Where Archives Belong
Deborah Hayter argues why family and local history archives should be prevented from being sold abroad and, whenever possible, remain accessible in the region where they were created.
In 1921 Baroness Kinloss sold all the muniments from Stowe House in Buckinghamshire. Stowe House itself was close to being demolished, before being rescued and turned into a public school. At the time it did not seem to matter that vast quantities of documents, the accumulation of several successive great landowners, were no longer in their local home. In 1925 they were bought by the Huntington Library in California, and the archives now form part of the largest collection of original material relating to English history anywhere outside England, a collection that has been much trawled by American – and British – researchers.
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