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project beginnings
Location: Hertfordshire
Kimpton is a small village in Hertfordshire, with a population of 2000. It is a very active village with over 40 clubs, organisations and an annual May Festival which brings most of the community out either to spectate or to take part.
01 November 2004
how the project began
Despite the large number of organisations, the village has never had a History Group, although there has always been a great interest in the village’s heritage. In 2002, Juliet Morton and myself went along to an Oral History Workshop organised by the Herts Association for Local History and it was there that we were inspired to begin interviewing and recording some of the older members of our community so that their memories of Kimpton could be saved for posterity.
Our next move was to start up a History Group – the response was fantastic and we began holding regular meetings. At these meetings, there were many residents who had lived in the village for many years and had lots of stories to tell. This encouraged us further to investigate setting up a recording project.
One or two recordings had already been made on cassette tape, but we were aware that these tapes would not survive for very long. We therefore needed to have some means of storing these digitally. We tried various methods – mini-disc, digital voice recorder etc, both of which had drawbacks. It also became apparent that we would need a significant amount of equipment – computer, printer, recorder, microphone etc. We therefore applied for a grant from the Local Heritage Initiative and were fortunate to be successful in our application. This coincided with a space being made available for us in the new Parish Room where we could store equipment, archives and hold exhibitions.
The grant enabled us to widen our objectives and create a digital archive, not only of voice recordings, but also of photographs, documents, memorabilia, etc. We have been able to buy a recorder which records directly on to CD and to pay for the transcription of our recordings.
07 November 2004
first exhibition
 On November 7th, the Parish Room was officially opened and, although we had not yet fully equipped our study area, we felt we wished to join in with the celebrations and have a small exhibition of some of the material we had copied.
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