Custodial History, Provenance, and the Description of Personal Records

This article takes as its main case study the custodial and archival history of the papers of Sir Richard Fanshawe (1608–66). Like many personal papers, they have had many adventures, and it is difficult to give an adequate account of their complex provenance using conventional approaches to archival description. In describing such papers archivists need to reinterpret traditional distinctions between fonds and collections. Instead of envisaging a simple binary division between "organic" fonds and "artificial" collections, they should interpret the fonds as a grouping determined by context of creation and the collection as a grouping determined by custodianship. A fonds may sometimes be reified as a single collection but is often distributed across multiple collections. Both creation contexts and collection histories inform knowledge and understanding of archives.