Our ongoing volunteer project to open up the archives of the William Simpsons Asylum continues to reveal new and surprising aspects of the story of the institution. Located in the village of Plean, it opened in 1836 as a home for elderly soldiers and sailors. The story of the home and its occupants is preserved in four large metal trunks of tightly-bound papers which were (re)discovered on the site of the original buildings in 2014.
Following the transfer of the archive to the university we began a volunteer project to clean, flatten and repack the thousands of nineteenth century documents crammed into the metal trunks. This slow, careful, methodical process has revealed many interesting details relating to the management of the institution and the lives of its occupants.
Recently one of our volunteers discovered the oldest documents yet found in the archive. Within a bundle of family papers relating to the Asylum’s founder Col. Francis Simpson (1760-1830) there sat a smaller set of documents enclosed in a handwritten note by Col. Simpson reading “Papers respecting the Falkirk burial ground which belong to my father’s family.” These papers record an ongoing dispute relating to the Simpson family’s burial plot in Falkirk churchyard, with the oldest documents dating from February 1778 being letters from Col. Simpson’s grandfather to his father discussing the issue.
“Your father says if he was twenty years younger he would break his [head] stone all to pieces with a hammer and let him pursue him for it.”
Extract from letter from Patrick Simpson to John Simpson, 24 February 1778
The project to unpack the William Simpson Asylym trunks continues. We recently reached the milestone of emptying the third trunk – only one to go! We are extremely grateful to all of our current and former volunteers who with great care and attention are revealing these details for the first time since they were packed away in the trunks almost 200 years ago.
