Sir John Franklin’s signature

After the disappearance of Sir John Franklin in 1845 his wife, Lady Jane Franklin, was inundated with requests for copies of his signature. She responded by cutting out his signatures from letters he'd sent and posting these to the grateful collectors.  The damage this did is immediately obvious in this example, a letter Sir John …

Adopt a whole collection!

We’ve made it even easier this year to give one of our Adopt a Piece of History certificates as a Christmas present: it’s now possible to adopt a whole archive collection.  For still only £35 you could let someone adopt the archive of Calke Abbey, our Woodward cartoons collection, the records of a school or …

Nellie Kirkham: archives of busy local historian

This post about the arrival of the Nellie Kirkham collection is almost three years old. I was saddened yesterday to read on the PDMHS Facebook page of the death of Dave Williams. Dave is pictured mid-way down the post, on the day he deposited the Kirkham material. He will be much missed.

Derbyshire Record Office

It was in November this year that we heard from Dave Williams of the Peak District Mines Historical Society, to say that the Society had recently taken on responsibility for the papers of the historian, artist and writer Nellie Kirkham (1896-1979).  Dave, and other active members of PDMHS, were anxious to find a permanent home for the papers, lest the information contained in Kirkham’s research notes be lost to future generations.

Dave brought in box-files, folders, and index cards at regular intervals over subsequent weeks.  The final lot of material came in metal trays that had been removed from a filing cabinet:

I then began the process of transferring the papers to our own folders.  I shouldn’t really have used the acid-free folders until the papers had gone through our quarantine procedures, but they were all I could lay hands on at the time!  They may well be replaced by custom-built packages later on.  Here’s…

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What do you have about dwarves in Norse Mythology or the future colonisation of space?

These are just two of the themes I have been looking into yesterday as part of a visit from students at the University of Derby doing a Creative Writing degree. This has now become an annual visit that challenges me every time to come up with items from the collections to inspire and inform the …

A Bolsover matchmaker?

As I promised at the end of last week, here is another happy outcome from The Art of Letter Writing project. When the residents of Fulleylove Court retirement housing complex in Bolsover visited the record office I was delighted to get talking with Yvonne who mentioned that she had letters from her grandfather dating from 1901. For years she …

A ditty of thanks for The Art of Letter Writing project

Back in February you may recall that I blogged about my visit to Ashgate Hospice in Chesterfield. The visit was for The Art of Letter Writing Project which I have been working on in conjunction with Junction Arts, the Chesterfield based arts charity. The project celebrates the art of the letter and looked at historical …