Posted on Thursday 12th March 2020
Chris Copp, Senior Museums Officer at Staffordshire County Council
People interested in local history or who may have old family documents at home will get the chance to find out what they have and get it recorded in a new project.
Family letters, postcards and photographs are just some of the items that Staffordshire County Council’s Archives & Heritage service are interested in capturing.
The team will be running a series of ‘digital drop-in’ workshops’ in some of the county’s more rural communities.
At the sessions people will get the chance to bring along documents and photographs, to have them scanned or photographed, as well as the chance to get advice on caring for their collections.
The scanned resources will then be made freely available on-line on the Staffordshire Past Track website and will be digitally archived in the county’s records.
Gill Heath, Cabinet Member responsible for the county’s archives service at Staffordshire County Council said:
“We’re a county steeped in history and we hope this pilot project will help tell us more about what life was like for our rural communities through the ages.
“We know that many families will have family photographs and old documents at home but they maybe unsure how interesting or useful they could be or what to do with them. That’s why we’re encouraging people to dig them out and bring them in so our team can document them and add them to the collections. Even someone’s old scrapbook or family snapshots could tell us a great deal about what life was like in our county all those years ago.”
The project comes after a bid to The National Archive’s Test Bed Fund and if successful could be rolled out nationally to help other archive services connect better with their rural communities.
Workshops will be held throughout 2020 and are expected to take place in Abbots Bromley, Betley, Mayfield, Rocester, Wheaton Aston, and Flash.
People can find out more about the project at www.staffordshire.gov.uk/Heritage-and-archives