While working on the SEEME Wiltshire Black History Project I was checking through some leads to an early black presence in the county, when a couple of lines about the death of a black cook sent me on a journey through the archives to find out about him and his family. The Salisbury and Wiltshire Journal reported on 22nd January 1848:

I am always pleased when several aspects of our activities come together at once.  Those of you who follow us on Twitter will have seen our tweet on a great landmark for our service that was the 100,000th record or set of records produced by our wonderful colleagues in the document production team since we opened in October 2007 (that represents over 59 million walking steps by the team to produce your records and put them back again!).

Actually, it was more than 100,000 as this figure was just for general archives, we count the production of parish registers and wills separately and so we can add a further 30,000 or more documents produced!  And the grateful recipient of the “100,000th” record was...er...ourselves. Let me explain.