Author Archives: mcrarchives

About mcrarchives

This is the blog of the Manchester Room at City Library and Greater Manchester County Record Office. We are part of the Archives+ partnership. The redevelopment of Central Library presents the opportunity to celebrate and showcase Manchester’s original archive treasures, by bringing together archive services and complementary partners into Archives+, a combined archive offer for Manchester and Greater Manchester, providing high quality customer services and access within the iconic Central Library.

Peg Dolls and Ink Wells: Archives+ at Wythenshawe Hall

To celebrate the May Day Bank Holiday weekend, Wythenshawe Hall held an Open Day on Sunday May 5th. This was a great opportunity for the Archives+ team to get involved in an event that combined history, community and families. Joanne … Continue reading

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Behind the Scenes : Settling in at Greater Manchester Record Office

My name is Nicky Crewe. I started work at the Greater Manchester County Record Office on April 2nd. I am the National Archive trainee, and will be here for a year. It’s going to be a very significant twelve months, … Continue reading

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Digitising Images of the First World War From the Documentary Photographic Archive

My name is Keith Johnson and I have been working behind the scenes at Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives for the last few months, the majority of the time digitising photographic negatives by scanning and saving them to computer as … Continue reading

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Fred Haughton: Horwich Loco Worker and War Hero

My name is Chris Atkinson. I started my customer services apprenticeship at Manchester City Council in October 2012. Since then I have been working at Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives helping the public search our archive and local history collections. … Continue reading

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LGBT History Month

As LGBT history month is drawing to a close – we’ve selected items from our collection that document the LGBT community and activism in Manchester. First up we have a promotional  leaflet for Flesh club night at The Haçienda, 29 September 1993. … Continue reading

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Abraham Lincoln and Manchester

It may seem unusual for Manchester to have a statue of Abraham Lincoln, as there are no obvious links to the 16th President of the United States. In fact, Manchester was a very important ally to Abraham Lincoln’s Union during … Continue reading

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Manchester Parish Registers

Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives and Ancestry.co.uk have made available, online, a large collection of Church of England parish registers which span 1541 – 1930. The collection includes over 6,000,000 names recorded during baptisms, marriages and burials at Anglican churches … Continue reading

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For and Against Temperance

We’ve taken two documents from the Broadsides collection that give differing opinions on the temperance movement, first up we have “Drink When You’re Dry” and secondly “Clench the Nails” “Drink When You’re Dry or the Groans of an empty Beer- … Continue reading

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Aerial Bomb Maps Explored

In the last blog post we covered how to build a detailed picture of the bombing of Manchester during the Second World War; we briefly touched on 1930s aerial bomb maps, which we are going to explore in a little … Continue reading

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Manchester Blitz

The Manchester Blitz, which occurred 72 years ago this month, was the bombing of the city and its surrounding areas by the German Luftwaffe between 22/23 & 23/24 December 1940. Around 684 people were killed and 2,634 injured. Manchester Cathedral, … Continue reading

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