A year into my one and a half year contract I am responsible for locating and collecting the files and papers produced by the District Councils. Spanning a period from 1974 to 2009 this means some of the files are 35 years old. Unsure what to expect, it has and continues to be a very rewarding role meeting lots of people in a great many roles and locations, who are all passionate about preserving the history of the county.

                                                                     North Wiltshire District Council Minute Books

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I’m Victoria Barlow and I’m the County Conservation and Museums Manager. Before moving to Wiltshire three months ago, I worked as Collections Manager for a maritime museum in Kent and have worked in museums for 15 years. During my first few weeks in post I visited all of the 18 museums that we work with and I was struck not only by the welcome I received but by the professionalism and enthusiasm of everyone working in Wiltshire’s museums.

Volunteer Mike Asbury of Pewsey Museum and Photographer Simon Harris collect an award at the recent Voluntary and Community Sector Awards. Copyright Wiltshire Council.

Many of our museums are run by volunteers and even those which do have excellent professional staff, rely on volunteers to some extent to run their services. You will have heard the government talking a lot about volunteers recently and the concept of The Big Society. Here in Wiltshire we have been doing that since the 1970s! Wiltshire Council doesn’t run a museum but instead we have a Museums Advisory Service and a team of Conservators who work with museums small and large across the county, supporting and helping them to look after their collections and meet professional standards. 

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In one of my earlier blogs I had the pleasure of writing about our research into Black History in Wiltshire. I mentioned at the time that we were working with local communities and other partners to create the SEEME Wiltshire Black History Project. I am pleased to say that this hard work has paid off and we have been awarded a grant of £39,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund as part of a total of £56,000 we and our partners have raised to run an Oral History Project relating to Wiltshire BME communities.

 
This exciting project will help us to record, transcribe and archive the personal testimonies of elders within the community before they are lost to us. In addition, we will be providing family activities, including performance through drama and music, and animation video in response to those testimonies; creating educational resources and engaging young people with elders; publishing a calendar and a mobile exhibition. The aim is to create a project that is managed by the local community, with opportunities to volunteer and participate in all activies, in partnership with Wiltshire Council, the Salisbury Playhouse and the Wiltshire Music Centre. We are also grateful to Westlea Housing who provided an initial £3,000 to run a pilot project and get the partnership off the ground.

 Baptism entry for ‘Gilbert, son of John Keen, Niger, Yeoman and of Frances his wife.’

We also hope to continue to research the early Black presence in Wiltshire and I am grateful to colleagues and researchers at the History Centre who continue to provide some wonderful examples. Readers may recall that last time I wrote about Maria Mandula ‘Stranger and Aethiops’ buried in Calne, 1586, as perhaps our earliest written reference to a Black person in Wiltshire. My new favourite entry in our records relates to the parish registers of Minety, brought to my attention by our colleague Steve Hobbs. It is for 1708 and relates to a baptism of ‘Gilbert, son of John Keen, Niger, Yeoman and of Frances his wife.’ This is exciting because the majority of the Black people we find in parish registers in Wiltshire at this time were servants / slaves or former slaves for the aristocracy and gentry. Either way, most were not considered to be free. During this period it is estimated that there was a Black population of around 20,000 in London alone, and evidence from provincial counties such as Wiltshire help us to widen the picture. This was a period where Britain had truly established itself as a major player in the slave trade. But here, in Minety, not only do we have a Black person who is a relatively wealthy farmer, who was free, but clearly had been established in the community long enough to be married and have a child. Any further information on John Keen and the Keen family would be most welcome. We continue to collate references to Black people in Wiltshire, notably between 1600’s - 1800’s, so do keep the references coming as we build a picture of our county that has seen constant movement of people and historically more diverse than you might think. To find out more, please 'read more'...

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Like many researchers, when I am browsing newspapers and other records I am often distracted by other interesting stories or snippets of information. When searching for articles online, there is less distraction as you are already narrowing your search terms to produce that eureka moment. But what online research does provide for, something that should be in every Local Historian’s toolkit, is what I call the art of serendipity, or more bluntly putting in a couple of keywords and see what happens, with surprising results! (You see, we have all done it).
 
The Titchborne Claimant

In the spirit of research on behalf of our faithful blog readers I thought I would search two online resources to which both Wiltshire Council and Swindon Borough Council subscribe on your behalf. These are the Times Digital Archive and Nineteenth Century Newspapers Online. These are available 24/7 to Wiltshire Libraries and Swindon Libraries members respectively, through the following links: http://www.wiltshire.gov.uk/leisureandculture/librarieshome/libraryonlineresources.htm. To find out which other Wiltshire stories were discovered, please 'read more'... 

http://www.swindon.gov.uk/leisuresport/libraries/24hourlibrary.htm

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As you may know, Wiltshire is one of the richest counties for archaeological monuments. There are over 2,000 monuments in the county which are scheduled, or considered to be of national importance.  As part of our work the Archaeology Service of Wiltshire Council works in partnership with English Heritage to implement a monument management programme. Every year we target a small number of scheduled monuments in need of a little “TLC”. Over the six years the programme has been running we have carried out work on over twenty sites including, scrub clearance on Neolithic long barrows and Iron Age hillforts, masonry conservation at a Roman bath house and a medieval castle keep.

The Archaeology team on a site visit to Oldbury Castle Hillfort at Cherhill

Our programme for this past year has focused on three sites in particular. At a Roman bath house near North Wraxall, 2,000 year old walls had been exposed a few years ago and were suffering damaged caused by the extremely cold winter last year. We employed a specialist masonry conservator to re-point and consolidate the walls prior to their backfilling. At the Iron Age hillfort at Fosbury we completed a three year programme of work involving scrub clearance on the ramparts by the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers (BTCV). We also completed a five year programme of work on a Bronze Age barrow cemetery near Beckhampton which focussed on trying to exclude badgers from the burial mounds with the insertion of badger-proof fencing and artificial badger setts. 
If you spot any monuments in need of our help, please let us know!
[Additional images available, please 'read more'].

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Launched in 2009 the Wiltshire Treasures website allows you to search the catalogues of eleven museums in Wiltshire, along with the art and photographic collections owned by Wiltshire Council.


Example of a search on Wiltshire Treasures for all items made of mahogany in Market Lavington Museum!

There are more than 160,000 records to search containing items ranging from prehistoric flint tools to a 1960’s dolls house. The site is easy to use and searches can either be carried out by keyword, topic, place, date or name.

  The most recent addition has been 50 of the star objects from Mere Museum

 Wiltshire Treasures collections are from: [please 'read more']

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Hello, my name is Clare and I'm the Modern Records Officer at the History centre. My job is to collect together all of the records of the four District councils that have been combined with the County council to make the new Wiltshire Council.

Although the majority of the records I am dealing with are from after 1974 (when the District Councils were set up), whilst trawling through the boxes and filing cabinets I also sometimes find earlier items.

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