What? No white gloves?: our first archives session

Where our archive research will take place

Next up after our introductory oral history session was “Introduction to Historic Documents”, where we began our training in how to do research with historic maps and archives. The setting for the session was the Merseyside Maritime Museum. Perhaps an unusual choice for a project on local food, but in developing the project the team were particularly interested in understanding what ‘local food’ might mean in a port city.

Often, small market towns are the model in the back of people’s minds when they think about rebuilding local food systems. However, this kind of model is not what Liverpool has traditionally been based around. Indeed the money from Mr Seel’s Garden itself, would have come from Mr Thomas Seel’s slaving empire. So one of the really interesting questions raised in this project is how ‘local food’ relates to the dynamic networks of trade, which have always been essential to port cities and their hinterlands.

Volunteers getting intro to historic documents

Our aim at the Merseyside Maritime Museum was to develop a picture of food systems in Liverpool that might give us an interesting contrast to our oral history and map sessions, which focus on finding where food was grown in Liverpool. To start getting ready for this we had to first get an idea of what kinds of archive documents would help us answer the questions we had, and just as importantly – how to handle the documents when we found them. Along with how to use stands to support books and weights on hold down pages, we were initiated into perhaps the most persistent controversy in public archive work – whether or not to wear white gloves. We were quite bemused to find out that despite what we might have seen on TV, it is actually often better for the documents not to use them (See this post from the British Library for an explanation).

Detail of warehouse plan by Jesse Hartley

After recovering from the shock we settled in to get more of an idea of the kinds of records archives usually contain and browse through some examples the archive’s curator Sarah Starkey had prepared for us. In response to someone’s claim that ‘there must be a record’ of some of the Holt’s activities that we are particularly interested in Sarah told us that this was a phrase that strikes dread in the heart of archivists. Instead, archive work was presented to us as being more like being a detective, treasure hunter or even a spy. Since not everything that happened in the past gets recorded the key to successful archival research is to try to work out who might have needed the info you’re looking for and for what purposes. For example, there are most likely to be records when money is involved.

One of the key sets of materials we’ll be looking at are the Liverpool Customs Bills of Entry (see here for an overview). While we only had a quick look at them in this session, just seeing the increasing size of each of the volumes showed how much and how quickly Liverpool port business changed over the 1800s. We also saw changes in the origin of the ships, with ships in 1829 mostly coming from Ireland and ships around 1900 shipping frozen meat from Argentina.

More locally, we also looked at street directories from 1955 which included pages and pages of bakers and butchers. We wondered how big their sections would be in the Liverpool directories of 2012. It was really interesting to find that while records from particular shops are most likely to have been destroyed, street directories are often still available and provide valuable resources for tracing the rise and fall of particular industries.

Other items of interest included a stevedore’s log book that included incredibly detailed plans for loading ships, including lists of items to be shipped, how they should be packed and what kinds of things shouldn’t be packed next to each other.

Thanks to Alex Buchanan from the University of Liverpool, Alex Hale from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, and Sarah Starkey, the archivist at the Merseyside Maritime Museum for organising the session. For more information on the MMM’s collection of Bills of Entry go here and here.