G'day Merv and others I've recently been having some work undertaken for me at the PRO, and I thought I'd give people a heads up. First, having a member of the family whose occupation taken from BDM certificates etc is in the Customs can be problematic. I have one such family member. William Jeffries worked FOR the Customs but was not IN the Customs. Rather in reality he was a "Scale Porter" for the Customs. In other words he was a labourer employed by the Customs to do the physical work of weighing cargoes so that Duty could be calculated by the Customs Officer. It is the latter whose records are in the archives. Secondly, a good record agent will be able to do the necessary searches at the TNA in about three hours. Mine charges £25 per hour < http://www.searcher-na.co.uk/ > However, the research I'm undertaking at the moment isn't amenable to such an approach. I'm researching an English family member who was stranded in France during WWII, and who was arrested by the Germans, as a result when MI5 were interrogating Gestapo member post-war, she's mentioned in a number of files, from which extracts were taken and copied into her own MI5 file in an abbreviated form. To ask my record to search the files and locate the references would cost me a great deal of money. Instead, I'm having the necessary files copied and sent to me so that I can spend the hours searching them. (One I received on Friday has my relative's name blanked out in a report written by an MI5 Officer recounting his field trip to Germany in 1946, but knowing the context and the other characters named in the report, I know exactly who he's talking about, whereas a record agent would more than likely miss the reference). I asked the TNA recently to provide a quote to copy one file in pdf format, and they came back with a price of £403 or £2.80 per page. My record agent digitally photographed (jpg) the file along with two others for £75 in total. He then put the resulting 1.6 Gigabytes of photographs on a commercial file sharing site for me to download. It's a more cumbersome method, but far more economic. Food for thought? David Armstrong Maylands, Western Australia ----- Original Message ----- From: sally roberts Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2012 5:59 PM Hi Merv, Any records to do with Customs & Excise are held at The National Archives - http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/research-guides/customs-excise-tax-officers.htm Sadly, these records are not available to view online from what I can see. Regards, Sally ---------------------------------------- > From: [email protected] > Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2012 17:43:53 +1000 > > Hi Sally > > Bryan became an excise officer in Liverpool in 1824 and died on the job in > 1853. Would you know if there would be any employment records available? > > I contacted [email protected] for help and they were unsuccessful. > > Any help appreciated > > Merv Rossiter