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Maybe you have moved to a different house and are interested in discovering more about its history. You might be newcomers to a town or village and want to gain a sense of its identity, or maybe lived there all your lives and have realised that there is a whole lot which you don't know, simply because it seems so ordinary and familiar.
'There are all sorts of motives and reasons for embarking upon the local history trail ...'
Perhaps the world you have known is disappearing - landmarks and mundane ways of life are changing and vanishing, and you want to do something before they are gone completely.
There are all sorts of motives and reasons for embarking upon the local history trail, but all of them lead to the same basic question. How do I find out more about it? Who might tell you about your community, its people and its landscape, in the past?
There is no one way to approach local history and there are great many tips that can help those new to the subject get the best start possible. Even if you only follow some of them you will still be on the road to becoming a successful local historian.
Courses are held all over the country which will help you do this more systematically, and there are plenty of places to seek advice, information and encouragement (see Go further). But one of the most exciting aspects of local history is that anybody can find new information, discover new evidence, and reach new conclusions about what was happening in the past. Many local historians are 'ordinary' people who enjoy the fascination of history and have set about finding more about their area.
You do not need a qualification, you do not need rarefied expertise, you do not need difficult skills, and you do not need to have an academic background. But there are some things that you definitely do need:
No, certainly not to begin with and many local historians never need to know any Latin. It is true that many older documents will be in Latin, but when you begin you are not likely to use them, and there are almost always people locally who may be able to help if you do. Many Latin documents will be in print anyway, usually (not always!) with translations.
For example, the records of medieval monasteries are rarely in anything but Latin, because that was the everyday language of the medieval Church, but you will almost always find that there are published translations of the main documents. There are quite a few useful introductory books to reading and using Latin.
Do I need to learn how to read old documents?
Reading old documents is known as palaeography and it is a skill that many local historians only acquire over the years. Patience and practice are the keys to clear understanding. For research covering the last three centuries, palaeography is rather less important, as the handwriting becomes progressively more like that in use today.
'... you can begin to understand the feel and character of parchment and paper in a totally new way.'
In most areas of the country there are courses and classes in palaeography, and several books are in print and readily available to assist beginners (see Go further). Palaeography is challenging but it is also fascinating, because as you master its skills a whole world of historical sources opens up.
You will be able to read documents which perhaps nobody has read for a couple of hundred years, you see the words of people in the past revealed and, if you are using original documents (as opposed to photocopies or microfilm) you can begin to understand the feel and character of parchment and paper in a totally new way.
Do I need to find out the background history?
The more that you read and find out about the background to your subject, the better. All historians are constantly doing this - nobody, however great a historian, can ever know enough, and reading the work of other people, and getting the context of your own subject clear in your mind, is crucial. So, you must be prepared to do a lot of reading when you are doing local history - but history is of course fascinating, and it is not at all like it was when you were at school!
These are not boring textbooks, but fresh and stimulating insights into the past of all of us. History today is not all about kings, queens, generals and politicians, although they play their part. Many of the most fascinating books are instead about ordinary people and ordinary places, revealed and explained by historians for whom the 'common man' is perhaps the most important aspect of history.
Printed sources
Books, articles, papers, pamphlets, newspapers, directories and all sorts of miscellaneous material, which is most likely to be found in the local studies collection of your library. Such material is often grouped together under the label 'secondary sources' because most of it has already been worked on and interpreted by historians and others in the past.
Most branch libraries have a small local history section, but the important collections will be at the central library or a main town library. The local studies collection is the essential starting point, and you should make sure that you make use of its resources.
Archives
The documentary sources, usually in manuscript or typescript form (and, increasingly, available on microfilm, microfiche or in electronic media) are the raw material of local history as they are of other aspects of historical research. These are usually labelled as 'primary sources'. They are endlessly interesting and challenging.
' Documentary research is the key to the local history trail ...'
Documentary material will normally be found in the county record office, the borough or district archives, or sometimes in a university or other library. In many places there has been a trend towards bringing printed material and archives together under one roof, in a local studies centre. Documentary research is the key to the local history trail, but it is necessary to find out the background and use the secondary sources first.
Oral testimony
Recording the memories of local people is increasingly seen as a valuable source of information. Since the mid-20th century people have been recording and transcribing memories and reminiscences, and for many parts of the country there is now a large collection of sound recordings and written transcripts that can be used by local historians. The local library or record office should know of the whereabouts of any such material.
Physical evidence
The landscape, the fields, the streets, the buildings, the market places and the factories, the riversides and the housing estates … all these are part of the historical record and help to tell their own story. Look around you and try to see your locality as though it were a document or a book. Try to read what it says and to understand its message.
To the government of the day they provide vital evidence of trends that can help in the planning of the economy. To the historian they provide vital evidence about the past.
If you were tracing your family history this would be a very important source to find out details of your ancestors. You can immediately be able to identify the names, ages, occupations and birthplaces of the people listed, but the local historian would then ask himself or herself a series of questions about the evidence that the census entries give.
Some historians call this 'interrogating the source' - it means that instead of simply looking at the information, we try to think about what it means, what message it is giving? We can use this evidence to support ideas we might have about what life was like for these people and, equally important, we can compare the two families here. What were the differences between them, what contrasts emerge?
And, in turn, this evidence - now reinforced by a more 'in-depth' appraisal of what the census tells us - can be related to what we might learn from the work of other historians, in published books, about more general themes such as the nature of family life in the mid-19th century, the character of mining communities, migration patterns, the employment of children and women, and other key topics in the local history of Victorian England.
'People in the past were no more two-dimensional than their descendants today.'
This three-stage investigation of local history holds good whatever we are doing, and it produces a very satisfactory result, because we begin to see history in a three-dimensional way. History is not flat like a cardboard cut-out. History is about people and what they did and how they made their world and responded to their world.
People in the past were no more two-dimensional than their descendants today. They, too, lived and breathed and worked and played and loved and hated and died. They suffered and they enjoyed, they shouted and laughed.
The best local history always emphasises this point and always recognises that nothing happened without people and that people were central to everything. The most successful local history follows the pattern outlined above: it does not merely describe what is clear from the evidence anyway, but instead seeks to understand what was going on. It looks for explanations, answers questions, and is about real people in a real world.
Published on BBC History: 2005-03-02
This article can be found on the Internet at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/local_history/getting_started/first_steps_local_history_01.shtml
© British Broadcasting Corporation
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