FAMILY ARCHIVES
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verzorgen. Nog dit jaar zal de serie worden geopend met een deel, gewijd
aan het kopieboek van zakenbrieven van een Frans boekverkoper te Amster
dam, dat bewaard wordt in de boedelpapieren van het archief van de Waalse
Gemeente. Een restant van een klein, maar uiterst belangrijk Amsterdams
familiearchiefje, niet alleen voor de boekhandelsgeschiedenis van Amsterdam
en de Republiek, maar ook voor die van andere Europese landen. En zo bevat
het Amsterdams gemeentearchief nog veel meer, op allerlei terreinen!
I. H. VAN EEGHEN
We are all of us Archivists, most of us family archivists. At least we
contribute to family archives. And the congested state of our pockets and
desk drawers and cupboards at home bear testimony to the excellent way we
keep our private papers and to the sound and scientific principles we apply
to the elimination of such letters and tradesmen's bills we wish never to
see again!
Our ancestors were keen on preserving papers and documents, particularly
documents relating to property, and especially documents relating to the most
stable form of property, namely, the land. And we live in a latitude and a
climate in which documents can survive with a minimum of care. I once
committed myself in print to the statement that the English climate has its
detractors, but it has not dealt unkindly throughout the centuries with papers,
parchments, leathers and fabrics which have been kept under conditions in
which their owners and custodians chose to dwell and work; provided, of
course, that active agents of decay were not allowed, through errors of
manufacture, to remain in the material.
It is true of course that neglect and indifference in the past has allowed a
considerable proportion of the accumulated family archives in Britain to perish
and decay, and indeed many of them have been deliberately jettisoned and
destroyed as unwanted lumber; but fortunately much has survived, and it is
this great heritage of family archives that we have come here to consider as
archivists.
What precisely do we mean by family archives? And in working towards
a definition of the term I shall proceed in a round-about way by eliminating
as far as possible those divisions of archives in which we are not interested
this morning. First of all come of course the records of the central government,
those evolved by the machinery of state. But we do find Family archives among
the Public Records. Some of them were of course presented to the Public
Record Office in the past, being the private papers of public men of importance.
We do not as a rule encourage gifts of this kind. The British Museum, the
National Library of Wales, the great Libraries of the Universities of Oxford
and Cambridge, and the Libraries of other Universities: London, Durham,
Leeds, Nottingham, Sheffield, Bangor, to mention but a few of the University
Libraries to which Family Archives of local and more than local importance
have been presented or have been deposited therein: great City Libraries
(Liverpool, Birmingham), the famous John Rylands Library at Manchester, the
recently established and active County Record Offices throughout England
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and Wales: we consider these are more appropriate institutions to receive
and care for family archives than is the Public Record Office. But when we
were informed recently that the owners of the private papers of the first
Lord Cromer and the first Lord Kitchener considered that the appropriate
place for them was the Public Record Office we naturally agreed: and when
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II decided that the Carleton Papers, the papers
of the last British Commander-in-Chief in America at the time of the
Rebellion (or the War of Independence), which had gone to America thirty
years ago, and were presented by President Eisenhower to Her Majesty
during her last visit to the United States, should come to the P.R.O., we
hastened to obey the Royal Command with dutiful alacrity. I shall mention
these Carleton Papers again later in my address, but U would agree with you
that they scarcely come within the definition of Family Archives. They were
regarded as the Private Archives of Sir Guy Carleton: but in spite of Lord
Montgomery's views, supported I profoundly regret to say by Sir Winston
Churchill, we would today regard most of these papers as public records.
But apart from these collections of private and family archives that have
been given to or deposited in the P.R.O. there are among the Public Records
themselves many family archives; archives that are by the new Public Records
Act of 1958 deemed to be Public Records. I suppose that the best known
groups of early private correspondence among the Public Records are the
Cely Papers, the papers of a London family of merchants of the late 15th
century, which were published by the Royal Historical Society in 1920. These
letters and the Stonor and Fanshawe correspondence of much the same period
were found among the miscellaneous records of the Chancery.
There are also among the Public Records several complete classes which
can be described as essentially family archives.
The Chancellor, now the Lord Chancellor, had from the end of the 14th
century a growing equity jurisdiction, and the records of the great Court of
Chancery are voluminous, for suits in Chancery tended to be notoriously pro
tracted. It was the practice of the Court of Chancery to refer matters such as
questions of disputed facts about land or matters of account to officers of
the Court known as Masters. To these Masters the attorneys of the litigants
produced Title Deeds, Court Rolls, Estate Accounts and Correspondence as
evidence. When the suit ended, sometimes after the lapse of a century and
often on account of the financial exhaustion of one of the contending parties,
these Title Deeds and correspondence these family archives-should have
been reclaimed by the suitors or their attorneys (or solicitors). In many
cases they were not, and they remained unclaimed. Thery are now Public
Records. They form several large classes known as Chancery Masters' Exhibits,
and have been listed and are available for public inspection: but they are in
essence the papers of family businesses and estates.
I have digressed somewhat to point out that family archives are found
where least expected, namely, among the records of the Central Government.
I shall not have time to digress when mentioning the other divisions of
Archives. The Archives of Local Government is the next big division. It would
take more than one long lecture to explain to you how Local Government
has developed in England: and it may surprise you to be told that there were
no established Local Record Offices, no Record Offices in the Counties of
