A Wayward Ward

Although much has changed in the last 200 years, some things remain constant, and the troubles of teenagers is one of them. I recently found a wonderful set of letters within the Miller Mundy family archive that tell the tale of a ward of Edward Miller Mundy, whose transition into adulthood didn't go very smoothly! …

Charted Territory – celebrating the maps of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site

The Derwent Valley Mills and the surrounding landscape were inscribed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2001. This recognition is well deserved as the valley saw the birth of the factory system, when new types of building were erected to house new technology for spinning cotton. Snaking 15 miles down the valley of …

Snow

As I write this, working from home, I’m looking out at what remains of that most magical substance which fell from the sky for most of yesterday. Having grown up near the coast my experience with snow was limited.  If an inch fell once every 5 years or so we thought ourselves lucky.  Every minute …

The Miller Mundy archive – a lockdown project completed

If you are a regular follower of this blog you will have noticed several posts over the last year featuring the Mundy and Miller Mundy families. This is because one of our projects, which we began in March 2020 during the first Covid-19 lockdown, was to get the box list of the Miller Mundy archive …

Markham Colliery Online Exhibition

The Arts and Humanities Research Council have been funding a joint project with the University of Wolverhampton and Northumbria University, known as 'On Behalf of the People', which focuses on coal mining communities from the nationalisation of the coal industry in 1947, right up until 1994 when collieries were winding down. Eight different case studies …

Voices from the Peak

Did you know that this year marks the 70th anniversary of the creation of the Peak District National Park? The beautiful Peak District is mostly associated with Derbyshire, as the majority of its 555 square miles are in our county, but it also spills across our borders into Greater Manchester, Staffordshire, Cheshire and Yorkshire. Kinder …

My Family’s Claim Against the Butterley Company

One of my main tasks as an archive assistant on the Mining the Seams Project, is cataloguing documents. For me, this involves checking over documents and creating spreadsheets to correctly describe them for future users. Since I started on the project in October 2019, a lot of this has involved looking through various correspondence of …