Caring for our collections
 Rob (left) and Alex inspecting and logging the traps
Bug hunting 'museum style'
One of the essential elements in caring for our collections is 'good housekeeping'. At the start of January Rob and Alex checked and updated the sticky insect traps in the museum collection stores.
This is not a job for the fainthearted as the traps can reveal a variety of mini-beasts who have been wandering around the collections. The task of the team is to check each trap and log what is found. Usually this consists of spiders and the occasional woodlouse. Neither of these are harmful to the collections. We are looking for evidence of carpet beetle, silverfish, furniture beetle (woodworm) and clothes moth which, although tiny, can cause a lot of damage to our delicate fabrics, paper and wood.
On this occasion the 'catch' included a couple of centipedes, some spiders and several woodlice, none of whom would consider dining on the collections.
 Rob labelling new traps before Alex replaces them in locations around the store - in this instance inside one of the carriages
New traps were prepared, labelled and returned to the different locations throughout the store according to a plan developed by Lisa, our Conservator. They will be checked regularly to ensure that the collections remain free from any of our insect friends that may wish them harm.
Staffordshire Name Indexes
A Bissaker case study: using Staffordshire Name Indexes to help find wills on FindMyPast
Andrew George is working in the next stage of the wills index and a new section covering 1570-1600 will be launched on the Staffordshire Name Indexes in the coming months. In the meantime, Andrew has been looking at how we can use the Staffordshire Name Indexes site to locate those difficult to find wills on FindMyPast.
The intention here is to look at the wills index material available on the Staffordshire Name Indexes (SNI) site and images and indexes available on Findmypast (FMP) to show how they can be used together and separately to get the best out of both, especially where surname spellings are variable. The case study looks at examples from the Bissaker family of Packington in Warwickshire.
To get the best results, the partial match option on the SNI site is helpful. Searching on Bis (with partial match ticked) and Packington produces 6 relevant results for the 1600 to 1790 period currently covered by the index: Eustace Bissacre 1684, Ralph Bissacre 1646, Elizabeth Bissaker 1715, Ralph Bissaker 1742, John Bisaker 1714 and Robert Bisaker 1704. The other hit, for Corbison, shows the limitation of partial match when few letters are used – there can be many unexpected results. Ours are easily found when early in the alphabetical series, or as well when as here the hitlist is short (see: Lichfield Wills Index - Staffordshire Name Indexes (staffsnameindexes.org.uk)
 Searching on FMP for the Bissaker surname with variants produces a larger list of 25 hits (Search Results for Staffordshire, Dioceses Of Lichfield and Coventry Wills and Probate 1521-1860 | findmypast.co.uk), of which 15 seem to be immediately relevant to Packington. There are reasons for this. The manuscript indexes to wills, familiar to many Record Office users, were also filmed and are available on FMP, so probates after 1640 should all have 2 entries, one for the index, one for the actual documents (FMP does not distinguish between the two in any way). Here, the two entries for Elizabeth 1715 and Ralph 1742 are side by side, while John 1714 and Robert 1704 have entries apart because the spelling of the surname has been recorded differently.
 The one entry for Eustace 1684 turns out to be for the documents themselves, but there is nothing at all for Ralph 1646. The reason for this becomes apparent when I did a search for all 1646 wills. First thing to say is that now this is a frustrating thing to do, as the hitlist runs into the tens of thousands because all the ”undated” peculiar court wills are included in the results, but a couple of clicks on the year icon at the top line of the hitlist at least gets the specific year entries to the top of the list. Scrolling down the pages, I come across two entries side by side for Ralph Bissacre 1646 Little Packington. So, the answer is that FMP doesn’t consider Bissacre to be a variant of Bissaker. Hmmm. Curiously, as the initial hitlist shows, it does consider Bisacre to be one. Answers on a postcard please.
Examples before 1640 will often have 3 entries in FMP. This is because the series of Consistory Court Act Books (B/C/10i/1-15) was also filmed, and they provide the source material from which the manuscript indexes to the early wills were compiled. This is helpful because many early records have not survived, so in some cases the abbreviated act book entry in Latin is the only survival. A red tick in the early manuscript volumes marked cases where records did survive. Users (and staff) of the service at Lichfield may well remember filling in slips for the production of original wills and having the slip returned when the item couldn’t be found with the dread letters NRT (no red tick). However, these Act Book entries are often roughly written; this and the abbreviated Latin makes them prone to FMP misreading – on the plus side, they are often easy to spot, with for example Ric(h)ardi or Richi appearing rather than Richard.
In the FMP hitlist, the final entry is for Agnes Byssaker 1557. The document is the index volume, but no tick is found between the date and the surname on the page (the bottom entry on the page). The 1585 entry for Richd Bisaker does have a tick, so we can expect to find the will. Unfortunately, the other two entries which seem to relate to this (Richi Bisacre and Richardi Bisaker), are both of the act book page.
Another contender to help here is the closely dated (1584) hit for the unusually named Ansti Bisaker of Alveley, Shropshire. However, this turns out to be another Act Book entry (a misreading), a caveat relating to Eustace Bisaker of Coventry in that year. I have sympathy for anyone wishing to do a place name study for Alveley as in this whole dataset Alveley is used as the default answer when no place can be identified in the source - so it appears much more frequently than you might expect based on the size of the place.
The will of Richard was difficult to find, but after a series of different searches (by changing dates and other limiting factors) it was found. The new SNI addition will make it easy for you – the notes section for the specific entry will provide the answer, but until then, this is your challenge . . .
Exhibitions
 Our County, Our Climate
The new 'Our County, Our Climate' exhibition is on display at Burton Library until Monday 13 February. The exhibition features poems, photographs, objects and copies of documents relating to historic flooding and drought in Staffordshire.
You can also access our YouTube channel and watch storyteller Maria Whatton walking through the Burton washlands as she shares 3 unique stories written specifically for the project.
|
