The Nosey Genealogist

What are and where are the National Archives for the United Kingdom?

The National Archives are in Ruskin Avenue in Kew, Surrey which is just on the southern outskirts of London. They were once called the Public Records Office and you will often see the letters ‘PRO’ used as a short name when doing genealogical research. Today you are just as likely to come across ‘TNA’ in your family history researching online and in the written media.

TNA is where the records of the UK central government are deposited if they are considered worth preserving. What is more it is where the records are kept for the English law courts.

While many people will visit the Kew site of TNA, a great many others will go to its website. The advantage of this if you, like me, live a long way from Surrey, is obvious! Within the TNA website is Documents Online, which will allow a researcher to order documents, some to view online and others to be sent by mail.

www.nationalarchives.gov.uk is a website that is quickly developing into one of the best internet resources for family historians as well as for military historians and others. Perhaps it should be said that it is probably not a good idea to use it to start your family history at the moment as it is huge and requires a lot of getting used to.

If you take a look at the Catalogue, you will find that it is not like a library catalogue. At first it seems to be so very complicated and almost perverse in stopping a researcher from finding what one is looking for. The catalogue’s function is to describe and then list in a hierarchical order, all the records that the TNA hold.

Some people may think that they are looking at a catalogue of documents, but it is actually one of ‘records’ as it would be a task of mammoth proportions to describe all the many documents whose home is at TNA. Individual documents fall into categories, which are called ’series’. Series are arranged by the department of government that created them or, in some cases, were the past custodians of the documents.

So if you are to use this resource you will need to understand how the various arms of government worked in the form of which departments are likely to have created the records and how they would have been organised.

There are about ten million descriptions on the TNA catalogue, but they are not all of the same detail or quality. Some are more detailed, especially if the creating government department gave more importance to the record series than others. In the case of the series that is well detailed, in its description, it may even give the searcher descriptions of the documents! But so many others will give little clue as to what is exactly contained in the series in question.

So what have we learnt here?
The catalogue is not a searchable index of documents held at TNA.
It is a searchable index of records, or more precisely descriptions of records that are arranged hierarchically in up to seven stages.

To order a copy of a document to be posted to you will need a note to be taken of the catalogue reference. This reference is in several parts.

The department code, which is between one and four letters, e.g. War office = WO, Home Office = HO

The series description - a number which can be one to four figures
e.g. HO 102

The piece or item number - e.g.WO364/1000

This actually refers not to a document but to a microfilm reel that contains the documents. Here it is armed forces service records from 1914-1920 and in particular for Soldiers’ Documents and Pension Claims, First World War and being the surnames between Desmond, Michael and Davenport, Harry.

If you want more help with the catalogue then I would take a look here: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue/about.asp