Part of the Together Trust’s substantial archive collection has been given a new lease of life thanks to work done by ancestry.co.uk.
The family history website has spent many hours digitising eleven of our leather bound emigration books that run from 1883 to 1914. The books contain information on all of the children who were emigrated from England across to Belleville, Ontario, Canada. Each child was allocated a page within one of the books. Reports and letters were sent back to Manchester at least annually, detailing the child’s situation at their new home. These were glued one on top of the other in our books making many difficult to read. The brittleness of the pages and degrading of the leather binding, also meant the books were becoming more and more fragile, making handling difficult.
Ancestry.co.uk has spent many hours using their specialist equipment to image every document contained in our 11 emigration books, and with around 150 pages a book and up to 15 images a page, this turned out to be a lot of photographs! They are now all indexed and safely held on a hard drive meaning the Together Trust can continue to access this wealth of information without damaging the original material. Without Ancestry’s work it is likely the books may have had to have been closed to research.
A huge thank you to Ancestry for making this possible!
To find out more about the Together Trust’s archive collection email enquiries@togethertrust.org.uk.
