The Mills Archive Trust offers a variety of free resources to help researchers interested in any aspect of mills and milling.
For those able to travel we offer an open-access library in a pleasant environment with helpful and knowledgeable staff. Not only can you browse our books and journals, by arrangement you can also examine original archival documents.
We ask you to make an appointment giving us 1-2 weeks’ notice so that we can ensure your visit is as productive as possible. Although we have some flexibility the notice period is essential if we are to provide you with archival material to inspect. We strongly suggest that you prepare for your visit by browsing our Archive and Library catalogues and letting us know what you wish to see.
Our catalogues and hundreds of helpful pages of helpful information are freely available to all on this website. We are constantly adding new material to make your research easier and more rewarding. These include more than 80,000 images and documents with details of 12,000 mills. To ease access to our 4 million records a number of finding aids provide guidance to the contents of files which may not yet have been scanned in detail
Family historians may also find our milling ancestor database worth searching for the names of millers and mill people more generally.
As a small charity, dependent on the availability of volunteers, we focus on providing free services to our 180,000 virtual visitors each year. We are happy to answer single specific questions submitted on our contact form provided they will take less than thirty minutes to answer. These will be handled as rapidly as possible without charge, although we cannot guarantee to respond within a few days.
We may be able to arrange for someone to do more detailed research on your behalf, but we cannot do that without significant payment in advance. Our minimum charge is £250 for a preliminary report which may be unproductive or indicate the avenues to follow and the consequent cost of further research.
Please note that payments for research and subsequent reports are not refundable and we offer no guarantee that we shall find anything relevant beyond what would be stated in our initial estimate. Copyright charges may apply if the report or any images provided are published in any form.
