This is a text-only version of an article first published on Tuesday, 21 May 2019. Information shown on this page may no longer be current.
A VILLAGE church has provided the Berkshire Record Office with its 10,000th collection for its archives.
Lucy Laird from St Andrew's Church, Shrivenham, hands a church register to County Archivist Mark Stevens.
Berkshire Records Office.
The Record Office, located in Reading, is the custodian of local archives from across the county and has been collecting records for the last 69 years.
The collections span 10 centuries of Berkshire's history.
The 10,000th collection comes from St Andrew's, Shrivenham, near Swindon - part of the historic county of Berkshire which included towns like Abingdon and Wantage.
The oldest item within it was a Victorian marriage register dating from 1813. Lucy Laird, a Shrivenham resident and church member, said: "It is very reassuring to know that our irreplaceable historic records are now stored safely at the record office. "Parish registers like the one from Shrivenham are invaluable sources for family historians.
For example, the Shrivenham registers record the marriage of Edward Cavey and Hannah Wicks on 6 April 1814 and the baptism of their three children.
The burial register notes that their second child died aged only seven days, that Hannah died at 41 and Edward, who was the village butcher, died at 50. Other recent collections include a letter from the American Red Cross in the Second World War with instructions to Reading girls for how to behave at dances and a lease for land in Bray dated 1742.
The Record Office is always happy to add historic documents and photographs to its collections.
Anyone with relevent material is invited to contact: Berkshire Record Office, 9 Coley Avenue, Reading RG1 6AF, tel: 0118 937 5132.
Email: arch@reading. gov. uk