recipe book which isn’t what it seems. Inside there are many inedible concoctions, made with very strange ingredients like Eau...

Last year the Friends of Worcestershire Archives helped us with the purchase of a fascinating document sent to Worcester by Edward VI, shortly after succeeding his father, Henry VIII. This is now in the care of Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service, and the Friends have organised an event to look into Worcester at the time...

While checking our local history references books I came across a bound poem, written in Bewdley in 1839 by George Griffith its title ‘The Devil’s Spadeful’ rang a bell. Between Kidderminster and Bewdley is a large area of heath and woodland called the Rifle Range, which is used by scouts, horse riders and walkers and was a...