Its Festival time again!

Next week is the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester.  If you carry out a search of the phrase Three Choirs Festival on our online catalogue you get 579 hits, including programmes, musical scores and printed histories of the Festival and its key performers.  The Festival was originally called the music meeting and was in existence by 1718.  If you’re visiting it don’t forget that you can see any of the items listed on the catalogue here at the Heritage Hub, as long as you give us prior notice of the items you wish to see.  You can either order documents directly through the catalogue, or by emailing archives@gloucestershire.gov.uk.

The Heritage Hub is making its own contribution to the Festival by hosting two talks, both of which are free to access without prior booking, and are specifically timed to avoid events on the Festival programme.

Controlling archival ferment: the West Country Breweries Collection at GA, by Mike Bevan

Gloucestershire Archives has been stock checking, listing, enhancing and structuring the collection ready to being fully catalogued into CALM, with the help of volunteer Amber Patrick, also a member of GSIA (Gloucestershire Society for Industrial Archaeology) and an expert in the Maltings Industry. Is she partial to an amber ale then? No, she doesn’t drink beer!

Gloucestershire Heritage Hub’s nearest pub, which has a West Country Brewery plaque on the exterior

The series of photographs taken of the staff at the brewery is an interesting feature which can be useful for family history reseachers, looking for relatives employed by the brewery. Another good set of photos are of b/w inn signs which again allow locals to identify with their specific landscape and memory; and connecting their local pub with an image of what the sign would have looked like in the past.

Port of Gloucester Crew Lists all ship shape thanks to volunteers!, by Ann Attwood

Mags and Terri with repackaged D3080 boxes

Working 1 morning a week from November 2015 to October 2018, Margaret and Terri ploughed through 44 large boxes coming across mutinies, shipwrecks and desertions along the way.

It’s back!

Barton and Tredworth website home page

The “It” is the Barton and Tredworth community heritage website, an outcome of the Hidden Lives project of 2011-12 in which the Archives was a partner.  The site was created using a bespoke platform designed by Community Sites, who specialize in assisting local communities to create their own web sites.  However the format wasn’t ideal for the wider range of devices that can now access web sites, so Community Sites have just converted it into a WordPress based site.

Coming soon to an Archives near you

Did you know that the Archives’ site is used for purposes other than just caring for and making available the County’s historic documents? For instance, the Gloucester branch of Gloucestershire Family History Society holds their meetings here once a month, currently in the Frith Centre.  Anyone is welcome to attend, although a small charge is made for refreshments, and you can find a list of the upcoming events at http://gfhs.org.uk/events-2/action_agenda/cat_ids~29/.

Christmas comes early with Heritage Lottery award

We’re delighted to announce the Heritage Lottery Fund is giving us £1.1 million towards our “For the Record” partnership project.

This means we can now access extra funding from key partners, trusts and foundations, as well as generous donations from the public.  Finding out before the holidays gives us even more reason to celebrate all the project has achieved so far!

Meeting the Neighbours

On Monday 18 May we were delighted to welcome some of our neighbours to the Archives to learn more about our plans for the “For the Record” project.

The Dowty Story

Gathering, keeping and sharing Dowty’s heritage

Dowty Group Archive: annual report 1949 (GA ref D8347)

Sitting in a strongroom at Gloucestershire Archives, preserved safely but otherwise inaccessible, is our single largest uncatalogued collection – the Dowty Group Archive. The Archive charts the story of an engineering firm from its origins in George Dowty’s 1930s Cheltenham workshop, through a worldwide expansion and up to the break-up of the Group in the 1990s. As such Dowty’s represents a big part of Gloucestershire’s industrial heritage. And as a major local employer it touched many lives.

Preservation and Interpretation – A trainees perspective

Since August 2013 I have been working at Gloucestershire Archives as a trainee archivist; and in September I moved to Liverpool to study for my Masters in Archives and Records Management, the professional qualification which will allow me to work as an archivist in the future.

Providing access to fragile or damaged items in our collections

At Gloucestershire Archives, we do the best we can to ensure that the collections in our care are preserved securely and permanently. But some parts of our collections have suffered damage in the past because they have been well used or because they have been kept in poor conditions before reaching us. For example, documents might be damaged by mould, heavily soiled by smoke and coal dust, badly torn, eaten by mice or broken into pieces!