Transcript of the 1678-1683 St Helena Records -  Click HERE to Download the PDF File

St Helena’s historic documents at the Archives office in Jamestown include 132 volumes of Consultation records for the years 1678-1836 (within the effective 1659-1836 period of EIC governance) detailing details of proceedings by the island’s Governors and Councils.

As part of their endangered archives project to preserve cultural heritage at risk of loss or decay and to make this available to as wide an audience as possible, the British Library scanned the six earliest volumes of records for the period 1678-1703. These are available as a large number of scans on the BL website. 

Since the handwriting in these records is extremely difficult to read, Dr Chris Hillman volunteered to transcribe the scans of the first available volume covering the period 1678-1683. These 437 scans can be seen HERE.

Every name quoted in this transcription has been extracted (1,550 records) with a modern-day English summary of the context of each name in the 1678-1703 records. These have been incorporated into the St Helena Ancestors database.

Note: This complete transcription supplants the only previously published source for these years, H. R. Janisch’s Extracts from the St. Helena Records (St Helena, 1885). Janisch has been found fairly reliable, but it has long been difficult to know whether he was directly quoting records or merely summarising them. Likewise, it is sometimes unclear whether some of the comments came from the records or Janisch himself. Again, he sometimes abbreviated the text to the point where the meaning was changed, also excluding details, for example, judicial judgments without describing the evidence presented.