Northern Archives

I came across something interestingly disturbing while wandering down a rabbit hole of Scottish history.

While tracing Scottish names in colonial archives, I noticed something quietly unsettling. Far too many writings by Scottish hands have been quietly buried under the label ‘British correspondence.’

I aim to change that.

Scotland stands among four nations, not beneath them.

Our voice has been lost too many times: unheard, absorbed, erased, or banned outright.

And I can’t stomach the thought that Scottish, Irish, and Welsh voices, each distinct and alive in their own way, have been flattened into a single, careless category. We are not footnotes in someone else’s empire.

We are the authors of our own, scattered pages and it’s time we found them.

Across archives and attics, in the margins of foreign ledgers and the backs of family bibles, Scottish voices lie waiting. They are the sailors who wrote home from Jamaica, the women who kept travel journals in the colonies, the soldiers who doubted the wars they fought for another crown. Their words exist, but too often under someone else’s flag.

This project begins with a simple question:

What happens when we look for Scotland, not Britain, in the world’s history?

To answer it, we must unearth what was mislabeled.

Search the metadata, challenge the categories, and read between the margins of “British” correspondence to find the Scot who signed his name in cramped ink at the bottom of the page.

Each recovered name, each refiled letter, is an act of repair, a stitch in a torn national archive.

Northern Archives will collect these fragments: letters, diaries, ship logs, trade notes, and family records, not to claim empire, but to reclaim identity.

We will map where our people wrote from, what they witnessed, and how their words were absorbed into “British” history. We will give them back their country, line by line.

The task is enormous, but every rediscovered voice matters. Each is proof that Scotland did not disappear, it was simply misfiled.

A Call from the North:

This is where Northern Archives begins, not in a grand building or government vault, but in the hands of ordinary Scots who care enough to look.

Our history isn’t gone, only scattered, through libraries, colonial ledgers, university basements, and family trunks on the far side of the world. The only thing keeping it quiet is that no one has gone looking in the right drawers.

So start looking.

When you see British written on a file, ask yourself who’s missing.

When you read a letter from a sailor, merchant, missionary, or midwife, check where they were born.

When you find a name that sounds like home, note it, save it, share it.

Because every time we find one of our own voices in Jamaica, India, Poland, Canada, or beyond, we stitch another thread back into Scotland’s story.

Not to rewrite history, but to complete it.

This matters because identity is built on memory, and memory can only live if it’s spoken aloud.

For too long, Scotland’s words have been filed under someone else’s empire.

It’s time to pull them out, dust them off, and return them north, where they belong.