Memories of Broadland

I mentioned in the last blog post that I had managed to get the website up and running on another PC which had kindly been loaned to me whilst mine undergoes its necessary upgrades. It took a little while longer to sort out than I initially thought but it all seems to be working fine now at my end and I have been able to start working on the new submissions again.

At the end of November I had begun working on a collection of photographs and an accompanying holiday log from 1949 – those photos and the “Log of Corinthian” were finally uploaded to the Broadland Memories website over the weekend. The log is a wonderful read and, having been written at the time of the holiday in June 1949, gives a fascinating insight into cruising on the Broads during this era. I love reading these tales and memories of past holidays and from the feedback received so do others – it’s a popular section of the archive! Not only are these reminiscences entertaining, they often provoke a real sense of nostalgia in people who first visited the Broads in their youth. As I have said in the past, these written accounts help to build up an incredible picture of life and leisure in the area and it is so important to record this aspect of social history.

I hope to begin work on another set of memories for the archive this week, this time from the 1960s, along with a set of accompanying photographs courtesy of John Turner but it has brought to my attention the fact that the personal memories section of the archive is still quite small. I’d love to expand this area of the website and include the recollections of people who actually lived and worked in Broadland along with those who holidayed here. People often tell me that they don’t feel confident enough to write down what they do remember, that they don’t have a “way with words”, or that what they write wouldn’t be interesting enough – I say that it doesn’t matter how you write things down! It can just be the jotting down of a few memories here and there rather than attempting to do a full blown holiday tale and it doesn’t matter if you struggle with spelling or structuring as I can help with that when I come to add them to the website. Each era of the personal memories section has what I called “Collected Memories” pages to which I add the shorter snippets which people send to me. When I’m sent photographs I always ask for as much information as people can remember about those too so it can be included in the captioning for the gallery pages. People say that they are often surprised at how much comes back to them when they do start to write things down. If you have memories of working on the Broads, holidaying in the area, or have old ships logs written by your parents or grandparents then please do get in touch!

Another possible future project for the archive is the addition of audio recordings of memories of Broadland, the idea being that I would actually go out and talk to people about their recollections of living and working in the area and then make edited versions available to download from the website (with their permission). It’s a method that seems to be increasingly used by archivists these days as it’s often easier to prompt peoples’ memories via conversation rather than trying to get them to write it down. I can see it may well provide some fascinating history and would be another imporant way of preserving the past for future generations as I would of course archive all of the recordings. With this in mind, I was given a digital voice recorder for Christmas which I hope to try out soon. I’ve not looked into the logistics of making audio recordings available through the website yet and it may not be possible for me to do so with the setup I use, but I would at least be able to transcribe the conversations into written articles for the website if that turns out to be the case. As I said, it’s just a possible thought for the future at the moment!