Our online catalogue provides descriptions of the collections we hold, it does not provide access to the documents themselves. The catalogue briefly describes each document we hold, so that you can identify documents relevant to your research. You can then visit our searchroom with a list of the DocRefNos of the documents you wish to see. Alternatively, you can contact us to purchase copies, or to engage our research services if you are not able to visit us in Warwick.

Latest additions

We update the website once every two months in February, April, June, August, October and December on the first Monday of the month. Please note that Warwickshire's Past Unlocked may be unavailable on the day to ensure that the update takes place successfully.

Completeness

Warwickshire's Past Unlocked is a work in process, but we are always working to improve it:

• All collections are given a 'Collection level' description as soon as possible.
• New collections are catalogued down to item level directly into our electronic catalogue.
• We are working through our backlog of uncatalogued material.
• We are converting our old paper catalogues to add them to our online catalogue.

We measure our progress by the percentage of documents in our collections which have 'item level' descriptions. We now have over 180,000 item level descriptions which equates to approximately 43% of our total holdings.

This catalogue includes our archival collections only. It does not include published books in our library or some of our local studies resources such as newspaper or electoral registers.

Full catalogues to all the Church of England parishes for which we hold records are available online (though these may not include very recent additions). The majority of our school and hospital collections are catalogued online and an increasing number of our landed estate collections, such as Willes, Waller and Newdigate are also available.

More recently catalogues to some of our business collections, such as Willans and Robinson have been published online. Significant parts of our council collections can also be found online such as Warwickshire County Council's signed minutes.

Using images or text from the website

Copyright to all images is retained by the individual rights holder. They have kindly made their collections available for non-commercial private study and educational use. You may only download or copy the content for educational or personal non-commercial use. No copying, storage, redistribution or publication of any content is permitted without the express permission of Warwickshire County Record Office or the owners of such content or their authorised persons, if other than Warwickshire County Record Office.

Copyright in the catalogue descriptions themselves lies with Warwickshire County Record Office.

Viewing the original documents

Please note that Warwickshire's Past Unlocked is only a catalogue of the records held at Warwickshire County Record Office, you cannot view the actual documents online. If you wish to see the documents themselves please consult the following information.

You can find out more about consulting original documents by:

• Visiting Warwickshire County Record Office at any time during our opening hours.
• Using our research or copying services.
• Employing a private researcher to research or transcribe the records for you.

If you would like to visit the record office to view documents of interest, please make a note of the document reference (given in the DocRefNo field of the record description) as you will need this to order the document.

If you require further information about accessing our records, please contact us by email

Some of our records are unavailable for general access, and this is usually indicated in the AccessStatus field of the record description. For more details about requesting information from records that are unavailable for general access, please go to our Freedom of Information page

Glossary

If you find a word you do not understand there is a glossary available to help you which can be accessed via the left hand menu bar.

Feedback

We are always keen to know if there are any areas of our public service that you feel could be improved and this includes the usability of this catalogue. Please complete the following feedback form if you wish to bring any aspect of Warwickshire's Past Unlocked to our attention: Feedback Form