I spent the month of August last year in Kansas, working on English
documents which are vital to an understanding of local and family
history in the part of West Yorkshire where I now live. In fact, with
the library's help, I was able to locate and transcribe many hundreds of
deeds which formerly belonged to the Kaye family of Woodsome Hall and
which, with a few exceptions, have no known counterparts in England. The
earliest items in the collection date back to the thirteenth century,
and the latest to the 1700s, but the vast majority are title deeds from
the Tudor and Stuart periods.
The collection is housed in the
Spencer Library in Lawrence, the rare books, manuscripts, and archives
library of the University of Kansas. It is located in the Department of
Special Collections, which is a broad-based rare books and MSS library
with an international reputation. The manuscripts division contains
about 300,000 items, primarily from Europe (including Britain), Latin
America, and the US, and it concentrates on the humanities and natural
history. Few of the manuscripts have been published. They are seen by
the library as primary sources for use by researchers: all readers are
welcome in the library, but the manuscripts must of course be used
within the Department. Among the sample of `broad subject areas' listed
in a brief introduction to the Department's holdings are the following
tantalizing headings: (1) British family papers (letters, legal
documents, financial accounts, diaries, etc.) largely 17th to 19th
centuries, and (2) Several thousand miscellaneous British deeds, 14th to
19th centuries.
Among those miscellaneous deeds are two
categories temporarily entitled The Yorkshire Deed-Box Collection and
Huddersfield Area Deeds. These were the items that had first attracted
my attention, and a brief explanation of how they came into the
University's possession is a help to intending researchers. A paper
prepared by Ms. Ann Hyde, the Department's Curator of Manuscripts, tells
how in 1969 the Department bought two groups of British deeds and
estate papers from the English book-dealers Hofmann-Freeman. One
consisted of about 5,000 unsorted and supposedly miscellaneous items,
the other, containing about 4,000 roughly sorted deeds, was from
Kirtling Tower, a seat of the notable North family, who had extensive
estates in the south of England.
The entire shipment arrived in
the United States in parcels, made up it seems by the book-dealer. Once
in Lawrence they were classified as `H-F' and `North' and a student gave
the contents temporary numbers, providing scratch cards for all the
items. These cards contained the temporary number, and bare details of
the date, the parties involved and place names, where possible. The
librarian's impression was that material from `North' had somehow found
its way into `H-F' and vice-versa. An English archivist was hired to
handle the collections and worked on them between 1982 and 1985. As a
result there was some re-arrangement and re-boxing, but apparently it is
not now always clear which items she handled, and some may have been
misplaced. Work on classifying these deeds continues.
It was Ms.
Hyde who first realized that a significant number of deeds related to
places in and around the West Yorkshire parish of Huddersfield, although
not to Huddersfield itself, and she informed the West Yorkshire Archive
Service of the collection in 1991. Because the office was then
short-staffed, Ms. Hyde's letter was sent to me, and I was asked if I
could help. It was immediately clear to me that the deeds had to do with
the estate of the Kayes of Woodsome and were likely to provide the key
to several important chapters in the history of the family and the
estate. And so it proved this last summer, when the research carried out
in Lawrence was finally analyzed. The Kayes may not have been major
landholders in the national context, but the search produced significant
material for no fewer than twenty townships in West Yorkshire,
clarifying the history of numerous farms and hamlets.
Moreover
there proved to be even more valuable genealogical evidence in the deeds
than I had dared to hope. I had of course expected that new light would
be thrown on the various branches of the Kayes in and around Almondbury
parish, and on the gentry families with whom they were directly linked.
But there were also among the deeds marriage settlements, inquisitions
post mortem, testamentary documents, copies of court roll and much else,
all with direct evidence relating to the families who were tenants or
neighbours of the Kayes. The total of such families or individuals comes
to more than fifty, and includes such significant names as Saltonstall,
Copley, Armitage, Dean, Lockwood, Crosland, Ramsden and Nettleton.
Since
returning from Lawrence I have been able to compile a detailed calendar
of the Yorkshire deeds, complete with place-name and surname indexes.
Now it will be possible to make this particular section of the British
collection in Kansas more widely available. Two things should not be
forgotten, though. First, there are significant complementary
collections for the Kayes's estate in England, both at the estate office
of their successors, the Earls of Dartmouth, and in the Leeds section
of the West Yorkshire Archive Service. Second, the Kaye material in
Kansas amounts to no more than six or seven percent of the full British
collection. No doubt there are still many exciting disc