On October 9th we hosted the Molly Coombe Memorial Lecture at St. Johns. It was well attended and there was an enthusiastic response from the audience. We had a few sound problems, which we shall have to address before the next talk, but on the whole it was well received. Most of the month has been taken up with preparations for our Open Day on 26th October. We have been gathering information from the Archive and putting together a programme of proposed events for 2020. Our great team of volunteers and trustees did a fantastic job with the displays and the teas! The response was fantastic considering the awful weather, and some great suggestions for next year came out of it. Also some new volunteers came forward and are now joining our team. We would love to encourage more people to get involved in our proposed events and displays for next year. There will be things happening, WWII related, throughout the year with a focus on the May V E Day celebration week, so do please let us know if you would like to get involved, or if your group has any plans of its own than can link into our programme.
We have been busy refurnishing the Wilson Room with shelving and desks so we now have lots more workstations and tables to make searching for archive material easier for anyone who wants to get involved with our research. Come visit us on a Tuesday or Friday, 10am til 2pm. Bring your laptop or tablet and see how you too can be involved.
During the month James, Imogen and Yvonne attended the Archives and Records Association South West Meeting at Kresen Kernow, which is the new Cornwall Record Office at Redruth. The new facility is housed in the re-furbished Redruth Brewery Building. It is a huge site and very impressively designed and equipped. We had a tour of the site and picked up some interesting ideas and a wish list!
The Conference hosted some interesting presentations on the subject of partnerships and, while most of the other institutions represented are undergoing funding problems, their focus seemed to be very much on digitisation. That said, it did seem to us all, I think, that we are quite significantly abreast of the sector in many ways, mostly in our approach and our commitment to developing our own systems and working methods. James and Imogen also attended a Seminar at the Devon Records Office entitled ‘Digitising Your Archives’, giving us more ideas and information about our own digitising task.
So from January our focus will be on WWII and armed with the 1939 census we shall be trying to map the village during wartime, who lived where, how the village changed and many other aspects of village life during that war. If you or any of your family have memories, photographs or letters, especially relating to evacuees who were here, please do get in touch and get involved.