The Big Friday Find – Archives+ The Year in Review

2013 was the year that the Archives+ project kicked into gear. We thought for this week’s Friday Find we would take you through a whistle-stop tour of the highlights of our year.

April

Archives+ staff started their roles based at Greater Manchester County Record Office. Joanne (Community Officer), Angela (Learning Officer) and Gaynor (Digital Access Officer) took up their posts as well as Nicky (The National Archives trainee). As you can see from this picture we were made to feel very welcome.

May

We hit the ground running with our first large scale event, an open day at Wythenshawe Hall. May was also the month that our Facebook and Twitter pages went live.

June

We met some very interesting characters while attending the Manchester Day Parade. We also attended the Longsight Festival, Crumpsall Carnival, Armed Forces Day and Clayton Hall to name just a few.

July

On one of the hottest weekends of the year we had a stall at Manchester Mega Mela on Plattfields Park with our partners from the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre.

August

The Summer Reading Challenge took place in July and August and the Archives+ team visited Ordsall Hall to do a Creepy House activity which fit this year’s theme brilliantly. Here is a photo from the local images collection which shows just how creepy Ordsall Hall looked in the past.

September

We visited Clayton Hall in September for their heritage open day where we met lots of new people and children coud have a go with our dip pen and ink to try copperplate handwriting

The Greater Manchester Archives and Local Studies partnership volunteers also came together for the first time to learn about our World War One project.

A postcard from our collections.

October

To celebrate Black History month we delivered a project in Loreto High school to research the life of Juba Royton one of the first records we have of a black man living in Greater Manchester in the 18th century. We worked with a group of students over 2 days. The first day was spent collecting information and images to include in a book on the life of Juba Royton and on the second day we also worked with an artist to create a model in clay to represent what the students thought Juba Royton would have looked like. A great time was had by all.

November

Chorlton Book Festival was the highlight of the month when the Archives+ team, volunteers and Manchester libraries donned their fancy dress outfits to take part in the family fun day theme of ‘The Magical World of Books’. We took with us examples of books from our Special Collections and offered children’s craft avtivites.
Our team for the day and two of our volunteers helping out.
December

We visited the Rates Hall in the Town Hall Extension where we had our first Christmas Extravaganza where the Archives+ team and Manchester Libraries hosted an afternoon of choirs and crafts. Here we have Manchester Community choir performing for our visitors. The afternoon was a great success.