External Events and Announcements
As you will appreciate, many external events may change their details at short notice. We therefore ask you to contact organisations directly for up to date information about whether their events are going ahead as advertised. Please note that the RHC cannot provide further information on these events and announcements, nor be held responsible for any inaccuracies in what is posted below.
Preston Historical Society Talks
Monday 11 November The New Poor Law in Preston - Dr Lewis Darwen. The talk
focuses on the long-running dispute in the town in the period 1837 to 1865.
Monday 9 December Crossing the Ribble: The Preston to Walton Summit ‘Old Tram
Road’ - Nigel Hardacre
Monday 10 February 2025 Religion in Tudor Lancashire 1520-1620 – Dr Alan Crosby
All talks are held at Central Methodist Church, Lune Street, Preston PR1 2NL on the 2nd Monday of the month (September to May). Doors open at 6.00pm for a 7.15 start. Visitors are welcome, £5 per talk.
Lancashire Family History & Heraldry Society Talks
Thursday 14 November The Parkers of Bagganley: a Chorley family in the 15th
century – Dr Alan Crosby(Chorley branch)
Wednesday 4 December Growing up in Accrington, 1946 - Alan Mitton
(Rossendale branch)
Visitors are welcome to branch meetings. Information about membership, and
further details of branches and their meetings can be found at www.lfhhs.org.
Liverpool & South West Lancashire Family History Society - Leigh Branch
Leigh Branch will be holding a public lecture on Tuesday 19 November 7.30pm. Dr Tom McGrath will present The suffragette sleepover: the life and time of Rose Hyland.
The venue is Leigh Town Hall, Market Street WN7 1DY
More information can be found at www.lswlfhs.org.uk
Kirkby Lonsdale & District Civic Society
On Wednesday 20 November at 2pm Dr Mike Winstanley will give a talk on Delinquents and Debtors: Life in Lancaster Castle in the 19th century. Mike is a retired Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University with a special interest in the history of the North West of England and the local history of Lancaster and the Lune Valley. He will be exploring life in the Castle for both criminals and insolvent debtors. What was life like for these people? What were their living conditions? What did they eat? How did conditions change over the course of the century? What did they think of life there?
Venue: Lunesdale Hall LA6 2BG. Admission is £2.50, including tea and cakes. Visitors welcome. For more information, please contact Nicholas Flight on kldcssecretary@gmail.com
Kendal Historical and Archaeological Society
The KHAS is holding a series of autumn lectures. On Monday 25 November , Kate Sharpe will deliver The Lady of the Lakes: Clare Isobel Fell and the role of women in archaeology
Kate Sharpe completed her Master's and PhD at Durham University, her dissertation, ‘Motifs, Monuments & Mountains’, focused on the prehistoric carved stones of Cumbria and their relationship to stone axe quarries and stone circles. Dr Sharpe leads community archaeology projects, continues to write and lecture on the subject and is an Honorary Research Fellow at Durham.
For more details, please email Jane KHAS16@outlook.com.
Ormskirk Heritage
Ormskirk Heritage Talks are held at St Anne’s Parish Centre, Prescot
Road, Ormskirk, L39 4TG starting at 1.30pm.
Forthcoming talks include:
• Tuesday 3 December A very Ormskirk Christmas history - Dot Broady-Hawkes
• Tuesday 7 January 2025 The history of Ormskirk inns and beerhouses - Dot Broady-Hawkes
• Tuesday 4 February 2025 West Lancashire military heroes remembered - Dot
Broady-Hawkes
Burnley Historical Society
Meetings of the Burnley Historical Society are held on Wednesdays at 2pm at St. John’s R C Church, Ivy Street, Burnley BB10 1TB. Members free, guests £2.00
8 January 2025 Chance and coincidence – Mike Townend and Linda Dawson
12 February 2025 Burnley Film Makers
12 March 2025 Sex and scandal in the Victorian era – Lavinia Tod
Historic Society of Lancashire & Cheshire Online Talk
One-place studies – their place in the historical landscape by Janet
Barrie.
Janet Barrie, the chair of the Society for One-Place Studies, researches the
people and activities associated with the Springhill area of Rossendale. In this talk, originally given in September 2024, she examines the principles of conducting a one-place study. Available now on the Society's website
Weaving History Podcasts
A brand new research podcast, Weaving History, has launched. It uncovers a forgotten piece of Lancashire’s working-class history and was created by two Lancaster University Alumni from the English and Creative Writing department. Combining Victorian poetry and interviews with leading experts, Weaving History tells the story of the Cotton Famine in a fresh and accessible way. It connects the cotton weaving industry in North-West England to the American Civil War, the fight against slavery, and Victorian literature. All six episodes are available to stream, so Listen to all episodes now!
Lancashire Archives and Local History
We're delighted to let you know that Lancashire Archives and Local History now has a Facebook page!
You can also follow Lancashire Archives on X (formerly Twitter)
Also, back issues of the new Lancashire local history magazine 'Archives' are now available to purchase in all Lancashire County Council libraries and at Lancashire Archives, priced at £3. If you'd like to receive a copy by post, please contact the Archives at archives@lancashire.gov.uk.
If you have an idea you’d like to discuss, please contact archives@lancashire.gov.uk to discuss your suggestion.
Rookhow Open Days
Rookhow is a Historic Grade II* listed 1725 Quaker Meeting House in the heart of the Rusland Valley. Set in 12 wooded acres between Coniston and Lake Windermere, open days are held every 1st and 3rd Friday of the month.
Filmed Production of 400-Year-Old Play By Shakespeare's Contemporary Lady Mary Wroth
A 400-year-old play, which captures how the delights and difficulties of courtship have changed (or not), is now freely available on film thanks to Professor Alison Findlay, Professor of Renaissance Drama in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University and Chair of the British Shakespeare Association.
‘Love’s Victory’, by Shakespeare’s contemporary Lady Mary Wroth, was written c.1617-1619 and is the earliest surviving romantic comedy by an Englishwoman.
The performance is the result of nearly 30 years of work by Professor Alison Findlay. Her research project, ‘Shakespeare and His Sisters’ was set up to explore the works of Shakespeare and his female contemporary dramatists in site-specific locations. The 2022 production, directed by Emma Rucastle and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Lancaster University, was designed to recreate the conditions of an early household performance. It was staged at the author’s home, Penshurst Place in Kent, in 2022.
Bob Dobson, Heritage Books
Bob Dobson has been dealing in second-hand Lancashire interest books for over 50 years and due to retirement is selling stock at half the catalogued price. From Lancashire Acts of Parliament to dialect poetry and old picture postcards, there is much to interest the local and family historian. To receive a catalogue, please email Bob at landypublishing@yahoo.co.uk. He can also be contacted on 01253 886103 or 0774 9838 444 (text preferred).
The Leyland Historical Society
Meetings have resumed in the Shield Room, Banqueting Suite, South Ribble Civic Centre, West Paddock, Leyland, PR25 1DH. £5 for visitors (but new members are always welcome). Visit The Leyland Historical Society to find out more.
British Association for Local History
The British Association for Local History has a new feature, the Ten Minute Talk, which has proved so popular that there are now ten talks and presentations available on their website, on subjects as diverse as nineteenth-century small businesses, marriage in early-modern Suffolk, construction of a Cambridge gas holder or the ‘Spanish’ influenza epidemic of 1918-19, so please do take a look.
Local and Family History Resources
Zoe Lawson of the Lancashire Local History Federation has kindly gathered a list of helpful resources. The following is a selection of free websites.
Genealogy Sites
Ancestry and Find my past are well known and offer a 14-day free trial.
Family search is the largest site to offer free access to records from old censuses, birth registers, etc. It includes the International Genealogical Index (IGI) which has parish records for several countries including Australia, Canada and the USA, as well as the UK.
Genuki doesn’t hold records but contains a vast amount of historical information that will help you find the records you need from anywhere in the UK.
Jewish genealogy website.
Births, Marriages and Deaths. The Register Offices in the county of Lancashire hold the original records of births, marriages and deaths back to the start of civil registration in 1837. The county's family history societies are collaborating with the local registration services to make the indexes to these records freely searchable at Lancashire BMD.
Free access to records of births, marriages and deaths for the whole of the UK is available at Free BMD, Note that not all records have yet been transcribed.
Archived catalogues are always a good starting point and many online catalogue entries provide significant detail, though not a substitute for looking at the original document when archives offices re-open.
Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire
The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire seeks to promote understanding of, and public interest in, Lancashire and Cheshire’s past, through the publication of editions of historical documents. For an annual subscription of £20, members receive each year a hardback volume and an invitation to a historical lecture.
Women In Street Names
Women in Street Names is a project to highlight streets named after women, for the British Federation of Women Graduates, and Harper Adams University. It was launched at the Women’s Library at the LSE in July 2019. Carrie de Silva from Harper Adams explains that the aim of the project is “to highlight streets named after women, (and to highlight how few there are!), and to remember such women as are commemorated. Outputs will be a booklet of mini-biographies of women named and a paper to consider political and social culturalisation, conscious and unconscious, through the names we see in our streets”. Information is requested from across the UK, and from villages, towns and cities. More obscure royalty will be of interest (the collection won’t be including Queen Victoria or Queen Elizabeth II). Obscure or less well-known saints are also welcome. Of particular interest will be little-known local women who nevertheless made a large contribution to their area. Carrie will welcome the name on its own, even if the sender knows nothing else about the named woman. Please forward the street name with district, town, city, village, etc with the woman’s main achievement or area of operation (if you know it) to: Carrie de Silva: cdesilva@harper-adams.ac.uk. (07583 144622).
Cumbria Prehistory Resource
Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society (CWAAS) have produced a learning resource to help teachers in the county’s schools support the teaching of prehistory, from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, within the History curriculum. The pack was produced with input from archaeological experts and feedback from teachers and learners after a pilot session in a Maryport school. It comprises an introductory slide show; in-school activities (covering topics like artefacts, burials, food and the home); on-site activity suggestions (using Cumbrian sites, artefacts and museums); background information and signposts to further information.
The resource pack is free and can be downloaded from the Cumbria Past website.
Or search Cumbria Past in Google, then open the tab Grants, and look under Schools Area.
The Viking Age in the North West
The Viking Age in the North West is a free app which allows you to discover a range of sites in the Wirral that shed light on the history of Viking settlement and integration. These sites range from place names and archaeological finds to stone sculptures. The app comes with a map to help you locate sites, or you can browse through the alphabetical list. There is a brief description and image for every featured site, as well as references to find out more information. It is hoped to expand the geographical range of the app in future, and feedback via the app is welcome. You can download the app for free from the App Store.
If you would like to submit an article for this page or our newsletter, please contact us: rhc@lancaster.ac.uk 01524 593770.