Tuesday 20th November 2012, 7.30 p.m. in Slingsby Village Hall.
A talk by Christine Churches and Martin Holt:
“Joyce Hodgson’s plastic bag of documents: the perplexities, pleasures and problems of looking for local history in the legal records.”
Some records, such as Joyce found, turn up in junk shops and second-hand market stalls, on their way to becoming trendy lampshades or coverings for box-files, others remain in impenetrable seclusion in the private archives of Stately Homes, but the majority are now stored in Record Offices up and down the country. We would expect to find documents concerning Slingsby in York and Northallerton; but Slingsby in London, Slingsby in Nottinghamshire, Slingsby in West Sussex, Slingsby in Cheshire…? They are there too. Then, when we find the documents, how do we decipher them?