Online Catalogue

Today has been a landmark day for the Taking Account of Our Past project to catalogue the papers of Smith, Son & Wilkie, chartered accountants as the first bits of the catalogue went live on the Black Country History website and can now be searched online.

So far, only the catalogues for the records of four businesses are available:

• Craddock Brothers Ltd, Boot & Shoe makers
• Queen Square Syndicate, Property developers who worked on the Queens Arcade project
• The British Wrought Iron Association, who kept data on the industry and managed the sales quota scheme for wrought iron
• Benjamin Walters & Co Ltd, Locksmiths

To see the catalogue entries available online for the Smith, Son & Wilkie collection see here http://blackcountryhistory.org/collections/getrecord/GB149_D-SSW/ 

Smith, Son & Wilkie top level entry on the catalogue

 

Each entry on the catalogue contains:

• A title
• A reference (for this collection starting D-SSW)
• The covering dates for the collection
• A Description of the records to put them in to context with the work of the business
• An Administrative History (on the top level only) to describe the history of the business
• The extent of the collection (physical description, e.g. 3 boxes or 2 bundles)
• The level of the description (in the order: Collection, Series, Subseries, Item)

The Black Country History website has a section at the bottom of each description called ‘catalogue’. Below this will appear a tree of records in the catalogue, both above and below the selected record. This can be very useful to put a particular item in to context or to see how it fits within the larger structure of the collection.

Catalogue Tree for The British Wrought Iron Association records

 

If you would like to view any of the records listed here, please come in to Wolverhampton Archives and Local Studies with the reference number for the records you are interested in and the counter assistants can retrieve them for you in the usual way.

 

I still have a lot of records to catalogue but now they can be added to the Black Country History website once the descriptions are complete. The next descriptions to be added will be for the records of Smith, Son & Wilkie themselves.