Today marks a big step on the way to building new pages on the website. Our biggest resource, to date, is the Wadkin Archive – the first step was to scan and digitise the archive. Step 2. was to upload all of these images to the website (they can all be found by following the links to the Wadkin Archive page). Step 3. has taken almost a year and, as of this afternoon, is complete! All of the scans have now been catalogued ready to be spread across the website in to individual pages (Step 4!).

Step 4 is going to take some time, too, but we will begin by setting up all the pages over the next few weeks, so that you can see what is coming – if the page for the house, business, activity or family that you are looking for has been uploaded but is empty – you will know that it is coming and you can contact us for early access to the material at any time.

These photos may give you some idea of the enormity of the task – each index card (there are nearly 6,000) relates to a separate scan and each index card has anything between one and dozens of entries to be catalogued and sorted across the different website pages. Each scan could end up appearing in dozens of different places, depending on the breadth of relevance for each one – the Horticultural Show newspaper clippings are a good example, as each one names every winner!

There are nearly a thousand different family names to be uploaded, 160 houses and over a 100 businesses, organisations and activities. We apologise that this is taking so long – it is frustrating for us, too! However, we are now beginning on the final stages and we hope that the website will become more useful and interesting as a result.

Thank you for your patience!