Lawrence Gregory is the NINS senior archivist and UK agent, and a historian of nineteenth-century English Catholicism, who also enjoys cats and steam trains.
The NINS Digital Collections contain twenty-nine letters from Sir James Marshall. Marshall grew up in Edinburgh, the son of the Rev. James Marshall, a Scottish Presbyterian minister. He received his degree at Exeter College, Oxford and was ordained in Anglican Orders in 1852. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1857, but due to the fact he had lost an arm in a childhood accident, was barred from being ordained a Catholic Priest.
There are two letters on the Digital Collections, written to Cardinal Newman from W. T. Stead, in his capacity as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. Stead was a prominent nineteenth-century English journalist and a pioneer of the journalistic profession. He first began writing for newspapers in 1870 at1 the age of 21, and the following year was made editor of The Northern Echo, becoming the youngest newspaper editor in the country.
In 2022, the National Institute for Newman Studies began a second phase of the digitization project at the Birmingham Oratory. The project involved scanning the correspondence archives of the Oratory Fathers who lived and worked with Cardinal Newman, including Fathers William Neville, Frederick Bowles, Edward Caswall, Paul Eaglesim, and Nicholas Darnell.
The NINS Digital Collections contains one letter from Father Basil Maturin to Bishop Amigo discussing his attendance at Father Tyrrell’s funeral. Father Maturin was born February 15, 1847 at All Saints Vicarage, Grangegorman, Co. Dublin, the third of ten children of the Rev. William Maturin. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and originally took Anglican Orders in 1870.
The mission at Stone, Staffordshire was begun by Blessed Dominic Barberi who resided at nearby Aston Hall. In 1844 he opened the chapel of St. Anne, which was designed by A. W. N. Pugin.
Included in the archives of the Birmingham Oratory, which were digitized in 2012, are two scrap books compiled by Newman. He labeled these his Autographic Remains. They contain letters, notes, sketches and other items related to his formative years between his 1806 and the death of his mother in 1836.
