About the catalogue

The online catalogue contains descriptions of a significant proportion of the Archive collections which we hold in Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service, which is growing through frequent additions, but it does not include all our holdings yet. There is a wide variety of records from many sources, both public and private, relating to the modern or historic county of Worcestershire and to parts of the former county of Hereford and Worcester.

It includes:

• all records of the first Worcestershire County Council (existed 1889-1974)
• and records it inherited (such as Poor Law Unions)
• Worcestershire Quarter Sessions records except for the series of loose Sessions papers (for these see Discovery below)
• records of various local and regional public bodies such as West Midlands Gas Board and Severn Trent Water Authority
• records of the departments of Hereford and Worcester County Council (existed 1974-1998)
• some records of the current Worcestershire County Council (established 1998), including schools
• part of the catalogue of the historic records of Worcester City Corporation resulting from the project to catalogue the Worcester City Collection
• part of the catalogue of the records of the Earls of Coventry of Croome Court resulting from the Croome Project
• part of the catalogue of the Lyttelton family collection
• some hospital records as part of two Wellcome funded projects (more are in Discovery – see below)

Since 2004 all newly catalogued records are entered directly into this catalogue.

In general it does not include those catalogues which the Archive Service contributed to the Discovery website: https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

These are:

• most of our Church of England parish registers and records
• Worcester Diocesan records
• nonconformist church records
• the series of Worcestershire Quarter Sessions loose papers for the period 1591 to 1840
• some hospital records
• some of our main family and solicitors’ collections

Information about some of our other collections can be found in various specialist indexes elsewhere on Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service’ Explore The Past website: Our Collections - Worcestershire Archive & Archaeology Service (explorethepast.co.uk)

PLEASE NOTE:
Sometimes records which are described in the catalogue may be closed to the public under the Data Protection Act or for other reasons. This will be indicated in the AccessConditions field in the search results.

Information in our online catalogue has been accumulated over many years from a number of sources including original paper catalogues when cataloguing standards were different to current ones. Also, descriptions are often taken from the documents themselves where the words and terminology used reflect the time when the documents were created and used. Therefore, in some instances, there are words and terms used that are not considered acceptable now.