TITLE DEEDS

The title deeds and leases in this collection were in considerable disarray when they were deposited. The majority were in the part of the collection which had been listed by the National Register of Archives; most of the original property bundles had become separated, and arbitrary bundles had been created, some of them by Lady Lucy Hicks Beach, first Countess St Aldwyn, who seems to have begun to collect together deeds featuring particular families as parties while she was sorting the archive after the First World War. The NRA listed the deeds as they found them and made no attempt to reconstruct the property bundles; they numbered the documents individually and listed them in some detail, rather than listing by bundle, but did not give enough detail to enable the original bundles to be reconstructed.

As part of the project to catalogue this collection, therefore, volunteers at Gloucestershire Archives [Nick Berkeley, Cassie Loyd, Pauline Nash, Jane and Tony Sale and David Smith] extracted the additional information required, including accurate descriptions of properties and lists of parties. With the help of this information, every effort has been made to reconstruct original property bundles wherever possible. Where it has proved impossible to recreate a property bundle, either because it has not been possible to determine with accuracy whether a deed relates to any others, or because the other related deeds are not present, the deeds have been listed individually