Types of records 's 19th-century "
red box", held in the archives s. The National Archives is His Majesty's Government's official archive, "containing 1000 years of history from Domesday Book to the present", with records from parchment and paper scrolls through to digital files and
archived websites. The material held at Kew includes the following: • Documents from the central courts of law from the twelfth century onwards, including the
Court of King's Bench, the
Court of Common Pleas, the
Court of Chancery, the
Court of Exchequer, the
Supreme Court of Judicature, the
Central Criminal Court,
Assizes, and many other courts • Medieval, early modern and modern records of central government • A large and disparate collection of maps, plans and architectural drawings • Records for family historians including wills, naturalisation certificates and criminal records • Service and operational records of the armed forces
War Office,
Admiralty etc. •
Foreign Office and
Colonial Office correspondence and files • Cabinet papers and
Home Office records • Statistics of the
Board of Trade • The surviving records of (mainly) the English railway companies, transferred from the
British Railways Record Office There is also a museum, which displays key documents such as
Domesday Book and has exhibitions on various topics using material from the collections.
Highlights of the collection •
Domesday Book, unique record of medieval England (1086) • Final version of
Magna Carta, issued by
King Henry III (1225) • Chest box containing the
Treaty of Brétigny, marking the end of the first phase of the
Hundred Years' War between England and France (1360) • Copy of the first item printed in England by
William Caxton (1476) • Gold
seal of
Francis I from the Treaty of Perpetual Peace between France and England (1527) • Letter from Sir
Francis Drake, Vice-Admiral of the English fleet, to Sir
Francis Walsingham during the
Spanish Armada (1588) • Autographed confession of
Guy Fawkes from the
Gunpowder Plot (1605) • The
last will of
William Shakespeare with the famous playwright's signature (1616) • Manuscript record of
Charles I's trial for treason, written by
John Phelps (1649) • Indictment letter for the notorious highwayman
Dick Turpin (1739) • Letter from
Captain Cook to
Philip Stephens, Secretary of the Admiralty prior to Cook's
first voyage (1768) •
Olive Branch Petition from the
Second Continental Congress to avert war between the
Thirteen Colonies and
Great Britain (1775) • Three of the 26 extant
Dunlap Broadsides, the first printed record of the US Declaration of Independence (1776) • Logbook of
William Bligh from
HMS Bounty with contemporaneous description of the infamous
mutiny (1789) • Last will of the famous author
Jane Austen (1817) • Copy of the
Treaty of Nanjing (1842) • Calling card left by the
Marquis of Queensberry for
Oscar Wilde that sparked his trial for sodomy (1895) • SOS telegram from
Jack Phillips alerting the nearby ship
SS Birma to the sinking of the
Titanic (1912) • 1 out of about 30 printed copies of the
Proclamation of the Irish Republic (1916) • Copy of the
Treaty of Versailles (1919) • Signed letter of abdication by
Edward VIII (1936)
Access to documents The collections held by The National Archives can be searched using Discovery, the name given to the online catalogue of the holdings of TNA. Entrance to The National Archives is free. The Research and Enquiries Room on the first floor contains a large number of desktop computer terminals. In addition, it is possible to
bring your own device and to access Wi-Fi. Close by are the shelves of the reference library. Elsewhere on the first floor and the second floor are the reading room and map room, for conventional and oversized documents respectively. Access to these reading rooms is restricted to those persons with reader tickets, and there are rules on what can be taken in. Anybody aged 16 or over can access the original documents at the Kew site, after producing two acceptable proofs of identity and being issued a free reader's ticket. The reading rooms have terminals from which documents can be ordered up from secure storage areas by their reference number. The reference number is in three parts: the department code of up to four letters, such as WO for the
War Office; a series or class number, for the "subcategory" or collection that the document comes from; and an individual document number. Documents can also be ordered several days in advance of a visit. As of 2011, some of the most popular documents had been digitised and were available to download from Discovery, for a fee of £3.50 per file, or through co-branded services called 'licensed Internet associates' as pay-per-view or part of their subscription service. On 22 April 2020, it was announced that a monthly quota of free downloads from Discovery would be made available to registered users, instead of charging £3.50 per downloaded file. As at August 2023 there are three licensing agreements in place:
Ancestry.com,
Findmypast and
TheGenealogist. A reader's ticket is not needed to access digitised records. Whilst a visitor is on the premises, they can be accessed for free on a terminal, or via a Wi-Fi connection, where the paywall on the network has been disabled. Frequently accessed documents such as the Abdication Papers had originally been captured on
microfilm, as were the aggregated service records for two million First World War soldiers. As part of a digitisation programme, microfilm was eliminated, and replaced by digital files, some of which were free to download. Researchers are encouraged to check Discovery first, to see if they can get what they want online, via the portal or a third-party provider. If a document is available online, The National Archives' policy is to encourage people to use the digital copy (surrogate) and not the original, even if they come to Kew, in order to protect the original from damage. In extreme circumstances, such as where the black and white image of the original was on microfilm, was transferred to a digital file, and resultant image decay has rendered the finer points illegible, an original document can be retrieved. It will be clearly stated in the catalogue entry if the record has not been digitised.
British Army "burnt records", 1914 to 1919 Over six million sets of these papers were stored in a War Office warehouse in London, along with a multitude of other record sets, but incendiary bombs dropped on the warehouse in the Second World War started a fire in which most were destroyed. The surviving quartile were largely water or fire-damaged and thus acquired the colloquial name of the "burnt documents". As they were mostly too fragile for public access, they were put on microfilm with the aid of the
Heritage Lottery Fund. This activity commenced in 1996 and concluded in 2003. They were converted to digital image files and were made available on the
Ancestry website from 2008 onwards. These are archive series WO 363.
British Army "unburnt records", 1914 to 1919 Some service record papers were held elsewhere by the Ministry of Pensions, and were unaffected by the warehouse fire. These records were also microfilmed and then converted to digital files, and were made available on the Ancestry website from 2008 onwards. These are archive series WO 364.
British Army service records, 1920 to 1963 For several years beforehand, the future transfer of the records was being talked about. In February 2021 the Ministry of Defence commenced transferring 9.7 million military records for individuals with a discharge date before 31 December 1963 to The National Archives, its largest record transfer in the history of the organization. A minimum of four business days advance notice is required when ordering these records, which are held offsite. In March 2023, Ancestry announced that it had won a contract to digitize over 3 million British Army service records, which it would release from 2024 through 2029.
Storage The documents are stored on
mobile shelving – double-sided shelves, which are pushed together so that there is no aisle between them. A large handle on the end of each shelf allows them to be moved along tracks in the floor to create an aisle when needed. They are generally stored in
acid-free folders or boxes. In the event of a fire The National Archives would be clearly unable to use
sprinklers for fear of ruining its holdings, and so when the building is evacuated,
argon gas is released into the air-tight repositories. ==Other services==