Review of Open Day held on 7/2/2015

Above: Friends of the archive Diane Donohue and Douglas Williams having a chat at the last Open Day. Diane is helping people find out about their family history. Douglas has donated a large number of taped interviews to the archive which are being copied from tape to new format MP3s and we have a number of people transcribing them (including Diane).

Our first open day of 2015 was Love and Marriage in a Fishing Village held appropriately on Saturday 7 February, just a week before Valentine’s Day! It attracted 122 visitors and we were delighted to see a good number of young people amongst them. Most people came in the morning (there was rugby on TV in the afternoon) when there was a pleasing buzz of activity with much interest shown by the visitors in both the displays and the large collection of archive files on family history available to look at. Folk were able to enjoy a drink and a chat with old and new friends and at lunch time purchase a very nice pasty. Your committee members were all very busy: Denny had some appropriate music to play; Pete Joseph was kept busy scanning photos and documents that people had brought for the archive; Amanda had made some amazing cakes to sell; Jean did well on the raffle and the rest of us circulated and tried to answer visitor’s queries.

Our next open day called ‘Farming the forgotten trade’ is on Saturday 11 April 2015. If you have any ideas or material we can use please make contact.