Voluntary work at Westminster City Archives

There are lots of opportunities to get involved in the work of the Archives Centre. Please see below for some examples of on-going volunteer projects, and read one volunteer's account of her experiences.

If you'd like to find out more, download an expression of interest form, or discover other opportunities for voluntary work in Westminster.

Indexing

Volunteers from the Friends of Westminster Archives have been working on indexing the St Martin-in-the-Fields poor law settlement examination books for 1708-1840, containing about 30,000 settlement examinations. It is estimated that the final index will yield the names of about 180,000 people living in London in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Settlement examinations can reveal the autobiographies of the poor, containing valuable information about places of birth, the fathers of illegitimate children, and migration. Through the indexing project, volunteers are creating access to this information for the first time.

For further details see the St. Martin-in-the-Fields settlement index page.

Other volunteers are producing indexes of names in parish registers of baptisms, marriages and burials to make these easier for family historians to search. They are concentrating on the volumes which have not been indexed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Building Plans

The Archives Centre holds a sequence of plans submitted for drainage applications. This is a valuable sequence as although they were submitted specifically for drainage applications there are frequently full sets of building plans included. In October 1999 the Archives Centre staff began a pilot to sort, catalogue and repackage the first 250 boxes. Following the success of this project it was decided to launch a more extensive project to tackle the remaining 1,000 boxes utilising the Friends of the Archives Centre. The project was launched in September 2001 with an estimated timescale of eight years. The project is progressing well and is on target for completion ahead of schedule with over 40,000 individual plans having been catalogued to date.

Conservation

There are two groups of volunteers (the Friends of the Archives Centre and members of the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies) who assist the Conservator in preservation projects after relevant training. They have worked on projects such as repackaging theatre playbills and programmes and remounting the slide collection.