The Sudbury Hall estate records

Now that the catalogue of the Miller Mundy family archive is online, my next lockdown project is the archive of the Vernon family of Sudbury Hall (reference number D410). The collection consists of around 70 boxes, of which 41 have been box listed, and it's these 41 boxes which are gradually making their way onto …

Bretby Colliery’s Connection to Tutankhamun

Bretby Colliery near Swadlincote once formed part of the Bretby Hall estate, run by the Stanhope family, who were Earls of Chesterfield. Upon the death of the George Stanhope, the Seventh Earl, in 1871, the earldom passed onto a third cousin but Bretby Hall and its estate stayed in the hands of his widowed mother, …

Welcoming visitors back to the record office and improving our catalogue

We are so pleased to be inviting customers back to the record office when we re-open at 10 o'clock on Tuesday 13 April. As you might expect there are a few changes to the way we are operating at the moment... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsmnDUSdCaw If you are thinking of visiting the record office, one of the main …

Florence Nightingale Talk

Looking for an interesting way to spend half an hour? Why not listen to Dr Jonathan Memel from the University of Nottingham's Florence Nightingale project team, who will be giving a free live-streamed talk on Tuesday 13 April at 2.30pm on the theme of ‘Florence Nightingale and Health at Home’.  Florence Nightingale's family had a …

In conversation with Maggie O’Farrell

Our friends at Derbyshire Libraries are hosting an online conversation with acclaimed author Maggie O'Farrell on Thursday 15 April at 7.00pm. Maggie’s latest award winning novel Hamnet captures a Jacobean England haunted by a plague that tragically kills Hamnet, the only son of William Shakespeare. In reimagining the complex relationship between Hamnet’s parents as the …

Putting colour into the past

If you have followed our blog for a while, you will know that one of our favourite subjects is Sir John Franklin and his lost expedition to discover the northwest passage from the Atlantic ocean to the Pacific via the Arctic. On 16 May 1845, the officers of Franklin's expedition had their photographs taken by …

#ArchivesFromHome

When the country first went into lockdown in March 2020, I wrote about the tasks we would be working on while we were unable to access the archive and local studies collections. Of course, none of us still expected to be working from home a year later, and although we will be re-opening our onsite …