Devon Heritage Services
Projects
DEVON HERITAGE SERVICES PROJECTS
Here are details of our projects, some of which are being undertaken in partnership with other organisations. In other cases, we are supporting outside projects with source material, resources, and advice.
Some of these projects have been made possible by external funding, and most take place with the help and support of volunteers working in the Devon Heritage Centre, the North Devon Record Office or at home.
This project, funded by a grant awarded by the National Archives Cataloguing Grants Programme, is cataloguing, and will also digitize and index, some of the Devon County Quarter Sessions records.
Funding from Devon County Council has enabled the scanning of Devon’s tithe maps, and a project is underway to eventually make these maps, together with their tithe apportionments, available online so that they can be viewed without visiting the Devon Heritage Centre.
Tithe Apportionment Transcription Project
This ongoing project is part of Tithe Maps Online, and involves the transcription onto a spreadsheet of the tithe apportionments for each parish, by a band of volunteers working from home, and using digital copies purchased from the National Archives.
Genuki Devon Wills Index Project
A volunteer-run project which is providing an on-line finding-aid in the form of an index of all known Devon wills, administrations and inventories prior to 1858, through the Genuki Devon website. Devon Heritage Centre and North Devon Record Office staff have assisted with this project from its inception.
Devon Shipping Records Project
A new project in partnership with volunteers from Devon Family History Society and the Friends of Devon’s Archives, to digitise and index shipping registers held at Devon Record Office and North Devon Record Office, and to make the information they hold more easily accessible.
A community archives project which began in 2006 and which enables individuals or groups to contribute content to a growing digital community archive and to make this available through its website. North Devon Record Office is one of a number of project partners.
Devon Family History Society Small Projects
A project carried on by all three archive repositories in Devon, in partnership with Devon Family History Society, to produce transcriptions of, or indexes to, unusual records of interest to family historians.
Peter Orlando Hutchinson Project
This community heritage project aims to continue the legacy of volunteer study and involvement in landscape heritage that has grown through the East Devon AONB Partnership and the Parishscapes project. It is drawing on the work of Peter Orlando Hutchinson, a Victorian geological and archaeological researcher, diarist and artist, who spent all his adult life in Sidmouth, Devon. His five volume diaries are now held at the Devon Heritage Centre, together with six volumes of his sketchbooks. These have been digitised and made available for the project by heritage centre staff and volunteers.
Tuckers Hall is the home of the Incorporation of Weavers, Fullers & Shearmen in Exeter. Devon Heritage Centre has assisted volunteers working for the Tuckers Hall Heritage Lottery funded project, to digitise the historical records held here.
Devon parish registers to go online
Following Plymouth & West Devon Record Office’s agreement with Find My Past to digitise many of its parish registers and make the scanned copies available online, a similar agreement between Devon Heritage Services and Find My Past was finalised, and digitising of parish registers held at Devon Heritage Centre and North Devon Record Office is underway.
A project to make the maps held in Devon's archives more readily available to schoolchildren studying their local history is being funded by Devon History Society.
