 |
Home
Making a Start
One year on
Half Way!
Final Leg
|
|
|
|
Final Leg
Location: Devon
Creation of a archive of Dartmouth historical information is a three year project that aims to establish a framework for recording and indexing documents in future years.
March saw the third of our History Open Days and the start of the final third of our projected time period. Progress on setting up the archive has gone well with the fundamentals of the disc based archive complete, a considerable amount of information, including audio recordings made in the 1980s of old Dartmothians, is now available on CD’s copies of which are available for researchers at the Dartmouth library. Archive information is continually being added with the CD’s having to be updated quite frequently, while this continues at its present pace copies of the CD’s will be restricted.
Our local Town Council has in their vaults a considerable number of papers and documents dating back to the 17th century and possibly before, the History Group hope in the near future commence the task of cataloguing, summarising and then adding these to the archive index.
The open day was again well attended with people as far afield as Exeter and the Plymouth area, Six other history groups had displays, information and ideas were exchanged and new contacts made. In the afternoon a demonstration of the archive so far was given, this included a recently discovered letter dated 1643 from Thomas Newcomen of Dartmouth, founder of the Atmospheric Steam Engine, in which he is claiming expenses for travelling to London to obtain gunpowder for the Town Council and another from 1719 for Ironmongery supplied to the Council, this is signed by Hannah Newcomen. Future plans for indexing the town documents and the creation of a web site to make the archive available on the internet were given.
Dartmouth library History Help Desk, manned by members of the group on Thursdays from 10 AM to noon has been successfully answering questions and offering assistance to locals and visitors on subjects covering past people and places in the town and surrounding areas. All enquiries are logged and are available in the library.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
