Correspondence

Letters, reports and memos were the chief form of written communication throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

You can often find documentation about buildings and the people who occupied them in the vast quantities of correspondence held in the City Archives.

Letters were written to the Council by Sydney residents, business owners, organisations and charities, colonial government departments, as well as people and organisations across the country and around the world. The letters canvas all sorts of subjects related to council operations and the inner city. You won’t find a private letter from your great-grandmother to her sister in our archives, but if your ancestor lived in the city or had a business in the city you might find them writing a letter to the Mayor or the Town Clerk. These letters are a treasure trove and give us a unique and intimate insight into daily life in the city.

19th century correspondence

Sydney Municipal Council was formed in December 1842 and we have letters in the City Archives dating back to that time. As well as letters from individuals, there are a lot of petitions with multiple signatories. These were often submitted by local residents when they were lobbying for improvements in their immediate vicinity, eg. Better street lighting, cessation of a smoke nuisance, better drainage etc.

The good news is that the entire series of Letters Received 1842-1899, over 57,600 letters, has been digitised and individually catalogued in Archives and History Resources. Digitised letters can be downloaded free of charge.

You can try searching by a person’s surname, or a street address, a business, or even a subject.

A keyword search and filtering to focus on the Letters Received series is the best way to explore this series.

For further direction, take a look at our video guide 19th century letters in the City Archives, part of The Things We Keep series. City Historian Lisa Murray demonstrates how to search these letters and highlights some of the surprising things you might find.

20th century correspondence

In the 20th century, correspondence files were established for particular subjects. These can relate to applications for approval about particular properties.

Unlike most other councils, the City has not created general purpose property files for each street address. However, such files do often exist for the areas of Glebe and South Sydney that are now within the City’s boundaries. These files are available from 1941 to the present day.

While some DA files from the 20th century may not have survived, you still may discover correspondence relating to the proposals, especially if the development proposal was large or complex. These are 2 relevant series:

• Town Clerk’s correspondence folders (AS-0028), 1900–1913
• Town Clerk’s department correspondence files (AS-0034), 1914–1978

Files in both these series are indexed in Archives and History Resources and are available in hardcopy for consultation.

House & building histories guide