V & A Museum theatre Collection

[Ladkyis]

Having watch WDYTYA tonight with Emilia Fox it was interesting to hear the srchivist from the V & A Theatre Collection say that they have a list of every actor and actress that appeared in a London theatre from 1690 something to the twentieth century.

I have been to the website to see how to get at this list and it looks as though we have to go to Kensington and visit the museum. I am never going to do that so I will be contacting them and suggesting that they somehow find the funding to digitise the list OR perhaps they could do a lookup for me LOL. No harm in trying is there.

[notanotherminer]

That's amazing, Ladykis. Maybe you should contact them because it seems bordering on the criminal that such a resource should be tucked away from the public without any arrangements to make them more accessible.

If they don't digitise some of the early records soon it might be impossible to do so at a later date.

[Dizzy600]

Let us know how you get on as I have an ancestor who may be on that list. If they've kept it quiet for this long they may regret that it's got out when we all start contacting them for information.

[Ladkyis]

That's amazing, Ladykis. Maybe you should contact them because it seems bordering on the criminal that such a resource should be tucked away from the public without any arrangements to make them more accessible. If they don't digitise some of the early records soon it might be impossible to do so at a later date.

Ah but it is all to do with money isn't it. They have to have loads of money to digitise unless they can persuade FMP or Ancestry to do it for them and as FMP have just begun a huge project to digitise a large set of records, the title of which escapes me for the moment, at The National Archives we are just going to have to wait. FMP will finish the digitisation of whatever it is in 2013. The first batches should be online in December 2012.
If we win the lottery I will be making sure that some of the stuff held by the V&A is digitised PDQ I promise. I'll show people how to spend 50 million squid!

ETA: the National Archives Crime, Courts and Convicts collection is to be further transcribed, digitised and published online by Brightsolid (parent company of Find My Past and Genesreunited). this vast collection includes records from the Home Office, Prison Commission, Metropolitan Police, Central Criminal Court and the Admiralty dating from 1782 onwards.
The records will be searchable by name, alias, date of birth, place, offence and sentence. Content such as judge's reports, prison registers, transfer papers and gaolers reports will also be included.
The digitisation is a huge project with around 1.84 million pages making up the records. Both the conservation and scanning stages are expected to take around eighteen months to complete, with the first tranche of records expected to be published online from December 2012. information from Your Family History Magazine Issue 19 October 2011 available through www.Parishchest.com

[Gododdin]

What an excellent idea, Ladkyis; if the lottery doesn't oblige reasonably soon, some enterprising researcher might humbly seek sponsorship from some of the wealthier theatricals (the names Webber and Mackintosh leap to mind).
Godo