Estate Maps at Derbyshire Record Office

A guide to privately produced maps and how to find them Estate maps is the generic term for manuscript maps produced for individual landowners to  document their property.  Examples in the record office date from the 16th to the 20th centuries, may be on paper or parchment, and may vary in size from small sketch …

Wage Forfeits at Strutt Mills

Whilst cataloguing the D6948 collection relating to Messrs W G and J Strutt, the cotton mill owners in Belper and Milford, there have been some interesting records to look at, including lots of employee records. You may have seen some previous blog posts relating to the child mill workers, which are part of this collection. …

Catalogue Available for Messrs W. G. & J. Strutt and English Sewing Cotton Company Limited Collections

We have recently been reworking the catalogue for two collections connected to the mills owned by the Strutt family, which were later taken over by the English Sewing Cotton Company. Both collections relate to the various mills in Belper, Milford and Derby, which were once thriving workplaces within Derbyshire. Snippet view of the D6948 catalogue …

Education of Child Workers at the Strutt Owned Mills

Back in November, I wrote about the registers of child workers I came across during the renumbering of our D6948 collection, which relates to W. G. and J. Strutt Ltd. There was little information in them about the children they referenced, besides when they were taken on and possibly their age. Recently I came across …

Child Workers at the Strutt Owned Mills

Recently I’ve been busy renumbering our D6948 collection, which relates to W. G. and J. Strutt Ltd, who once ran mills at Belper, Milford and Derby. There is a collection which we are currently re-cataloguing, and there is a lot of material to get through, comprising of fifty-one boxes and eighty outsize volumes. Whilst going …

Finding Derbyshire Business archives

A guide to finding the archives of Derbyshire businesses. Derbyshire Record Office holds nearly 1000 collections for businesses and trades across the county and city of Derby, primarily for the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, although some date as early as the 16th century.  Amongst the largest of these collections are: D1851 Bryan Donkin and …

Charted Territory – celebrating the maps of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site

The Derwent Valley Mills and the surrounding landscape were inscribed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2001. This recognition is well deserved as the valley saw the birth of the factory system, when new types of building were erected to house new technology for spinning cotton. Snaking 15 miles down the valley of …

Historic Derbyshire maps available online

With the new Derbyshire Heritage Mapping Portal you can now see how the Derwent Valley from Derby to Matlock has changed over the last 200 years.  Featuring selected maps from the collections at the record office, the portal enables free access to digital copies of the maps and an "overlay" feature so you can see …

Derwent Valley Mills celebrations in Belper

This Saturday, 11 March, the Derwent Valley Mills celebrates fifteen years of recognition as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Between 11 am and 4 pm there will be all kinds of events at the Strutts Centre in Belper, including children's activities, guided walks, talks, and stalls from forty heritage organisations.  We'll be there with our stall, …

Treasure 46: Register of child factory workers

This treasure comes from the Belper-based cotton spinning company W G and J Strutt Ltd and is a register of children dating from May 1853 to April 1860 (D6948/14/5).  Education was not made compulsory until 1880, so the use of children's labour in the Strutt mills in Belper was very normal. The register records the reference …