The Sutherland Papers are the massive archive created by the Leveson-Gower family, Marquesses of Stafford and Dukes of Sutherland. It is the single most important archive collection relating to past life in Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent. However, because of the wealth and activities of the family, the collection is not just important locally and regionally but also nationally and internationally.

The collection contains hundreds of thousands of documents, volumes and maps created and preserved over 10 centuries. It was purchased by the Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent Archive Service in 2006 with the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund, a wide range of organisations, grant-awarding bodies, businesses, local societies, and very many private donors. A full acknowledgement is given here.

The purpose of this website is to give some indication of the wealth of information that the archive contains and to show how interesting and enjoyable using archives can be. Each of the items illustrated on this site is unique. Each of them represents the record of a moment in time. By looking at them, thinking about them and trying to understand how they interconnect, we can learn about the lives, thoughts, plans and motives of people in the past. We gain clues about their environment and daily activities and what the places they lived in looked like. We can begin to see the similarities as well as the great differences between life now and life in the past.

The catalogue of the papers can be downloaded here