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Welcome...to this Archive of historical material related to a part of the Stretton family. Please see further down the page for information on its structure and how best to access the material herein.

Recorded in the Leicester area at least as early as the 1600s, a branch of the family became established in Kidderminster from 1856 where three generations of surgeons, Samuel, Lionel and John, played an important role in the town’s development for nearly one hundred years. Their story is told in the Exhibition Virtual Tour on the John Lionel Stretton website.

Lionel has an important place in medical history having pioneered the use of Tincture of Iodine in surgery as reported in his letter published in the British Medical Journal on 9 August 1909.

Archive Collection

The material in this Archive was largely collected by Antony Stretton, son of John, and digitised by his nephew Chris Stretton between 2012 and 2014. All the original, hardcopy documents are deposited in the Worcestershire County Archive. These may be inspected by visiting The Hive in Worcester and the index can be searched on-line at: http://e-services.worcestershire.gov.uk/CalmView/ : entering stretton in the search box will show a ComputerRef No of 15607, which is the Home page for the Archive. It may be searched by entering individuals’ names.

Also in The Hive’s Archive is a considerable quantity of documentation from the Kidderminster Infirmary, deposited as Accession Number 8481. In 2016 these were reviewed by Rosemary Byrde and Chris Stretton and those with relevance to the Stretton story were scanned and summarised. The results of this can be accessed through the Archive/Infirmary Old Records menu item or through the Kidderminster Infirmary Records  tab in Lionel’s Archive section. The Infirmary Day Book 1872 – 1897, therein, is a fascinating document and well worth a browse. It contains many hand-written entries recording significant events in the Infirmary’s day-to-day running. A favourite can be found on page 75 of the document, dated May 23 1888: “An in-patient, name of Henry Stafford, having misconducted himself and disobeyed the orders of a nurse, has this day been discharged for the same”.

Using content

You are welcome to download material from this Archive for your own private use. If you wish to use anything for commercial purposes then please contact us first using the Contact Page on this website.

Archive Future

The Archive is ‘work-in-progress’ and additional material will be added over the coming months as it is systematically indexed and reformatted. Initially material was uploaded  for the three surgeons but this has now been extended and there is now material for over 30 separate family members.

We are keen, also, to add material from other sources and family members. If you have anything suitable, any queries or corrections, please get in touch using the Contact Page on this website.

You are currently on the HOME page of this digital Archive and will see the five navigation links to access all the areas of the site. The two links: FAMILY and ARCHIVE give you access to all the material in the Archive where, as digitised items are added over the coming months, there will be increasing amounts of material to browse and available to download.

To understand who is related to whom it would be good to be able to present an overall Family Tree. With over 800 individuals in the tree related to the Archive it is not possible to represent this on the computer screen! To make some sense of the relationships, single page summaries are available for key individuals, within which are active hyperlinks to other individuals whose material is published on the site - move the cursor around and active links will show themselves for those individuals whose material has already been uploaded.. These are accessed via the FAMILY Menu drop-down item. The GEDCOM file containing all the records currently collated will be available to download in due course.

The FAMILY area is a good place to start. This will will take you to a summary page containing thumbnails of individual family members whose data has been uploaded to the site. Click on one of these people and you will go to a single page that gives you background information about the individual and where they fit in the family.

Then head to the ARCHIVE page…you can get there either from the main ARCHIVE link in the top menu,  or clicking on the link towards the top of the page in the individual FAMILY pages where you can also see the number documents that have been uploaded to the Archive,

The ARCHIVE area holds all the material that exists for the individual family members. Ultimately it is intended that the structure of the Archive will be based upon family trees, clearly showing family groupings and providing live links to individuals therein. Meanwhile, as this is ‘work in progress’ the Archive is simply organised as folders of material related to individuals, identified by their full name and date of birth.

Additional material, unrelated to specific individuals, is also available in cluding:
     * Scans and reviews of Kidderminster Infirmary Records
     * Archive Management Policy

Unsurprisingly individuals will have varied amounts of content associated with their lives. These have been organised into a folder structure collating DOCUMENTS, IMAGES and MEDIA separately. Under the first two groupings are sub-folders, only displaying if there is content in the relevant area. The MEDIA folder contains audio and video files and are currently only available for John Lionel and John Weston. The structure is as follows:

DOCUMENTS

  • BIRTH MARRIAGE DEATH
  • CAREER
  • FAMILY
  • OTHER
  • PUBLICATIONS

IMAGES

  • ALBUMS
  • FAMILY
  • OTHER
  • PORTRAITS

MEDIA

This should help you get the best from this Archive...please use the Contact Page if you need any more help.