Expensive Archives

SIR – Daniel Austin (Letters, January 12) asks if the National Archives will start charging for documents. Sadly, it already has a policy that can make its services prohibitively expensive.

It has introduced a rule limiting researchers to 12 documents per day. Where research material of interest is scattered in small amounts across multiple documents, one can find that, within two or three hours of arrival, one’s research “day” must finish.

A Londoner may be able to go back the next day to continue research, but for those of us living further away this means high travel or accommodation costs and much wasted time. Anthony Annakin-smith

Neston, Wirral

SIR – I sympathise with Stephen Rowe (Letters, January 11) over transcription errors in the 1921 Census records provided by Findmypast. I, too, found some that seemed to come from the transcriber being unable to decipher the cursive writing of 100 years ago.

This is no new problem. Some years ago I discovered that my own birth entry online had misrepresented the correct handwritten record, and given my name as Virignia.

Once I got over the feeling of having been an imposter for most of my life, I quite enjoyed having had an “official” name that sounded like a Roman legionary. It has now been corrected. Virginia Williams

Kidderminster, Worcestershire