Archiving Everyday History

Boxes of documents awaiting my arrival to
the Reading Room

In the five weeks that I have been in London, I have already been to many museums and I'm sure I will go to many more before I head back to the States. Each museum offers a unique perspective on different aspects of life. The British Museum simply blows its visitors away with the monumental artifacts it houses. It's hard not to be amazed standing in front of the Elgin marbles, the Rosetta stone, the statue of Rameses II, and an Easter Island head. My inner child giddily took in the dinosaur skeletons in the Natural History Museum and the spacecraft housed in the Science Museum. But the museums we've visited have only showcased the exceptional members of society and the incredible artifacts of civilizations past and present. To find the everyday history of the people who haven't found their ways into the city's major museums, I had to travel to the National Archives.

I found him!

My main reason for traveling to the archives was to research the owner of the fever idol at 2 Temple Place that my group chose for the midterm project. Since the idol's placard in the museum only gave the owner's name and the ship he was serving on when he procured the idol, I needed to do some digging. Heading to the National Archives website, I found the naval records of Arthur R. Hulbert, commander in the Royal Navy and commanding officer on the HMS Proserpine when the fever idol came on board in 1905. But that was the only record on his that had been digitized. To find anything about the work he had done and try to figure out how he gained ownership of the idol, I needed to actually go to the Archives and request documents.

The prospect of getting to work in the National Archives excited me. I worked briefly in the Oberlin archives last spring for a project in Carol Lasser's First Wave American Feminism class and I can honestly say that that was the most fun I'd ever had on an assignment at Oberlin. Going to the United Kingdom's National Archives, with its records on millions and millions of people, was a major step up from Oberlin's small but rich collections.

Supporting the book with foam
wedges

After I registered for my reader's pass, ordered my documents, and made it through security and into the reading room, I was struck by how many different types of people were there, all tied together by their research into the past. I sat next to a fellow American university student, an elderly couple sat at the table next to mine, a mother and daughter looked at documents through a document camera at the other side of the room, and two members of the British army sat at the table behind me. Everyone looked at various different types of documents--letters, large books, maps, scrolls, photos, even sketches--all looking at different parts of the past. The number of lives that were being recalled in that reading room that might have otherwise gone unnoticed in the storage rooms of the Archives astounded me.

How to make a rat bomb

Fabric designed by Vanessa Bell,Virginia Woolf's sister

The exhibition room at the Archives also showcased other lives that would have gone unremembered, as well as events that might not have been as well documented in other museums. An exhibit on spies and espionage during WWII featured the pictures and names of forty British spies who were executed after they tried to escape from a Polish POW camp. The exhibit also featured information on female spies who had not previously been recognized, and instruction sheets used by spies to make bombs out of dead rats (I kid you not). The exhibit also included more obscure records from famous British citizens, such as J.R.R. Tolkien, that would not be the usual fare for the standard museum. These exhibits give the museum treatment to people and objects that would not have been otherwise unrecognized.

The National Archives offer a unique look into the everyday culture of the United Kingdom. With census records, military and political correspondences, court documents, education records, fabric samples, newspapers, and hundreds of other types of records, the Archives captures and preserves the history of ordinary men and women, the people who would marvel at the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin marbles.