Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London

Hi all,

Today’s posting comes courtesy of the Society of Antiquaries of London. As ever, we value any contributions to the blog – please feel free to get in touch if you have an idea that you would like to blog, or indeed any other relevant announcements etc. ‘

Jonathan Trigg

Searching for Fellows in the Archive

A frequent question we receive in the Archives is what material we hold on specific Fellows.

Very often the enquirer would simply like to know whether someone was FSA or perhaps when they were elected. Currently, the only way to find this out is to email the Archivist. Behind the scenes we are busy working on a publicly accessible database but this will take a little while longer. (NB – the database will cover historic Fellows only; so there are no data protection implications.)

We hold Blue Papers (nomination forms) consistently from 11 March 1847 onwards, with some dating back to 1811. Before then, we have some registers of Fellows but the main record of elections are the minutes of meetings. All minute books to 1921 have been digitised, with those up to 1835 already available online. We are also gradually adding searchable text to the catalogue records, so that searching for Fellows by name in the catalogue will bring up meetings where they were proposed, elected or exhibited items. For example, searching for William Stukeley already results in 13 minute book entries, whether he was exhibiting a scale wooden model of Stonehenge or an intaglio with the head of Hercules.

Correspondence of Fellows with the Society has only been kept to the mid-20th century, with the bulk being from the 19th century. Archive volunteers are currently cataloguing this collection, so this too will be searchable by name online before too long. In the meantime, the Archivist may be able to provide details of specific names or dates. Records of the 18th-century correspondence are already available online.

The Society no longer collects material relating to Fellows such as their personal correspondence, research notes, sketchbooks or other papers. However, we do have a large number of such collections, mostly from the 19th and early 20th century – scroll through the collections archive to get an idea of how varied they are! Very often what we hold are small sections of a Fellow’s life and work – for instance, most of Mortimer Wheeler’s papers are in the UCL archive, but he bequeathed to the Society the collection of notebooks, photographs and maps relating to his and Katherine Richardson’s work on hill forts in Northern France.

It is extremely unlikely that we have significant material relating to any Fellow who cannot be found by name in the catalogue. Useful additional resources are the National Archives Discovery catalogue and Archives Hub, both aggregate catalogues that facilitate searching across hundreds of repositories in the UK.

Of course you are always welcome to get in touch with the Archivist at archives@sal.org.uk for further help with your research!