Devon & Exeter Boys’ Reformatory and Industrial School Transcription Project

This website came about as part of a study I carried out for my Masters Dissertation in 2016. I was looking for some records, which would be useful to genealogists, but were basically underused.

The Exeter Heritage Centre holds a good set of records relating to both the Devon & Exeter Boys Reformatory and Industrial Schools. No complete indexes or transcriptions had been made, even though they could prove to be invaluable to researchers.

Hence my project to make these records freely available online for fellow genealogists in the form of a searchable database.

The site is still in its infancy and still does not hold all the records, however I hope by the end of 2018 to have all the schools Admissions and Discharge registers 1876-1905 online, along with some of the Superintendents Journals and Logs. The aim is eventually to have all the documents relating to the two schools on the website; hopefully this will be achieved by the end of 2019.

A big thank you must go to members of the Devon Family History Society who have given their time freely to help with the transcription work.

The work is currently ongoing, but I hope you find the site useful in your research.  If you would like to join our Facebook group to tell us about your successful searches or ask advice from other members, please click on the facebook link in the footer of this page.

Linda Hammond.