The Museum has had an exhibition called `
War and Memory’ by the artist Rozanne Hawksley in the Queens House for some time now – it ends on 14
th November. Her work is both fascinating and thought provoking and is partly inspired by the work her grandmother did sewing sailor’s collars between the two World Wars.
It set me thinking about the number of people who visit the Caird Library and Archive who are researching a story which is really personal to them. In many cases researching an ancestor or someone who means a lot to you and finding out more about them and what they did is of course a means of getting to know them better and ultimately of remembering them.
We are currently working on a project with the National Archives recording the names of crewmen on merchant navy ships during the First World War. Behind each of these names, and there will be well over a million of them when the project is finished, is no doubt a very personal story waiting to be discovered illustrating the impact of the war on that person. The Library collections have hundreds of diaries and journals kept by men and women who were involved in wars and they represent a lasting memorial to these people.
A selection of these can be found in our Journals and Diaries collection which has the reference
JOD – type this reference into our archive search box and tick the `finding reference’ box and you’ll get a list to look through. If there are any that you’d like to see you can sign up for a readers card and order them in advance of you visit – instructions are on our homepage
www.rmg.co.uk/cairdlibrary click on Visiting the Library.
Stuart
( Head of Archive & Library)