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Record Office Guide
This is a comprehensive guide to the archives held at Derbyshire Record Office. The guide is updated every time new acquisitions are made available to the public. It gives a summary of each collection, and its collection reference number, but not the numbers needed to order individual items to view in the search room.
How to search
The guide covers every type of record we hold, from schools and voluntary organisations to businesses and religious groups.
There are three ways to search it:
By type of record
If you pick a type of record from the “select a record type” drop-down menu, and click the search button, you generate a complete list of collections of that type. Sometimes there are also sub record types, which you can select to narrow the focus of your search.By place
If you select the name of a town or village from the “select place” menu, and click the search button, you generate a list of collections relating directly to that place. Collections referring to more than one place are not indexed in this way, so try using the place name as a keyword if you can’t find what you want.By keyword
If you are looking for something specific you can search for it by name – but only if the words you use occur in the exact order you type them.
The guide works best when you combine these types of search, for instance:
If you are a family historian, hoping to find school records relating to an ancestor who was educated in Chesterfield, you could select “schools” and “Chesterfield”, before pressing “search”. This brings up a list of records held by Derbyshire Record Office relating to schools in Chesterfield.
If you are looking for records relating to cotton-spinning in Bakewell, you could select “Business – Manufacturing” from the “record type” menu, “textile manufacturer” from the “sub record type” menu and then “Bakewell” as the place. This would bring up a reference to the Lumford Mill collection.
After searching, you can find out more about a record type by clicking on it. And, if the collection reference appears in blue and underlined, you can click for a link to our online catalogue for a fuller description of the contents of the collection. Otherwise, you will need to see the hard-copy catalogues in our Search Room.
Please contact us at the Record Office for details, or follow the link to the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) for more search tips.
