December News from Local Studies

Compiled by Lynda Tomkins, Archives Assistant As the year draws to a close, this month we look back on some of the things the Local Studies team have been up to during 2022, and some of the work we undertook whilst we were closed. Each team member has written their own update. Barbara, Archives Assistant …

September news from the Local Studies library.

Whilst Covid restrictions closed the Local Studies Library to the public, Local Studies staff took the opportunity to make some minor changes. Here Archives Assistant, Lynda Tomkins describes what went on behind the scenes. The need for social distancing has meant rearranging the computers in our Computer Room. This has given you much more space …

More online events from the record office

We are pleased to announce another three free online talks for the new year. Our first talk is our ever popular ‘Introduction to the Record Office’ – find out who we are and the services we offer, the collections we hold and how you can access them, whether in person or remotely. Talk: ‘Introduction to …

Record Office events go online

Those of you who had visited the record office or began following our blog before the pandemic hit will know that we always liked to keep the record office a busy place.  Throughout the year our events programme would be packed with talks, workshops, and special events.  Like with so much, the pandemic put a …

Are you ok? – the importance of staying connected

Thursday 4 February is national Time to Talk Day. A chance to start a conversation about mental health and wellbeing. The focus this year is on the power of small, because however you have a conversation about mental health – whether it’s a quick text to a friend, a virtual coffee morning with colleagues, asking …

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 …

When family history becomes a little more complex…

Very few family historians are able to trace their ancestors back through the civil and parish registers without hitting some kind of complication, whether that be a “missing” entry, an “extra” entry making it unclear which is correct, the resettlement of their family elsewhere or other issue.  Often, such cases can be resolved with a …

Searching for people in the catalogue

Our online catalogue contains nearly 400,000 entries relating to the archives and local studies collections we hold but it is not necessarily the easiest or most user-friendly site to search.  We're working on several improvements and in the meantime, here is a short guide to how to use the catalogue to find information about individuals …

Family History from Newspaper Reports of Court Proceedings: the Offensiveness of Matthew Goodden

Regular readers of our blog will be familiar with Roger, one of our cataloguing volunteers, here is his latest fascinating contribution. This post arises from my continuing curiosity about a man named Matthew Goodden.  I first learned of him in 2017 while working on documents from the Thornsett Turnpike Trust (ref: D535).  An invoice had …

Newspapers

A guide to the uses of local newspapers and where to find them (updated Jul 2020). From the 18th century to the present day, newspapers are an invaluable source of information for family and social historians: births, marriages, deaths, advertisements, crime, coroners' reports, sports and entertainments, elections, farm and property sales, bankruptcies, disasters, scandals, and …