Transferring court registers to Barnsley Archives

Earlier this year Barnsley Archives and Local Studies’ staff went to the Magistrates’ Court on Westgate to help with the transfer of a large batch of the court’s non-current registers.

Magistrates’ courts are one of a number of public bodies and organisations which are required by law to transfer their older registers to an approved ‘Place of Deposit’ – a local archive service appointed by The National Archives.

In return for receiving this material, local Places of Deposit draw down funding from the National Archives to offset the costs of archival-standard storage space and packaging, the cataloguing of the records and the administration of requests for access from the courts themselves. The registers transferred earlier this year consist of 1,260 volumes covering the years 1994 to 2003. They augment Barnsley Archives’ existing holdings of Magistrates’ Court registers which form an unbroken series beginning in September 1841.

Most of these records are subject to a 100-year closure for confidentiality reasons, but older court records are fully accessible and can be used by the public. All of the 19^th century court registers were photographed by Ancestry.com last year, and they’ll be going live on-line by the end of this year.

This latest batch of records will be safely stored for researchers to access in the future.

To view these and any other of the fascinating documents in the Barnsley Archive, contact the team on 01226 773950 or at archives@barnsley.gov.uk