Kent Record Collections

Kent Record Collections is a trust designed to encourage the growing interest in Kentish local history and to promote research into it through the medium of printed indexes, calendars or transcripts of original records. These the trust will itself produce, failing other publishers, but its primary concern is in compiling the texts for printing, and this can only be done by employing persons well qualified to compile them.

This is a costly undertaking and since the trust has no endowment it must rely on grants and donations to fulfill its objectives. In this respect the KAS has been a tower of strength by making very substantial grants towards the immediate objective of the trust, namely, the compilation of a comprehensive index to the probate records of the dioceses of Canterbury and Rochester and the peculiars from their beginning to 1858. This will include not only the wills and administrations, but also the inventories, accounts, caveats and similar records. In brief, the index should provide a reference to everything in the archive relating to any one person. It is estimated that the complete index will comprise twelve or more volumes, including those already in print. Through the grants from the KAS and others all the original and registered wills, probate acts and administrations in the diocese of Canterbury for the period 1577-1639 have been indexed, along with an entirely new feature, an index of armorial seals. Work on the accounts is in progress through an arrangement with the Economic and Social Research Council, but funds are needed to begin work on the remaining classes, e.g., the inventories, or the guardianship papers, which in quality and extent are unique. It is worth mentioning that this vast project has the whole-hearted and unqualified approval of the Keeper of Public Records, the Director of the Institute of Historical Research, the Director of the Economic and Social Research Council group for the History of Population and Social Structure and others.

On the publishing side Kent Record Collections has already produced a volume edited by Jules de Launay of full and detailed abstracts of the Wills of 659 parishioners of Cranbrook proved in the diocese of Canterbury in the period 1396-1640. A few copies still remain at £10, post free. Also available is the first volume, just issued, of a new and exhaustive edition by Stella Corpe and Anne M. Oakley of the 'Freemen of Canterbury' from 1275 to 1835, in six volumes of about 300 pages each.

The present Volume covers the years 1800-1835 and, although last in point of time, it is the first to be published for that period. The normal price is £15 post free, but to KAS members it is £11.75. Cheques should be made payable to Kent Record Collections, 90 Albany Drive, Herne Bay, Kent, CT6 8SV.

P. H. Blake