Wednesday 24th June 2020 is Midsummer’s Day and the Feast of St John the Baptist. It is a celebration that has links to the old summer solstice festivities, although it occurs a few days after the longest day, which usually falls on the 20th or 21st of June. Traditional celebrations for Midsummer began at sunset… Read more A Dorset Midsummer
Wednesday 24th June 2020 is Midsummer’s Day, and we will be posting a blog about the historical significance of this on the day itself. Today, we wanted to look at the historical meaning of the summer solstice, which happened on the 20th June 2020. — Since Neolithic times, when our Dorset predecessors were clearing trees… Read more Dorset’s Summer Solstice
We are sharing a monthly look at the farm diary of John Foss, written from his dairy farm in Kingston Russell in 1851. June 1851 June starts “very cold for the season” with storms and strong winds, but soon warms up to be fine and hot. The farm is continuing to focus on churning and potatoes, and John has started producing… Read more The Diary of John Foss: June 1851
A quick search of the catalogue reveals that we hold over 4,000 records relating to Kings or Queens, which is a rather large figure given Dorset’s relative removal from Royal life! As with everything though, you can scratch away at the surface and find that this figure is swollen by the ‘other’ records, ones which… Read more Archives A-Z: K is for Kings and Queens
In this blog, Jenny Oliver and David Watkins from Poole Museum explore a recent purchase made by Dorset Archives Trust and what it can tell us about the history of Poole… — Dorset History Centre with funding from Dorset Archives Trust has recently acquired a letter, undated but probably late 17th century, making a number of apparently unrelated points… Read more Disaffected and Unruly People – Poole in the 1680s
At Dorset History Centre we have lots of collections of varying sizes, and in previous blogs have explored some of the bigger collections. Now, in the first of a new series of blogs, we want to shine a light on some of the smaller, less well known collections that we hold to demonstrate that every… Read more Collection Spotlight: Audrey Mary Walder
Sometimes an item comes into the Conservation Room that has pretty much everything going wrong for it and as a Conservator your heart sinks (but then you get a bit excited because it’s good to have a challenge!) This volume was one of those. The paper was acidic and brittle, 141 of the 430 leaves… Read more Rebinding the Rental: conserving the Rental of the Estate of The Marquis of Donegall, 1864
In a recent blog we looked at what sort of information title deeds can tell you. In this blog, one of our volunteers, Louise Haywood, has explored this theme in more detail, looking at a recent purchase made by Dorset Archives Trust… — Nowadays we have a conveyance to transfer property or land between a seller… Read more Marriage and Property in 16th Century Kimmeridge
‘Royal Weymouth’ is a four-volume book that we hold within our collection. Like ‘The Extra Illustrated Edition of Hutchins’, it has been put together by A.M. Broadley, but instead of grangerising one book, these volumes are based around several accounts of the Royal visits to Weymouth by King George III and his family. — The… Read more Royal Weymouth Volume 3: A Pardon and a Petite Princess
As archivists we are often taking in documents long after the events they relate to have passed, sometimes hundreds of years later! But as the way we create and store documents has changed we have changed our practices to include more proactive collecting. Modern media, including digital files, are much more fragile than paper and parchment. Risks include file… Read more The Digital Problems: Capturing the Coronavirus
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