Public can now View a Million Restored Records at the Lancashire Record Office

"Goodbye my love, and may we have the pleasure of embracing again in six months." So reads the last message mariner Robert Tod wrote to his wife before embarking on a "long and perilous voyage" from the shores of Lancashire in 1848. He never returned.

Mariner Tod's note is one of thousands of documents painstakingly restored by staff and volunteers at the Lancashire Record Office, on Bow Lane, Preston.

Almost a million individual documents have been restored - records covering an area from Merseyside to Cumbria and into Yorkshire - and are now available for members of the public to see.

You can read more about these newly-available records in the  Lancashire Evening Post web site at http://beta.prestontoday.net/ViewArticle.aspx?ArticleID=1980121&SectionID=73.

Comments

[Bill Effle]

tried link to this site, but recieved error message "could not find website."

[Joyce]

This one works! :-)

http://beta.prestontoday.net/ViewArticle.aspx?ArticleID=1980121&SectionID=73

I visit the LRO monthly for my own research and have accessed many wills, so I rang them up to ask about this article this morning. I was curious whether this meant that more wills were suddenly becoming available or whether there was a special display for the public, since the article was a bit vague about what was meant by "available for members of the public to see".

The LRO employee told me that the will flattening project has been going on for years, and the newspaper article was just noting the end of the project. The documents are not on public display in the museum display sense, but they can be accessed in the usual manner for LRO documents - visiting the LRO and requesting the documents individually for examination.

Wills aren't the only documents they have of course, there are deeds, old parish registers, and enough to keep a genealogist occupied until the cows come home!

The records office website is at this URL:
http://www.lancashire.gov.uk/education/record_office/

If you look under the tab "Research>Enquiries and Research" there are several options for people who cannot access the archives in person.

If you want to search for wills or documents at the LRO (or any other english/welsh archive) I would recommend this website:
http://www.a2a.org.uk/

Happy Hunting!

[Louise]

I have been using the LRO via snail mail for about five years, and they have been fabulous, even finding things I didn't know existed and therefore hadn't requested - such as a birth certificate for my grandmother's twin sister. I don't think anyone still alive had any clue that grandma was a twin. When I visited Preston in 2003, I stopped by just to thank them (well, and to submit another document request). They were most gracious!