LANDED GENTRY RECORDS
UNINDEXED ARCHIVAL GEMS
Once research has exhausted the Victorian plethora of information online, finding out what your ancestor did for a living or how much they were paid becomes a lot more challenging. A solution may be visiting an archive and exploring records that have been deposited by the families who owned the land in the parish where you believe that your ancestors were baptised, married or buried.
Exploring mainly Georgian and Victorian records, which have fairly uninviting catalogue descriptions such as estate vouchers or accounts ledger, opened a whole new window onto the lives of those who worked for the Bankes family.
The discoveries detailed in this article are all from the Bankes Archive – comprising more than 30,000 items – which is held at the Dorset History Centre in Dorchester.