Friday 21st Sept

Last night the Archdeacons of the Diocese (of Northumberland and of Lindesfarne) had any Churchwardens who were interested to dinner. We had to pay of course, but it was a lovely evening. I went because they had picked the brand new, custom-built County Archives as the venue.
This sounds a not particularly interesting place to go, I know, but there were 2 reasons why I wanted to go. First, it is part of the Woodhorn Mining Museum, which I had not visited for about 10 years. Secondly, in the dim and distant past, 11 0r 12 years ago, I had been Chairman for a year of the Amenities Committee of the County Council. This meant that I visited the Archives, Libraries and Museums in the County, with the head Civil Servant and got a privileged view of them all. I even went to the prison library at Acklington Prison.
In those days, the Northumberland archives were stored in an old building in Gosforth, which was part of the County before the 1972 reorganisation. It was terribly overcrowded and the conditions were far from perfect, though they did the best they could. While I was still on the
Council, they developed a warehouse on the outskirts of Morpeth for all the Local Authority records and things like the census returns. If you were seeking information, you often found that you had to visit both sites. Time after time a case was put up for a new building, but of course it was a very expensive project and time after time it was turned down. The powers that be simply did not accept the importance of records and artifacts etc and chose to ignore the legal side of it. The County is the official repository of all Diocesan and Parish records, so really did need to have proper, accessible storage.
I still do not know what made them build the new place. It was only finished about a year and a half ago. It is fantastic. There is storage space for all the records for the next 25 years. All the storage places are kept at the required humidity and temperature. The fire precautions will be very tight, though we did not hear about them. The Search Room (where the public do their stuff) is marvellous. The old one was not very big and the working space for each person was small. There were only about 4 microfiche readers and no computers etc, etc. Now there are big tables where you can spread a map out to study, plenty of room to study documents, computers where you can access "Ancestors" free (see the Family History forum), masses of microfiche and other readers, a booth for hearing recorded accounts etc etc. There are 2 catalogue systems - hard copy and on computer. The only thing is that the latter is not complete.
Having said all that, nothing really changes, does it? When I knew them and later when I was searching for stuff for the Village History, they were dreadfully understaffed. They are still dreadfully understaffed. There are only 3 of them. One is the Head Girl, so has quite a lot of admin to deal with and meetings to attend. So the other 2 have to cope with receiving records (they had just received a large number of boxes of records from a farm which had housed a tractor museum, with accounts etc etc, which all has to be checked, sorted and catalogued) Dealing with the general public. They are open from 10.00 to 4.00 Tuesday to Saturday. General caring and lesser conservation - important stuff has to go to Durham. And other things that I have now forgotten. Of course there is a permanent back-log. They do not use volunteers, because they need so much support and over-seeing that it takes more time than it is worth.
After our tour, we all had dinner done by the catering staff. Very good too. As there seems to be a big overlap between the Museum and the Archives, I am not sure who was in charge of that. After the Archdeacon of Lindesfarne, who is on the brink of retirement, had given us a summary of all that has happened in the Diocese in the last 20 years, we did a bit more networking and then went home. The 20 years covered most of the time that I had had contact with the Diocese, so I found it very interesting. I was on the Diocesan Synod for quite a lot of the time and new the Archdeacon well in all the jobs he did before his last post.