A GRANT of £31,570 has been made to the South West Heritage Trust to catalogue the Wyndham family archives.

The family and archive is the largest held at the Somerset Heritage Centre in Taunton and is regarded as a foundation stone of West Country history.

Now, with the grant given by the National Cataloguing Grants Programme, the heritage trust can undertake major cataloguing work on the collection and make the results fully available online. 

“The project will take us 15 months to complete but it means that a vast amount of new information will become accessible,” said Liz Grant, an archivist with the trust 

“The archive is very extensive and documents the lives of West Country people and places over hundreds of years.”

The Wyndham family settled near Williton in 1520 and acquired major estates in Somerset, Devon and Wiltshire.

Its archive contains material from the 12th century onwards and includes papers relating to the development of Watchet, manor records for Williton, thousands of property deeds and large amounts of correspondence.

Trust chief executive Tom Mayberry said: “We’re very grateful to our funders for making this project possible,

“The Wyndham archive is of outstanding significance, and now far more people than ever before will be able to discover its rich and remarkable contents.”

The Cataloguing Grants Programme is administered by the National Archives and supported by organisations including the Pilgrim Trust, the Foyle Foundation, the Wolfson Foundation, the Andrew W Mellon Foundation and the J Paul Getty Junior Charitable Trust. 

In 2015 grants worth £325,000 were awarded to 11 projects.