News on the project

Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery are searching for minerals belonging to Sir John St Aubyn's original mineral collection before it was split in 1834. As part of the project we would like to locate as many specimens as we can so that Sir John's collection can be fully documented.

Updates from the Project Assistant

Tuesday 15 December

We aren’t quite there yet, but on the 15th, several members of staff from Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery will be at the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, setting up the St. Aubyn touring exhibition. This is the first venue for its two year tour and will be opening on 9 January. We are all very excited about this day, and have sent the panels to the printers in early December in preparation.

Friday 27 November

The last portion of the St. Aubyn collection is now online. Everyone in the museum has worked really hard to put all of Sir John St. Aubyn’s minerals on the website so that you can see them. After matching as many specimens as we could to the catalogues, we made sure we put all this information online along with images and diagrams of the labels. Please feel free to browse this fascinating 18th century online collection.

Monday 7 July

Work has begun on designing the St. Aubyn touring exhibition, which is intended to display items from the collection as well as information about Sir John St. Aubyn. The exhibition starts its tour at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro on 9 January 2010, and will tour the country for the following two years.

Monday 20 May

Sir John St. Aubyn's micromount collection can now be viewed online. You can find out more about this unusual collection on the Micromount collection page.

Friday 20 March

Finally, after much painstaking work, the documentation team have completed all the data entry for Sir John St. Aubyn's herbarium. This means that his herbarium online database, with pictures, is now available to view.

Wednesday 11 March

I got a very interesting email today from a local historian who I have been in contact with in Newport, Essex. He writes:

"Unfortunately we had some vandalism at our church. Either as a result of this or years of neglect the railing surrounding the tomb of Christopher Verlet a servant of Sir John fell down and thus has given the first opportunity since 1827 to get an unimpeded view of the inscription. There are five altar or chest tombs in the churchyard, but this is undoubtedly the best - wonderfully carved and despite 180 years of neglect is very fine. The tomb of Patricia Odger is also a splendid altar tomb though not as opulent.

We know from the inscriptions that Verlet was born in Switzerland, and was with Sir John from 1777. Patience was from Clowance and was 30 when she died in 1830. These tombs must have been very expensive and Sir John must have been very fond of them".

Saturday 7 March

Friends of Devon Archives were running a special event at the Community Centre in Woolwell today, promoting Devon’s old documents and the history that comes with them. With it being a while since I have been out-and-about promoting the St. Aubyn collection to the public, I decided to join in and set up a stall for the event. Throughout the day there were lots of interesting lectures and several people were interested in the work that Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery are doing on the St. Aubyn collection.

Tuesday 3 March

Today I was trained by our paper conservator on how to clean the embedded grime from Sir John’s herbarium sheets. After brushing all the specimens in October, I noted that there were about 150 sheets that needed further cleaning because two centuries worth of dust had become stuck to the paper. From the training course I learnt that you could buy many different materials to clean the dirt off in a safe way. However, the best tool to use was a Mars Plastic rubber!

Wednesday 25 February

Today, I went to St. Michael’s Mount with the Keeper of Natural History and our photographer, Erana. After being introduced to James St. Aubyn and Richard Nesham, the curator of the house, we were taken round the building so that we could note all of the things that Erana needs to photograph for the touring exhibition. It was a good tour, and we got to see things that we hadn’t seen last time. James also showed us Sir John St. Aubyn’s walking stick, which was very grand indeed - it was 6ft tall, straight, with an engraved silver top.

Tuesday 10 February

During this week I started to match the ripped drawer labels of the broken Devonport drawers. Erana, our photographer, had printed all her photographs out to make the job easier. Amazingly, I was able to match a lot of them. All I have to do now is to match the labels with the minerals!

Tuesday 27 January

Over the last two days I have been working with the museum photographer to photograph all of the drawers that used to house St. Aubyn’s mineral collection when it was at Devonport Museum. We also photographed some of the micromount specimens and both volumes of the Count de Bournon catalogue. While I was handing over the micromounts to our photographer I took a closer look because the gem stones looked so pretty. However, what I saw was a bit of a surprise. Left in the wax mount, under the pretty gem stone, was a finger print. I wonder if this print was made by one of de Bournon’s fingers 200 years ago…

Previous news...

You can read what happened on the project during 2008 in the pdfs the documents table below.

Documents

To view these documents you might need to download some software. Visit our downloads page for more information.

	St Aubyn collection news: September to December 2008 - read what happened on the project between September and December 2008. File format Adobe Acrobat (pdf) - 43.1KB
	St Aubyn collection news: July to September 2008 - read what happened on the project between July and September 2008. File format Adobe Acrobat (pdf) - 46.2KB
	St Aubyn collection news: May to July 2008 - read what happened on the project between May and July 2008. File format Adobe Acrobat (pdf) - 39.2KB
	St Aubyn collection news: January to April 2008 - read what happened on the project between January and April 2008. File format Adobe Acrobat (pdf) - 43.3KB

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