Explore Your Archive: People Stories – Jean Young
One of the many topics we will be exploring in the museum’s new displays is rural healthcare. Our latest blog by Abbey School students focuses on the story of a 1940s District Nurse, Jean Young. Jean Young was a District Nurse/Midwife. This ambiguous job title in fact entirely sums up the role; for the first few weeks […]
Explore Your Archive: Animating the Evacuee Archive
Sonya Chenery is currently undertaking a PhD project – funded as part of the university’s Collections-Based Research programme – to engage with, intervene in and animate aspects of this archive within a range of publicly accessible spaces. We are delighted that Sonya has agreed to share an insight into her work in progress as part […]
Explore Your Archive: People Stories – Kathleen Hale
Our next blog from the students of The Abbey School explores the fascinating story of Kathleen Hale. If you were a child in the 1930s, you might well have ended your day with a bedtime story by Kathleen Hale. Her Orlando the Marmalade Cat books captivated many children with their bright colours and entertaining stories, setting […]
Explore Your Archive: Interview with an archivist
We asked Whitney, one of our volunteers, to find out about the different roles carried out by archivists at MERL and the Special Collections. She started by interviewing Cataloguing and Projects Archivist, Sharon Maxwell, who joined us just a couple of months ago. What does cataloguing entail? I’m trying to make the collections accessible to the public. Collections […]
Explore Your Archive: People Stories – Mary Wondrausch
The Museum of English Rural Life is very fortunate to have close links with country potter, Mary Wondrausch. Our latest blog written by students from The Abbey School, focuses on her fascinating story. When the lovely staff at the Museum English of Rural Life told us we would be researching Mary Wondrausch as part of their […]
Explore Your Archive: Reading Readers – Francesca
For our first Reading Readers post, Francesca shows us the wealth of material she has found in the CPRE (Council for the Preservation of Rural England) archive whilst researching for her PhD. I am researching for a collections-based PhD entitled Preservationism and Development in Rural England, 1926-2016: Policy and Practice, focusing on the collection of […]
Exploring the world of the archivist…
Before we post her interviews with colleagues later in the week, Whitney, one of our volunteers, explains how she’s been delving into the mysterious world of the archivist… Hi my name is Whitney. I recently graduated from Hertfordshire University where I studied English Literature and Journalism. I’m now volunteering at MERL which is a really […]
Explore Your Archive: Introducing Reading Readers
Our Reading Room Supervisor, Adam Lines, introduces a new feature for the MERL and Special Collections blogs, finding out how readers explore archives. On a daily basis, members of the public, students and academics from around the world use our extensive and varied collections. In the reading room at one time, researchers can be consulting manuscripts […]
Explore Your Archive: People Stories – Emily Eavis
Audience Development Manager, Phillippa Heath, introduces a project in which local school students discovered how archives can be used to research fascinating lives. As part of the Museum of English Rural Life’s redevelopment, we are keen to reveal the hidden stories behind our collections. Over the Summer we were fortunate to welcome sixth form History students from […]
Explore Your Archive: Let there be drawers…
Deputy University Archivist, Caroline Gould, has spent a huge amount of time exploring the MERL archives and photographic collections to select the items which will help tell the stories in our new museum galleries. Faced with such a wealth of fascinating archive material, this hasn’t always been the easiest of exercises! For the last two years we […]