The website will be down between 28 February and 1 March 2011

Suffolk Heritage Direct will be taken down for essential maintenance from 8.00am on Monday 28 February until 9.00am on Tuesday 1 March 2011. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Find out about Suffolk’s rich agricultural past

Farming has always been at the heart of the rural community in Suffolk. The East Suffolk Agricultural Association was formed in 1831 in Wickham Market by a group of progressive farmers and landowners who wanted to improve farming techniques in their county by holding an annual show. Since this date the Suffolk Show has mirrored and helped to shape agriculture and rural life in Suffolk both before and after it moved to a permanent Suffolk Showground in 1960.

In 1833 the West Suffolk Association began its own Show and in 1856 the two merged to form the Suffolk Agricultural Association. The Association judged farm animals from leading breeders, held ploughing matches, awarded cash prizes to men and women who worked on the land and contributed to improving agriculture.

The archive consists of minutes, newspaper cuttings, hundreds of photographs, bound volumes of catalogues, programmes, schedule of prizes, prize certificates etc which help to give an insight into local farming practices which had remained unchanged for centuries and tell the fascinating story of how they disappeared for ever, as tractors began to replace horses in the mid to late 1950s.

Lowestoft’s shipping history has come home

Lowestoft’s maritime history is brought to life in a remarkable collection of archives. Until recently Lowestoft was the busiest fishing port in Britain, and was also a leading centre of shipbuilding. Every single vessel registered in Lowestoft from 1854 to 1993 was recorded in detail in the Registers of Ships that were kept in the port. Over the years the Registers were moved around to different places, including Great Yarmouth, Ipswich, and Cardiff. Now they have all come home to Lowestoft and are stored in special secure archival conditions in the Suffolk Record Office in Lowestoft Library.

The registers will tell you where each boat was built, its dimensions, method of construction, and what sort of engine or sails it had. They will tell you who owned it, and all the main details of its history – whether it was stranded or wrecked, or perhaps torpedoed in one of the World Wars. Lastly they will tell you when it was broken up or sold to another port.

The on-line catalogue gives a full list of them, and you can see the original registers if you call into the Lowestoft Record Office

Catalogue of historic Suffolk photographs now online

Housed at Ipswich Record Office, the Suffolk Photographic Survey was started in 1954 by Mr R B Pratt of Capel St Mary, to create a collection of photographs that would illustrate as fully as possible the life of the county in the past. It now contains about 17,000 prints and negatives covering the whole of Suffolk, mainly from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is growing all the time.

The fully searchable catalogue enables you to find photographs of a community - maybe the parish church, village shop, main street or major buildings - or relating to subjects such as agriculture, transport, windmills or rural occupations and crafts.

Find out more details about other Suffolk Record Office photographic collections (PDF, 71Kb)

Tracing your Suffolk Regiment ancestors

The Suffolk Regiment Archives are housed at the Bury St Edmunds Record Office and cover the records of battalions from the early days of the Regiment as well as those of individual soldiers.

The Regiment saw action in many theatres of war particularly in Egypt, India, Malta, Shanghai, South Africa, Palestine, France and Flanders. The collection includes over 19,000 photographs illustrating the life of the Regiment from 1862-1959: active service (from Afghanistan in 1880 onwards), peacetime activities at home and abroad, sporting and social events, individual soldiers and groups. There are also Regimental histories, the Regimental Gazette, diaries and maps and plans as well as reminiscences and papers relating to war memorials and war graves.

Find out more detailed information about the collection (PDF, 79Kb)