Last year I reported here about Lucan’s Woodville House Archive which had, over the years, ended up in Yorkshire in the custody of a descendant of the Scott family who offered us the archive. I can now report its arrival in Tallaght Library, and can share some random examples of what is contained in the boxes.
One of their children, Hopton Bassett Scott, married Alice Jane Blaine in 1886 when he was 37 and she was 21. This gives us a branch of the Scott family living in Locksley in Shankill. Woodville was demolished in 1972.
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The archive is a rare survivor being an extensive archive of documents from a Lucan “Big House” and a smaller, but equally important house called “Locksley” in Shankill which is still extant. The link between the two houses is by marriage. Woodville’s owner was Sir Hopton Stratford Scott KCB, who married Mary Jane Bassett in 1866. He was 49 and she was 20 at the time of their marriage.
The archive is extensive. There are many personal letters dating from the early 1800s all the way through to the 1950s, leases handwritten on vellum dating back to the 1700s, family photographs that are unsorted and will take a great deal of detective work to put into order. Military commission documents from the early 1800s and bravery awards from the First World War also feature.
Of particular interest is Marjorie Scott (later Carden) who had a prominent role in the Red Cross and later the British Foreign Relations Department tracing refugees, displaced persons and assisting enemy prisoners of war after the Second World War. Many of her records survive in the archive.
In due course we hope to crowdsource some transcription work on some of the handwritten letters contained in the archive. This will need a lot of planning and we will let you know of progress.
I have digitised a small number of these items and they can be viewed HERE:
on our digital archive, Source.
[Ed’s note: many thanks to Dave Power, SDCC for his excellent updates and absolute dedication to the local history of the area]
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