By far my biggest project so far was for the Ockbrook & Borrowash Archaeological and Historical Society (OBAHS for short!)
Having acted as a volunteer oral history transcriber for I was contracted in Feb 2014 to work within the Lottery funded Unexamined Lives project, researching the names on the various war memorials, especially the main memorial on Victoria Avenue. The work formed part of the preparations for the centenary commemorations of the outbreak of World War One.
This involved researching over 70 of the 82 names on the memorial in collaboration with the existing team of volunteers. The was work later extended to include further names on other memorials, located in churches around the villages.
Having put together an extensive database of information on all but three of those who died, I was then asked, in 2015, to create a new website to make the information more widely available (click here to view the website: Unexamined Lives) The war memorial information was built into a Virtual War Memorial, one of the most significant areas of the website.
In 2016 I was employed by the Society to design and build an exhibition to celebrate the achievements of the Unexamined Lives project. This was held at the Erewash Museum, Ilkeston for six weeks in October-November, 2016. The design involved the creation of nearly 20 poster boards describing all aspects of the work of the project, displayed on the walls of the Lally Gallery at the museum. I also created a 20 minute rolling audio-visual video presentation of other aspects of the project.
As a postscript, in May 2016, the Museum of British Columbia, in Canada, discovered two previously uncatalogued “Death Pennies”, memorial plaques presented to the next of kin of the war dead from World War One. These bore the names of Margaret and Edwin Hassé, whose parents lived in Ockbrook and who both appear on the main war memorial in Borrowash and the Ockbrook Moravian war memorial.
As a woman, Margaret’s Death Penny is extremely rare (only about 600 female plaques out of 1.25 million). I am delighted to say that the Museum of British Columbia used the Virtual War Memorial to link the two names with our project.
In an act of astonishing generosity, the Museum of British Columbia has donated these two items to Erewash Museum. There they will form the centrepiece to ongoing commemorations of World War One.
My association with OBAHS is now into its fifth year I hope to continue to work with them and Erewash Museum in the future.