1947: Some illustrious Nigerians at the School Museum Service

One of our latest accessions is a visitors' book from Derbyshire's School Museum Service. It was a pioneering institution, established in 1936 following a Carnegie Trust grant. Small wonder it attracted visiting students from the Institute of Education in London, now part of UCL. Some of the students were from today's Ghana, Zambia, South Sudan …

Education of Child Workers at the Strutt Owned Mills

Back in November, I wrote about the registers of child workers I came across during the renumbering of our D6948 collection, which relates to W. G. and J. Strutt Ltd. There was little information in them about the children they referenced, besides when they were taken on and possibly their age. Recently I came across …

#ArchivesFromHome

When the country first went into lockdown in March 2020, I wrote about the tasks we would be working on while we were unable to access the archive and local studies collections. Of course, none of us still expected to be working from home a year later, and although we will be re-opening our onsite …

School and College archives

A guide to archives of education in Derbyshire (edited 18 October 2022). Before the Victorian period, there was limited access to formal education for most children because schooling was available mainly through fee-paying private, public and grammar schools.  In 1811 the Church of England founded the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in …

Lost Legacies

Last week, I attended the annual Black History Month event at County Hall and have previously blogged about the first speaker, Paul Crooks, who "pioneered research into African Caribbean genealogy during the 1990s and is credited with an upsurge in the interest in Black and British ancestry" (ref: http://www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk). Like Paul, the second speaker, Dr …

The future history of the school admission register

I’m recycling this image of Steve Bloomer’s school admission record (blog posts passim.), and throwing in a question: have you used our admission registers on Find My Past in your research? And do you think historians a century from now will have the same level of interest in us? Old-style admission registers like this are very …

On This Day: ‘Advertisements’

From the Derby Mercury, 20th November 1767: Advertisements. INOCULATION BELLINGHAM the Elder, is come from Coventry, and proposes residing for some Time at Derby, to attend all proper Subjects that offer for Inoculation of the Small Pox, in the New Method. He has already given Proofs in this Town, that this once dreadful Disorder may …

Derbyshire Literature Festival May 2012

May was a busy month for our outreach team as this was the first year that the Record Office took part in the Derbyshire Literature Festival. This was the 7th Derbyshire Literature festival organised by Derbyshire County Council which takes place every two years, and this year’s programme was exciting as ever, with more than …

School Sports Day, 1924

Some while ago, we mentioned the acquisition of some photographs of the 1924 sports day of St James CE School in Derby (D6560/6/5/6).  You can see all the photos in the search room (just ask for CD187), but here are just a few of them. [2018: Images have been deleted from this post, in order to …

Smedley, Duesbury and the football

[2018: images from the "Thank You For Your Letter" project have been deleted to make space for new posts.  The images have been retained within Derbyshire County Council's internal records system so that we may re-use them in the future.] D6808/3/1: St Andrew’s Middle Class School, Derby, April 14th, 1882 [Pupils who fell foul of …