Contact the Archives
Questions, corrections, and family papers you would be willing to share.
Write to us
Write to the Keeper of the Archives with a question about the family, a correction to the catalogue, a request for a copy of a record, or an offer of family papers. Use the form below: it puts your message together for you to copy and send.
The Archives' email address will be published here soon.
Copy this message and send it to the Keeper of the Archives.
Donate or lend family records
Most of what a family knows about itself survives because someone kept a box of papers. If you have anything that belonged to the Belshers or Belchers, or to families who married into them, the Archives would be glad to hear from you. You do not have to give anything away: a good scan or photograph of a page is as useful as the original.
What we are looking for
- Diaries, journals and letters
- Family objects and heirlooms: a sword, a medal, a quilt, a pocket watch, tools or furniture with a family story
- Family Bibles and the family record pages inside them
- Photographs, especially ones with names written on the back
- Deeds, wills, land papers and receipts
- Military papers, discharges and medals
- Newspaper clippings, funeral cards and obituaries
- School records, certificates and report cards
- Recipes, songs, sayings and stories you remember being told
- Recordings or videos of older relatives
How a donation works
- Write to us and describe what you have. A phone photo of a page is enough to start.
- Choose a gift or a loan. A loaned original is scanned or photographed with care and returned to you; you keep it, and the family keeps a copy. Objects are photographed and their story written down.
- Tell us any limits. If something should stay private for a time, say so and the Archives will honor it.
- Your record is numbered, described and transcribed, and you are credited as the person who shared it.
- It opens to the public under the same rule as everything else: 72 years after it was made, and never with private details of living people.
Every gift or loan is recorded on a deposit form, so that in a hundred years anyone can see where it came from and who kept it.