In 2009, I saw that a dealer on eBay was selling original documents from the Edenhall estate in Cumbria. These were mainly bills and receipts predominantly from the 18th century, with a few documents from the late 17th century and some from the early 1800s. Most of these documents contain personal names, usually the name of the tradesman who had submitted the bill or signed the receipt in addition to the name of the agent or steward who had paid the bill on behalf of the MUSGRAVE family. Some documents contained whole lists of names. In addition to the obvious relevance to family historians, the documents as a group also give a fascinating insight into the lifestyle of the MUSGRAVE family and the expenses involved in running a large household. The MUSGRAVE baronets had their main seat at Edenhall in Cumberland, but they also held a lot of land in Westmorland (Hartley Castle had been their main seat until the mid-16th century) and in County Durham in the Bishop Auckland area. These documents predominantly refer to Cumberland and Westmorland, but there are a few County Durham documents included as well. It saddened me that a family archive like this was being irretrievably dispersed, and I decided to transcribe the documents still offered for sale from the excellent photographs the seller had provided on eBay. Unfortunately many of the documents had already been sold, and for those the photos were no longer available. My transcription document therefore only contains 183 documents (although some of them consist of several original documents, so the total is almost 200). This represents a small fraction of those in the Edenhall archives. I am extremely grateful to Chris Dickinson for spending an inordinate amount of time, effort and patience in helping me to put my transcriptions onto his Rumbutter site. They are now ready to view. To preserve the formatting of my transcriptions, the transcribed documents are displayed as images, and their text can therefore not be copied. However, you can download my whole transcription document as a pdf file and then copy the text of any transcribed document in which you are interested into your word processor. Rumbutter's search engine fully works for the documents as there is also a "plain" text version below each document which has no formatting but is searchable. The site's "Tag" system has also been used to create an index of standard surnames (e.g. the surnames STEPHENSON, STEVENSON, STIVENSON etc. all appear under the Tag STEPHENSON). The MUSGRAVE Baronets and their agents, who appear in very many documents, have been tagged by full name. Unfortunately the tag system only allows a maximum of 12 tags per document, and six documents contained more than 12 names - these documents were given the tag "Not fully indexed". The Category system has been used for an index of occupations and general locations, mainly counties but also some individual places (Edenhall, Hartley, Carlisle, Penrith, Kendal). My downloadable pdf document has an index of full names and an alphabetical index of place names, giving (as far as I could determine them) each location's parish, county and grid reference. It is worth reading the introduction as it explains the rules I followed when transcribing. And the second page of the introduction contains a list of the MUSGRAVE baronets for quick reference. To view the documents, go to the Resources section http://www.rumbutter.net/gen-cumb-resources-home/ and click on "Edenhall", or go straight to the Edenhall Homepage at http://www.rumbutter.net/gen-cumb-res-edenhall-home . You need to log in. If you have not yet registered with the site, you will need to do so - it is entirely free. There are other excellent resources on the Rumbutter site, it is well worth it. Have fun! Petra P. S.: There is more of this to come in the future...