The Guardians

Colin Watson deciphers the handwriting quirks of his latest project.

08 Oct 2009

Colin Watson is one of the archive's volunteers. Week by week, he and others cope with the complexities of spluttering dip pens, fading biros and disintegrating sellotape.

It is the job of the archivist to care for the Diocesan Archives, by ensuring that everything is housed at the appropriate temperature and humidity, and it is the volunteers who help to make them accessible. For the past fifteen years, many people have made a commitment on Wednesday or Friday to expand the range of indexes available and to enjoy each other’s company. They tackle Victorian handwriting in Baptism, Marriage and Burial Registers and laugh regularly at the inability of the clergy to count.

Colin, with Mary Harding, Judy Tudehope, Margaret Gibson, Beverley Stratford, Lynette Moore and Gail Watson regularly have to transport themselves back in time to consider just how a Cornishman or a man educated at Oxford would have heard the accent of an Irishman or a Yorkshirewoman and written it down. There are occasions when the debate over the interpretation of an ‘o,’ ‘u,’ ‘a’ or ‘n’ drifts well into cup-of-tea time. The discussion is worth it, for the indexes to Banns books, Sunday school rolls, confirmation registers, churchwardens’ books and cemetery plans save both the researchers who visit and the archivist hours and hours of time as they search everything from family members to the intricacies of plot locations.

The current projects will add to the breadth of the material. ChristChurch Cathedral has kept scrapbooks for many years. The service sheets and newspaper clippings which have been glued into their pages provide an important record of diocesan and civic events. When the indexes are finished they promise to provide access to a wealth of stories about our past that are just not available elsewhere.
Parish magazines are an under-utilised resource for those writing parish histories, yet they record in minute detail events in a particular location over time. Our other project is to record just how many of these are in the archives and then ask people to look under their beds and in top cupboards for the missing ones. The earliest one we have found so far is from Addington, dated October 1878. Can any one find anything that predates this?

WORDS & PHOTO: JANE TEAL