Hampshire Archives and Local Studies

About

Taking your first steps in family history? At Hampshire Archives and Local Studies, you will find church records of baptisms, marriages and burials, census records, wills, newspapers, trade directories and other sources for Hampshire ancestors.

Want to know who lived in your house or street in the past? At Hampshire Archives and Local Studies, you will find censuses, historic Ordnance Survey maps, tithe and enclosure maps, building control plans, sale particulars, rating and land tax, and other records to help you trace a building through time.

In the Film and Sound Archive you can see and hear history, from late Victorian times to the present day, through moving images and sound recordings. The Archive contains over 35,000 film and sound recordings relating to central southern England, including film and tapes of local TV and radio.

Hampshire Archives and Local Studies preserves and provides access to 8 miles of material, from parchment to digital, relating to Hampshire and its families and organisations. You can access this on-site in Winchester, or find out more online.

We also run workshops on how to use archives for family and local history, and how to preserve them. We also host exhibitions and talks on topics as varied as football and the Olympics, the Jubilee, fairgrounds, and refugees, as well as Hampshire communities through the ages.

If you want to see behind the scenes, we welcome visits from groups, and our team of professional archivists can provide a talk for groups in their own venue.

Need a venue for your own meeting? Our cinema is now available for hire too.