By Rachel Webb

My mother and grandmother were both only children, and so was I for the first five or six years of my life until my baby sister came along. My mother’s grandmother, though, was one of five sisters, providing me with a whole community (several generations of ‘aunties’ and their friends, and a few cousins for my mother) who loved to meet and chat. Still living in the bustling mill town in which they grew up, they had plenty of stories to exchange and remember together, about their own family and friends and the people they knew. Nobody really notices a small child playing quietly in a corner with colouring books and jigsaws and I can still remember the fascination and joy of just listening and taking those stories in. They fixed in me three threads which weave through my life: storytelling, memory and reading.

My grandmother’s Auntie Nellie married a man who became Borough Librarian (39 years in the job and never missed a Library Committee, I later discovered from his obituary in the local newspaper and research in the Local Studies Library). He inspired my mother to read and use the local library from a young age and she did the same for me. Having him in the family background did not influence my decision to train as a librarian and later as an archivist, but my love of stories did. It was only when I looked after my mother at the end of her life and started to research and write down the family ‘story’ that I realised two things: what a great inheritance I received from these women long gone, and that we all have stories and community memories tucked away in what some people call ‘dusty’ archives.

Archives have not always been seen as useful for storytelling. They are primarily the record of something having happened: a life lived, a business conducted, a community created, lives lived together and sometimes now gone, often just a serendipitous and bare record, but a record which has already had a life elsewhere in a different time. ‘This is what was left of us’, they seem to say. ‘Make of it what you can’. Some see the role of archivist as to preserve, conserve and arrange the material, in order to allow researchers to use and interpret it. But there has in recent years been a turn towards seeing archives in a new way in which storytelling is central.

The archive I work in has a collection of records from three coal mining unions in the North East of England, and a heavily used part of the archive is the compensation reports, documenting the decisions of the union about financial support for their members in cases of accident or death in the pits. They include details of the family circumstances of the claimant.  These records have been used alongside others to study miner’s wages and social conditions at the end of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. For me, each record tells a story. Who can read the following compensation hearing report from 1901 without wondering what this young man had for breakfast, whether it had been raining, whether other workers at home were unable through age or illness to provide enough for the family?

This was the case of a driver… just turned 16. He had worked his ordinary shift and, at the request of the management, stopped a second shift, being wishful to do all he could for his parents. He was killed in the second shift. The workers remaining [at his home] were the father, a shifter, two sons putting, and another at bank. The non-workers were mother and one little daughter. The Owners were only willing to pay funeral expenses. After the hearing, they agreed to give £10/10/0.

When we take displays of our material to the local history fair there are always more stories from the people who visit the stall, memories of their own families in mining. There are sometimes tears. There is often searching for ideas from the imagination to fill in the parts now long forgotten and out of reach.

The shift in the way archives are seen has led to great new initiatives in community archives, and the use of archives in creative activities, without losing the importance of archives for research. Archives can act as a community memory; visitors to our display recognise items from the past, smile, talk to each other ‘do you remember..?’ in the same way as they might in a museum or watching a TV programme.

Sometimes the stories go further back, as my childhood memories do, and I can find in our Local Studies collection the documentary evidence and sometimes surprising information which gives more life to the stories I heard years ago. Programmes like Who Do You Think You Are?  uncover personal family stories which also tell us stories about life in a different time and place. The records and objects tell us a story and sometimes challenge our own.

Working in the strongroom, we might open a box and breathe in the smell of coal still clinging to the ledger inside, which was used in a pit office for years. Folders of correspondence regarding health and safety from the 1930s are stained with the mark of a mug of tea. From another collection, we can pick up a notebook which was in the hand of a reporter in the desert of the Gulf War, or which recorded the comments of students in Tiananmen Square in 1989. We can handle the papers of a man who left Germany on Kindertransport alone as a young teenager, and built a successful life and career as an economic historian, or follow the work of a hugely successful film producer using his skills and influence to help others to education and success.

Every record, every object, has a story, but needs a storyteller. Archivists are sometimes the storytellers: we preserve and list to make collections accessible, and can bring together records and objects to show where a thread runs and we can also bring hidden archives to the surface to be used and enjoyed. Sometimes the story is of the archive itself; why is it here, how was it created, what can it tell us? But often the records and objects just wait, waiting for a writer to reveal their story, or waiting to inspire something new, and then the story begins again.

Discovering stories in archives can start in many ways. A local building might strike a chord, making you wonder, imagine. The records in the local Records Office or Local Studies library will reveal not only the history of building but of the area, and something about the people who lived there over the years. Searching archive catalogues can also be a voyage of discovery: how were people in an area affected by historical events, is there anything on a particular event and what it might have meant for someone on their way home from work that night? How did women cope day-to-day with the men away fighting in war? What was it like to discover a medical breakthrough? What did people find to do in your city in the 1930s?

Most archives now have web pages to explore in advance of, or instead of, actually visiting an archive (if you have not visited an archive before you will discover a whole new world, but usually no food or drink in the Reading Room please, and pencils or laptops only) and staff can usually be contacted by email with initial questions. An elderly friend researching family history discovered that his mother-in-law had been brought to England from India as a young woman and then committed to an ‘asylum’ as they were then, the family being told that she had died. He was able with the help of the local authority archives to establish that she had eventually been able to get back to India and he and his son travelled there to find her grave. What a story!

Archives and records themselves have often been the subject of fiction, sometimes as part of a plot (who could forget the library at Hogwarts and Tom Riddle’s diary, or the letters in A S Byatt’s Possession?). The Archivist by Martha Cooley focuses on some of the choices archivists might need to confront. The File by Tim Garton Ash is an equally enthralling non-fiction account which illuminates the impact archives may have in people’s lives, even without their knowing the records exist.

In recent years, there has been an increasing understanding of both the importance of archives and the creative potential. Initiatives such as Archives Revealed are recognising this and making funding available to reveal previously unknown small and local archives as well as bigger projects. The possibilities are endless.

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Rachel Webb works in Special Collections at the University of Sunderland Library. Find out more: https://library.sunderland.ac.uk/find-resources/special-collections/our-collections/

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