stcath, I'd absolutely encourage you to start recording local history yourself and get others involved too. It is enormously enriching for the community.
There is a long tradition of keeping records in Britain, probably going further back than the Venerable Bede's 'Ecclesiastical History of the English People', finished around the year 731. Local history societies are very popular here I have several books of stories and anecdote collections from various periods and they all provide fascinating pictures of what was happening at the time. There is one in particular I return to - 'The Living Village, a picture of rural life drawn from village scrap books' by Paul Jennings. It was first published in 1968 and shows the sometimes dramatic change of country life at the end of the 1960s.
When it was demolished, another, much smaller, book of memories was made about the primary school where my grandfather was headmaster for many years. In that, we found lovely stories about him that he'd never told us, but now the family have a record of them. In one, because of his dislike of corporal punishment, if he found two boys fighting he'd bring them into the playground, put adult boxing gloves on them and then summon the school to watch them try and slug it out. Of course, being small boys, they couldn't and everyone ended up laughing, including the fighting boys.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
Re: Local Recorders
Date: 2022-11-09 10:56 am (UTC)There is a long tradition of keeping records in Britain, probably going further back than the Venerable Bede's 'Ecclesiastical History of the English People', finished around the year 731. Local history societies are very popular here I have several books of stories and anecdote collections from various periods and they all provide fascinating pictures of what was happening at the time. There is one in particular I return to - 'The Living Village, a picture of rural life drawn from village scrap books' by Paul Jennings. It was first published in 1968 and shows the sometimes dramatic change of country life at the end of the 1960s.
When it was demolished, another, much smaller, book of memories was made about the primary school where my grandfather was headmaster for many years. In that, we found lovely stories about him that he'd never told us, but now the family have a record of them. In one, because of his dislike of corporal punishment, if he found two boys fighting he'd bring them into the playground, put adult boxing gloves on them and then summon the school to watch them try and slug it out. Of course, being small boys, they couldn't and everyone ended up laughing, including the fighting boys.