I recently was spurred on by another lister to search for some old hospital records. I found the details for St Mary's Hospital in Manchester (now Manchester Royal as St Mary's is Maternity) on the AtoA site, which stated the records were still kept at the Hospital. I e-mailed the hospital and got a quick response which might be of general interest. I was asking for the year 1916. "the trust no longer have records from the period of time you require. The Trust has a national destruction policy that allows records to be destroyed after a certain length of time. We are obliged to keep children's records until their twenty-fifth birthday, we keep Gynaecology records for eight years and keep Obstetric records for twenty-five years. We do however have a lot of birth registers in our archive room." I would just like to add that the sender of this sad news is really trying to be helpful and has requested more details in case she can help further. Pat W