Welcome to the Explore York Archives Online Catalogue

We are an Accredited Archives Service responsible for acquiring, preserving and promoting the Archive and Local History collections relating to the City of York Council area. Our collections document all aspects of life in York, from 1155 to the present day. In all, we hold well over 1.5 miles of archives.

For more information about us, our collections, services, projects or community resources, please see our website. You can also browse our online image collections and keep up to date with what we are up to by following us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, or our archives blog.

How to Search
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Welcome

Search the archives


This catalogue allows you to search our archive collections. It includes our publicly available records for City of York Council (and its predecessor bodies) and our community collections created by other local organisations. If you are interested in published Local History materials or book stock, please see our library catalogue.

If you already know what you are looking for, you can search by the reference number of the item or collection in the search box above. You can also conduct a general search across our collections by entering keywords in the search box. For more detailed information on how to get the best out of the catalogue, please use our How to Search page. We will be adding to this catalogue as new archives are acquired and as we progress with the cataloguing of our existing holdings to international standards, so please do check back in future to see what’s new.



Enquiries And Visiting The Archive

If you have an enquiry relating to our collections, please contact us and the team will be happy to assist. For our latest opening hours and information on how to arrange a visit to view our collections, please see our Visiting Us web page.


Harmful and Offensive Language

At Explore York Archives we have begun the process of reviewing our current and historic collections information and cataloguing and descriptive practices. In our catalogue we try not to replicate any offensive and discriminatory language found in the content of our collections. However, in some cases some harmful and offensive terminology may be retained within our catalogue entries and/or descriptions to ensure the records are kept in their historical context, and to facilitate discovery of these collections.

This does not mean that Explore York Archives condones or endorses the use of the language or content that may be found in our collections or on our catalogue. To read more about how we deal with harmful language within our collections, please see our harmful langauge statement on our Getting Started web page.