Archival Material now on Civil War Petitions!

So Civil War Petitions is now fully up and running! With images and transcriptions of original documents, exhaustive calendars of payment records gathered from the archives, and an array of different ways of searching the documents and records to interrogate them further, Civil War Petitions promises to provide comprehensive coverage of military welfare in England Wales during and after the Civil Wars.

For a full guide to the type of material that you will be able to find on Civil War Petitions, visit the About the Data page. For a full explanation of some of the terms used, visit the Glossary.

However, Civil War Petitions is very much still a work in progress! The research team have been working hard, travelling all over the country to gather data. So far, we have material on Civil War Petitions from the following counties:

• Denbighshire
• Dorset
• Durham
• East Riding of Yorkshire
• Essex
• Gloucestershire
• Hampshire
• Town and County of Kingston-upon-Hull
• Town and County of Newcastle-upon-Tyne
• North Riding of Yorkshire
• Northumberland
• Worcestershire
• West Riding of Yorkshire
• City and County of York

Unsurprisingly, the survival rate for the documents is patchy, depending on the locality. Not all counties have any surviving petitions or certificates, or a complete set of order books or treasurers’ accounts for the payment records. However, the team have gathered any relevant data from the material still in existence.

Not all of the data gathered so far has been uploaded to Civil War Petitions. The counties finished uploading all the data for are:

• Durham
• Essex
• Hampshire
• Town and County of Kingston-upon-Hull
• Town and County of Newcastle-upon-Tyne
• Northumberland
• City and County of York

A few additional payment records need to be added for Dorset, East Riding of Yorkshire and North Riding of Yorkshire. A few additional petitions need to be added for Worcestershire. This work will be completed over the next few weeks. Large numbers of petitions and certificates have been found in Denbighshire (over 300!), as well as extensive treasurers’ accounts for this county, whilst the West Riding of Yorkshire also has a large number of petitions and certificates (over 100) and very extensive order books. Gloucestershire has a smaller number of petitions and certificates (19), as has North Riding (23). The completion of these four counties are very much our immediate focus and will be added as a series of mini-updates over the next quarter. Do keep an eye on our Twitter and Facebook feed for news of when these have been added. The project will thereafter upload further archival material in a series of quarterly updates. The counties which you can expect to see coming soon include:

• Berkshire
• City and County of Bristol
• Herefordshire
• Lincolnshire
• Nottinghamshire

In addition, we expect Civil War Petition’s mapping functions and better graphics for the Events and Injuries pages to be ready later this autumn.

Civil War Petitions was officially launched by the project team at the National Civil War Centre on Thursday 26 July 2018. We were delighted to welcome academics, university staff, students, archivists, school teachers, museum professionals, representatives of modern military welfare charities, descendants of leading Civil War families and local government officials amongst our guests. All have been, or soon will be, involved in some way in our project and we would like to thank everyone who has in some way supported us.

We were entertained throughout the evening by the wonderful ‘Diabolus in Musica’, seventeenth-century period costumed musicians who regaled us with a variety of contemporary music. They did a fabulous job of uplifting the spirits of any who might have been flagging under the heat of the hottest day of the year! We were also extremely honoured to have a special performance from the Waddington branch of the Military Wives Choir. Before the performance, one of their members shared her experiences of being a military wife and explained what it meant to be part of the armed forces family. She spoke of supporting her husband through unsocial working hours, a constant peripatetic lifestyle and the uncertainty brought about by deployment – all these are timeless themes to military partners across the centuries and a poignant reminder of the anxieties and certainties that must have been experienced by families during the Civil War, as well as the comfort that can be drawn from the wider military community. We are very grateful to Carol King, Business Manager of the National Civil War Centre and her team for hosting us and helping us put on such an enjoyable evening.

If you have any comments, questions or enquiries about Civil War Petitions, please feel free to either email us via civilwarpetitions@le.ac.uk or contact us via our Twitter or Facebook pages.