County Record Office

The County Record Office cares for millions of documents of all shapes, sizes and ages. They include: the archives of the North Riding court of quarter sessions from 1605; the archives of the North Riding and North Yorkshire County Councils (including the deeds of all the properties owned by the county council and the minutes of all its proceedings); the records of local courts; the archives of district, borough and parish councils; the archives of hundreds of landed families, individuals and institutions from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries; the registers of the North Riding Register of Deeds comprising 2344 volumes containing approximately 1.25 million deeds made between1736 and 1970; manuscript maps from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries numbering approximately 2,400. Many of these documents have come (and continue to come) from a wide variety of owners and places, from national and local government authorities, from private homes, from solicitors' offices, from churches, from all over the county and from all over the country, and are kept together for convenience of reference in one place, under the care of experts in their conservation, storage and interpretation.