When Charlotte Chapel moved from Rose Street to Shandwick Place in 2016, no space was available for 50 boxes of archived material, covering the history of the Chapel from 1808 to 2009. The boxes were therefore deposited with the City of Edinburgh archives at their Murrayfield depot.
There was no opportunity to make a detailed index of the boxes before they were deposited. This had not been a problem in Rose Street, because they were available on open shelves, with the contents listed on the side of the box. To examine a subject referred to across different boxes, for example Minutes of Meetings, the monthly Record or the weekly Sunday Bulletins, boxes could be taken off the shelf, rearranged, and the contents read chronologically.
The City therefore kindly made the boxes available to Ian Balfour, at the depot, but only four boxes at a time. It was therefore not permissible to lay out all the boxes and to rearrange the contents into chronological order. This meant that documents had to be indexed ‘as we went along’ and as a result Minutes, the Record and Bulletins are scattered over many different boxes, often numerically far apart, and often not in chronological order.
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