The Ropley history Group

Summary

Ropley’s original archive was started and gradually amassed over the years by Councillor Tim Day, who later became the Parish Council’s archivist. Then in 2019, he, along with other like-minded villagers formed Ropley History Network and Archive Steering Group with the intention to create a website and digital archive for the research and archiving of material about the village and its surrounding area – to be accessible for all to use and enjoy.
The website and archive would support the group by enabling local people and those further afield to contribute, comment on and research their local history and also to showcase all the local history projects that have been created by villagers such as farming heritage and gravestone recording.

In spring 2021, thanks to the contributions of National Lottery players, the group were delighted and excited to be awarded funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund. https://www.heritagefund.org.uk/. The National Lottery Heritage grant enabled the group to purchase a digital archive software with customised website front end from Community Sites and also to purchase the recording equipment needed to start work on the oral history element of their project.

Since then, a great band of volunteers have assisted the effort to populate the new website and digital archive. A year on, the website went live and is accessible to all. Regular analysis of Google Analytics data shows that the site is regularly used by individuals as far away as the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many European countries. Indeed, the group has recently hosted visits by 2 such individuals from Canada and Australia, who, whilst on holiday in the UK, have chosen to come back to visit the village where their ancestors lived.

Ropley History Group archives at a glance

Note As virtually all archival projects are on going, for the purposes of this case study the cutoff is arbitrarily set at 12 months following the completion of the revised archive structure.
Status prior to project
Manual archive held by a private individual, no items catalogued and items on display only during village events.

Project timescale and resources
An initial 1-year timescale to the end of the National Lottery Project funding, but in reality, the local village archive and website project has now become a well-supported and popular organisation in the village which will continue as long as volunteers are found to run and add it.

Description of key challenges and solutions
• Finding funding sources beyond the end of the “project” to keep the local history group alive
o Solutions, local grants e.g. from the parish council, local amenity group and HAT
o Running talks of local interest for a small ticket fee
• Recruiting sufficient volunteers to keep going with the cataloguing and generally moving the project forward
o Fortnightly workshops to keep the volunteer group feeling like a “team”, with regular discussions on progress and training.
o Ongoing advertising at events on the need to add volunteers to the group.
• Reliance on a very small number of active steering group of very active members who act as editors and / or webmasters for the site.
o – Fall back on training from community Sites (at a price) to train up a new Webmaster for the site
• Consistent cheap location with some storage for the team to be based at.
o Money raising and annual budgeting for room and space at the parish hall.

Status at end of project
Website and archive live and continuing to be populated.
Collections and other content growing.
Project transitions to an ongoing village organisation (charity)
Steering Group and Workshop teams have become part of a team and organisation within the village.

Credit: Image taken by David Howard and used under a Creative Commons licence