The people, places, objects, traditions and stories associated with a family are precious.
In addition to basic facts of ancestors’ lives family stories and and information about the way our ancestors lived bring history home.
We welcome your donation of research about your family (or business / organisation) history if your family have lived or worked on Combe Down or in Monkton Combe or Midford. We’re also very interested if you have turned the research into a written family history that can be published.
We help to preserve the records of everyday lives and make them available to anyone wanting to understand where they’ve come from. Our archive contains family histories, transcripts of genealogical and local history source materials and digital assets.
We will need to assess your records to ascertain their historical value. We will ask you to transfer ownership to as well as copyright by signing a legal; agreement (please click the link for PDF of agreement) to keep the situation unambiguous and legal. If this is not possible for some reason then we shall ask you for a perpetual license to use and publish (please click here for PDF of agreement) your research or works created from it.
If your documents are recent enough that privacy laws may apply. consult with the archivists whether there is private information about anyone they need, by law, to protect. Such documents might include medical, school, tax, or legal records.
As we process the collection, we will make decisions about whether to discard some items as valueless. You can state in advance what you want us to do with the discards, including that we might return them to you.
You may also wish to to help support the care of your collection and we would be most grateful if you did. We have no government funding. We rely on memberships, donations, legacies and grants to survive as an organisation and to ensure that our collections survive for future generations.
You can see a number of family history donations we have on this site:
A history of the Miner family on Combe Down by Michael Miner
Frank Sumsion’s memories of Combe Down
The history of the Combe Down surgery
Saving our hospital’: the remarkable Bath Royal United Hospital Box Scheme