Our work — 02
Archive & research
Most of what survives is in people's houses. Our job is to find it, record it properly, and give it back.
- Catalogued
- 96
- Cost to deposit
- Free
- Originals returned
- Scanned and handed back the same day wherever possible.
The problem
The public record has a hole in the shape of a community
Holocaust archives in Europe are extensive, and Roma and Sinti are badly represented in them. Part of the reason is how the killing was done — mass shootings in the occupied Soviet Union left almost no paperwork. Part of it is what happened afterwards: for nearly forty years West German authorities treated the persecution as policing rather than racial persecution, so there was no institution collecting statements and little incentive for survivors to give them.
The consequence is that a great deal of the surviving evidence never entered a public collection at all. It stayed with families, and it came to Britain with them. Registration cards in a biscuit tin. A refusal letter from a compensation office, kept for sixty years because it was the only official acknowledgement anyone ever sent.
This is retrievable, and it is time-limited. The people who can say who is in the photograph are in their eighties and nineties.
What we collect
If you are not sure, it counts
Registration and identity papers
Police registration cards, identity documents with racial classifications, travel permits, workhouse records.
Transport and camp records
Deportation lists, arrival registers, prisoner numbers, correspondence from camps.
Compensation files
Claims made to West German offices after 1945, and — very often — the letters refusing them.
Photographs
Family photographs of any date. A name pencilled on the back is frequently the only surviving record of a person.
Letters and diaries
Anything written at the time or shortly after, in any language.
Recorded memory
Cassettes, video, and the account you have been carrying and never written down.
How depositing works
Five steps, no hurry
- 01
You get in touch
An email or a phone call. You do not need to know what you have, or whether it is important. Working that out is our job, not yours.
- 02
We look together
Usually at your kitchen table. An archivist goes through the material with you and writes down what you can tell us about where each item came from.
- 03
You decide what happens
Three options, item by item: publish openly, catalogue only (researchers can see it exists and consult it by appointment), or hold privately. You can change your mind later.
- 04
We scan and return
Digitisation at archival resolution. Originals go back to you the same day wherever possible. If you would rather the Centre kept the original, we will, and it is covered by the CIC asset lock.
- 05
It gets described
A catalogue record: reference, date, language, place, provenance, rights, and a content note where one is needed. That description is what makes an object findable rather than merely stored.
Standards
How a record is made
Published so that other small archives can copy it, and so that depositors can see exactly what is written down about their family.
- Reference
- RHMC / type / running number. Printed on every record page and quotable in a citation.
- Digitisation
- 600 dpi for documents, 1200 dpi for photographs, TIFF preservation master with a derived web copy.
- Description
- Title, summary, date, place, language, physical medium, and a provenance note in the depositor's own words wherever possible.
- Rights
- A rights statement on every record. No record is published without one.
- Content notes
- Applied where material describes violence, or carries the racial language of the authority that produced it.
- Access status
- Open, catalogue-only, or closed. Set by the depositor, recorded in writing, reversible on request.
Questions
Before you decide
If your question is not here, ask it. There is no wrong question about giving a stranger your grandmother’s papers.
Ask us