The Archivist has returned to the building

Last week was spent in the delightful city of Cardiff at this year’s ARA conference. As well as an array of speakers on various different subjects one of the most intriguing, in relation to the charity, was that of Michael Jones, who was mentioned in our last blog.

The importance of records for establishing identity

Michael had come across to the conference from Australia to give an intriguing talk on child emigration from an Australian point of view. Several points of interest came up:

• The Find and Connect website, that has been set up to direct individuals towards organisations that have partaken in child emigration, highlight the surprisingly large number of organisations that were involved in child migration in Australia alone. 

• The need for websites such as Find and Connect highlights the importance of records to individuals and ancestors and the need for organisations to make records more accessible. 

• The importance of collective memory to communities and the role of archives in providing this identity. 

So what do organisations need to do to ensure records are accessible? To start with it needs to be remembered that a lot of individuals looking for these types of records are not professional researchers. Some have very little experience of hunting down records and the finding aids created by many archive institutions may be difficult to navigate. Therefore there is a need for the archivist to have more interaction with the user to ensure the process is as painless to the individual as possible. 

Many hope to see photographs within the archive

As demonstrated by the Australian example one of the big problems for those tracking down emigration records is the wide distribution of information. For those connected with many different organisations discovering all records relating to themselves or their ancestors can be a strenuous task. This is why websites like Find and Connect can be so invaluable to the researcher. Maybe it’s something for the future for other countries to also look into.