This collection of autographs consists of mainly letters and other documents from artists, musicians, writers and other 'celebrities' of their times addressed to members of the Braun family, mostly on Thomas Braun's father's side, over a period of about 180 years. Through the 19th century and during the first third of the 20th most of the family lived in Berlin, though a more distantly related branch migrated to London in the mid-19th century. In the late 1930s Konrad and Hildburg Braun with their son Thomas, and also Konrad Braun's brother Gerhard and his family, came to England as refugees from National Socialism, living first in Birmingham and then in the London area. Although it is clear that many of the letters were kept by their recipients because they were from well-known people, they were not all treated with care. Only in the 2000s have they been assembled into one collection by Christopher Braun, Thomas Braun's brother, as part of a wider sorting out and examination of family papers after Thomas Braun's death in 2008.