I'd just like to preface this blog by saying, have you ever just had one of those days where your unusually tired, a bit wound up and just want to stay in and spend the day on the sofa? Well today for me is one of those days, thankfully I didn't have anything on today and everyone else around here has been either out for the day or chilling out as well.
Talking about this, earlier on in the week I decided to have a day doing the complete opposite where I got back into doing more research work for my dissertation. In order to do that I got on the train and headed down to the National Archives near Kew Gardens.
As always, it was really nice being back in the big city, watching all of the hustle and bustle, and riding round on the tube.
This was the first time that I'd ever been to this specific archive, and the second archive that I've been to ever. Due to this I'm still not that clued up on how everything works and the order everything's meant to be done in, however by the end of the day I did have a rough idea. I think I'll need to go back a few more times before feeling comfortable about making my way around the buildings and ordering and handling the old books.
Although it was a really useful experience, seeing where the archives were and how things work, there didn't seem to be as much information on my subject as I'd hoped there would be. Furthermore the information I did find was within several very large books that I had to sift through in order to find the few short sections that were relevant to my subject.
Having discovered that they don't often hold individual letters and records but in fact they are merged together with other records into large collections, means that I will have to take a few days out at the start of term to go back to the archive and sift through another few select books and collections to gather more info. I'm looking forward to it though, more time in London and back into another 'school' type project.
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