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New family history sources for 2011
For anyone contemplating work on their family history, January the 1st is a significant day: not merely the day on which one resolves really to get down to it this year, but also the day on which, every year, a… Continue reading
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Their finest hour: Lord Moran papers open for study
In May 1940 Sir Charles Wilson (1882-1977) received a summons from the War Cabinet: he was to become the personal physician of Winston Churchill, who had become Prime Minister just two weeks before. The health of a political… Continue reading
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Tick… Tick… Tick…
As the last hours of 2010 elapse, let’s look forwards to the new year. January is always significant for a repository that holds archive material: each new year brings the opening of new material to the public, material that was… Continue reading
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Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing statistics: November 2010
This month’s cataloguing statistics for archives and manuscripts, like last month’s, are dominated by two major groups of archive records. (New cataloguing accounts for all the records added to the database, although behind the scenes retroconversion work continues on the… Continue reading
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Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing: October 2010
Our monthly cataloguing bulletin for October is short: not because of a lack of activity, but because the vast majority of the material newly released to the public falls into two major collections, both already described on the blog. Wellcome… Continue reading
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The Sausage follows the Flag
Draw up a list of iconic British foods: menu items that radiate comfort and Britishness to the native and the outsider alike. The chances are that sausages will be somewhere on that list – not, perhaps, as charged with emotional… Continue reading
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Wellcome Trust and “One & Other”
What do the Wellcome Trust and Antony Gormley have in common? Gormley has long been a supporter of Wellcome Collection, referring to our exhibitions and library as a “laboratory of possibility”. There is a also a characteristic sculpture by Gormley… Continue reading
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Montezuma’s gift
How many words of Nahuatl do you know – the language of the Aztecs? And how many words of this complex, agglutinative language (spoken in various modern forms by about 1.5 million people across Central America today) do you think… Continue reading
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Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing – September 2010
The archives and manuscripts cataloguing highlights from September bring together a rich mix of brand-new cataloguing and expansions of old listings, of twentieth-century material and older, and – for the first time – of paper and born-digital material. Professor Hans… Continue reading
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Say cheese!
One of those quotations that comes up again and again is General de Gaulle’s complaint about the impossibility of uniting France: “How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” For the serious… Continue reading