Kirkwall Map Discovery

Our team of volunteers have been hard at work sifting through the bundles of documents in the Balfour of Balfour & Trenaby papers. They have been finding lots of interesting documents and we are gradually listing them all on our new online catalogue, so that everyone can see the list too. 

Last week Anne was looking at bundle 9 in the 26th box. It is a bundle of bundles. Rather than individual unrelated documents, bundle 9 contains several groups of related documents. One group is grandly called the 'Langstane Process" and is a court case about a disputed piece of ground in Kirkwall in 1798. What is very interesting is that it comes with a plan.

A plan from 1798! 1798! Why am I exclaiming? 

Because we don't have many detailed plans of Kirkwall for the 1700s. This is a very early map of Kirkwall and we're all very excited!! 

D2/26/9 - Plan of disputed lands in Kirkwall, 1798.
Click on image to enlarge it on your screen. 
Not to be reproduced without permission from Orkney Archive

There are a few recognisable features in this plan such as The Strynd and the High Street (now Albert Street). See if you can work out where in Kirkwall it was, where the burn was and where the bridges were. Once we know more about the court case, we'll share the story. In the meantime, just admire the map. 

Other maps of Kirkwall in this time period are this one from 33 years earlier: 

D8/E/19 Kirkwall 1766, surveyed by William Aberdeen
Click on image to enlarge it on your screen
Not to be reproduced without permission from Orkney Archive

And this one from 33 years later: 

D8/E/28 Kirkwall boundaries, 1831
Click on image to enlarge it on your screen
Not to be reproduced without permission from Orkney Archive

Hoorah for Volunteers!

 

It is volunteers week and this gives us a chance to celebrate our wonderful band of helpers without whom, the archives would be so much poorer.

The Orkney Archive is heaving at the seams with historical data and yet a collections catalogue and dewey decimal sorted photographic archive can sometimes only scratch the surface for a researcher. The archive staff only really have time to give an idea of what a document can contain. It takes time, lots and lots of time, to really squeeze all the infomation out of each document.

This is where our volunteers step in.

For example: many of our visitors are looking for information about parents, grandparents or other relatives who spent part of their military service in Orkney. We do not hold any war diaries or individual military records (these are held at the National Archives), but we do have issues of the Orkney Blast which detail engagements, sporting events and other little mentions of folk, some snap shots taken of service personnel during their down time, grocery credit lists etc.

So we set up our Service Personel Database, in which our volunteers enter the name, rank and any other information about anyone they find mentioned in items dating from either World War.

Our beautiful Service Personnel Database 

This means that if your great grandfather came third in a darts competition at Ness battery or your granny got engaged at a New Years party at HMS Tern in 1942, then there may be a record of it in our SPD!

Another project which several volunteers are working on is the Photo Index database. This involves entering detailed information about each photo we hold such as people in it, location, objects and date (if we have them). This makes it much easier for visitors to search for individual images as we were restricted to searching by subject matter before.

The exquisite Photo Identification Database

But fear not! It is not all endless databasing - our own Balfour Blogger is a longstanding volunteer who has spent many hours of her life sorting, dating and, more importantly, identifying blogable snippets for us from the enormous Balfour collection:

We have a few volunteers helping to work through this collection.

These are just a few examples of the many projects volunteers have assisted with over the years and we are extremely grateful for all of their hours spent sorting, numbering, transcribing, summarising and compiling.

Our volunteers are not paid but we do make sure to try and feed them tea and cake now and then with coffee morning/afternoons to keep up their strength and to express our gratitude for their diligent work.

Three cheers for volunteers!

Hip, hip, hooray! 

Hip, hip, hooray! 

Hip, hip, hooray!