Shropshire Routes to Roots | Sources and collections

1. Introduction

How have sources been used by Shropshire Routes to Roots?

Introduction

Sources are the raw material of history. A source is anything which has been written down or spoken or recorded in some other way. All sources are potentially valuable as a record of what people thought or did in the past.

A montage of different sources: an indenture document, a letter, an account book, a postcard and a photograph.

Montage of different types of sources

An 'archive' is a collection of related sources, usually kept in one place. The Shropshire Routes to Roots project has digitised and made available through the website just under 1000 source documents selected from three major archives: Shropshire Archives, the local studies collection at Oswestry Library, and individuals' collections.

Underneath each image on the website, you will probably see one of the following types of reference:

[Shropshire Archive reference: AB/123/456] : This means the image was taken from a document found in Shropshire Archives. If you bring the reference with you, in most cases staff will be able to bring the original document to you.

[Oswestry Library: AB/123/456] : This means the image was taken from a document in Oswestry Library. Parts of the collection there are not catalogued, which means they don't have a number with which you can find the document quickly. Where there is a number, you can visit the local studies collection and quickly find the document for yourself.

[Reproduced with kind permission of A. Name] : This means the image was taken from a document which is still owned by a third-party; under copyright rules, they have allowed the project to reproduce their material on the web.

[Secret Shropshire] : The image was produced by the Secret Shropshire project (Opens in a new window). Refer to the website for the full reference to the original document, if available.

More sources

The images you will see on the website are only a tiny snapshot of what is available. At Shropshire Archives, for example, there are over five miles of shelves containing documents. This Source guide gives an overview of the types of sources available, which you could find in Shropshire Archives, County Libraries or in your own local public record office.

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Page created April 2004 and last updated 13 July 2007

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