Saving Kent’s History
The KAS Records Branch was established in 1912. By the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, with a change in the law, many solicitors were throwing away Manorial documents, Estate Papers, Wills, Inventories, conveyances and such like. A county-wide effort was made to save these by the KAS. They were stored for many years in Canterbury, before thousands of individual documents were deposited on loan in the Kent Archives Office after WWII, where many have been microfilmed over the years, enabling people to carry out research.
But now we face a similar problem. Over the years many Kent museums and local societies have been collecting documents and adding them to their archives. Members of the Smarden Local History Society have identified many such depositories where documents lie uncatalogued and not transcribed, and therefore unavailable for historical research.
So the situation is comparable to the 1930’s, in that thousands of documents are often stored in unsuitable conditions, but collectively represent a vast store of information about the history of the people of Kent.
We have seen in our own KAS Library how a relatively small number of people, with modern methods of scanning and recording, can over time make the contents accessible to the membership and the wider world.
The Kent Archaeological Society has now formed a partnership with the Smarden Local History Society to create a Kent Heritage Resource Centre. Museums, local societies, schools and members of the KAS can bring their documents for digitisation to the Centre and release to the world the treasure trove of information they contain.
Under the partnership, the two organisations will work together to provide practical help and guidance on archive management, preservation and digitisation at the new Centre, at The Charter Hall in Smarden.
The new facility will feature a state-of-the-art archival camera, capable of producing high-output, high-definition images of, for example, documents, bound volumes, artefacts, photographs, slides, and maps up to A2 size, linked to specially developed indexing and cataloguing software. The purchase of equipment has been greatly assisted by a donation of £5,000 by the sons of our late Vice-President Joy Saynor, in her memory.
The Centre will provide options for users to carry out digitisation projects, with assistance where necessary. The Centre will also offer a data storage service for organisations seeking to back-up archives off-site. All Centre facilities will be available at nominal cost to users at The Smarden Charter Hall two days a week and at other times by prior arrangement.
More information about how you can arrange to take your precious documents along for scanning will appear on our website and in future newsletters.