README

Documents that name a person in Discovery, the catalogue of the UK's National Archives and of some 2,500 archives across the country, for omnisense/omnistate.

A catalogue of archives, not civil registration. England and Wales' births, marriages and deaths are held by the General Register Office, which has no public API. What Discovery answers to a name is the description of papers that mention it - a will, a service record, a prisoner-of-war card, a settlement examination - with their reference and who holds them. Every record is of the kind OTHER.

$registry = new NationalArchivesUk($httpClient);
$papers = $registry->search(new CivilQuery(familyName: 'Smith', givenName: 'John', dated: Period::years(1770, 1780)));
$papers[0]->title;      // "John Smith, parish of birth Shute"
$papers[0]->archive;    // Devon Archives and Local Studies Service, 3483 A/PO 20/8
$papers[0]->url;        // its page in Discovery

No framework needed: the package requires omnisense/omnistate and symfony/http-client. $httpClient is the HTTP client to call with - the application's, HttpClient::create() in plain PHP, a MockHttpClient in a test.

Responsibility

This package is an independent, unofficial client: it is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by The National Archives (UK). It reaches their service on behalf of whoever runs it, and it does not redistribute their data beyond the short excerpts recorded as test fixtures. Its MIT licence covers this package's code only and grants no right to the service or to its data.

Whoever installs and runs this package is responsible for complying with the Discovery API's terms (terms and conditions for the API), for obtaining whatever they require (an account, a key, a licence or subscription, an attribution or a citation, a rate limit to respect), and for any use made of what it returns. The authors publish it free of charge, make no commercial use of it, and accept no liability for how it is used (see LICENSE).

Documentation: docs/. License: MIT since 2026-10-09; earlier versions remain published under LGPL-3.0-or-later.