Bradford's historical archives are being relocated back to their original home - with one part of the collection being re-opened to the public today.

For two decades Bradford-related documents dating back centuries have been stored by the West Yorkshire Archive Service at its Canal Road site.

But now the collection is being moved back to Bradford Central Library where many of the documents used to be kept as part of the library's archive department which was founded in 1974.

Although the move is still under way, organisers were keen to make some of the collection available to the public as soon as possible.

So the archive's microfilms - photographic copies of records from across West Yorkshire - will be available to view for free at the Central Library from today.

Katy Goodrum, the head of the West Yorkshire Archive Service, said the microfilms were key in helping people tracing their family history.

"A lot of our business is family history, people researching their family trees and records," she said.

Miss Goodrum said the move would mean materials available through the archive could be twinned with library resources. "They will get a fully rounded history," she said.

She said the time for the move was right because the Canal Road site did not have full disabled access, and the building was not as suitable for modern archive storage as the library.

But she said decisions were still being made about how the archives would work at the library, adding that the full collection was due to open sometime in October.

"The next thing to do is to set up an area for people to use original documents," she said. There would be much more to store than there was in 1985 - when the service was moved from the library - as new records were constantly being added to the archives.

"There's never a day when something doesn't come in, you never know whether its going to be one item or one hundred boxes, but that's part of the fun," she said.

She said family history programmes such as the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? had increased the popularity of searching historical records.

BBC journalist Jeremy Paxman traced his roots to Bradford's textile mills for the last series of the programme, using records at Bradford Central Library and Bradford Register Office.

The new series will start on BBC1 with a look at the family history of EastEnders actress Barbara Windsor on Wednesday at 9pm.

e-mail: rebecca.wright@bradford.newsquest.co.uk