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WOODLANDERS’ LIVES AND LANDSCAPES Guidelines for Volunteers UPDATED MARCH 2020 The information given here will be updated as the proJect progresses. CONTENTS 1. RESOURCES FOR RESEARCHERS 2. RECORDING AND SAVING YOUR RESEARCH 3. GUIDELINES FOR WRITING UP RESEARCH 4. GOOD RESEARCH PRACTICE i. COPYRIGHT ii. ETHICAL RESEARCH PRACTICES 5. HEALTH AND SAFETY 6. KEEPING IN TOUCH, TIMESHEETS, EXPENSES AND FEEDBACK 7. LINK TO VOLUNTEER SIGN UP FORM AND DATA PROTECTION APPENDIX 1 VOLUNTEER TIMESHEET 1. Resources for researchers (initial list) i. A key resource for Woodlanders will be the Centre for Bucks Studies (CBS) in County Hall, Aylesbury, open Tuesdays – Thursdays and the first and third Saturdays of the month. https://www.buckscc.gov.uk/services/culture-and-leisure/centre-for- buckinghamshire-studies/centre-for-buckinghamshire-studies/ There are staff on hand to help and a member of the Buckinghamshire Family History Society is normally there on a Tuesday to help with family history research. If you wish to use the CBS, always make an appointment and tell them you are working on the Woodlanders Lives and Landscapes proJect. You can do this by phone or email. Telephone: 01296 382 587 Email: [email protected] Let Helena or Lesley know you are visiting, as we have a fee-arrangement with the CBS and we need to keep a record of visits. If it is your first visit, you will need to take a proof identity with name, address and signature. If you are new to archive and family history research, or could do with an update, we recommend you attend one of our free training sessions at CBS – dates to be confirmed. CBS can give you free access to two important online sources for family history searches – Ancestry.com https://www.ancestry.com/ and Find my Past https://www.findmypast.co.uk/ Other useful sources at CBS are: • Local newspapers - the Bucks Free Press (from the 1830s), the Bucks Herald (from 1832) • Parish records • Census • Births, Marriages and Deaths • Wills • Apprenticeships indentures • School records – 18th to 19th centuries • Kelly’s Directory – a very useful directory of trades • Historic maps, including 1910 valuation maps about ownership and occupation of land. • Deeds and plans of local houses and land • Criminal proceedings • The Posse Comitatus – this 1782 document lists every man between 16 and 60 suitable to fight in the Napoleonic War, listed by parish, and including their profession. Some women are listed too! • Records of the Bucks Archaeological Society – the catalogue will be complete by April 2020. • Photographs and postcards ii. Local History sections of High Wycombe, Amersham and Chesham libraries. These libraries also provide free access to Ancestry.com and Find my past. The High Wycombe Local Studies room is often supervised by an experienced volunteer, and it is advisable to make an appointment. The Bucks Free Press is available on microfiche. The library has books and documents collected by the Wycombe Historian L.J. Mayes (author of A History of Chairmaking In High Wycombe and other books). Helena has a copy of the catalogue of this collection if you would like to see it. Chesham Library has copies of the Bucks Examiner - first published in 1889 as the Amersham Advertiser, then the Chesham Advertiser and became the Buckinghamshire Examiner in 1903. The paper closed in 2019! Chesham Library also has copies of the Buckinghamshire Advertiser, first published in 1853. iii. Local Museums a. Wycombe Museum. A key source for the local furniture industry b. The Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading https://merl.reading.ac.uk/. Information on local crafts, countryside and vernacular building. You can browse their collections online or visit their archive. c. The Chiltern Open Air Museum. The museum has a small library, looked after by volunteers, with information on rural crafts and vernacular buildings. Museum Office on 01494 871117 or [email protected]. Curators at the museum have expertise on bodging and other rural crafts. d. Amersham Museum. Local and family history. Volunteer researchers with expertise in lacemaking. iv. Internet The internet is a valuable source for research, but sources are not always reliable, and information given can be misleading, or simply wrong. So always consider the authority of the materials you are using. The following websites could be useful: Unlocking Buckinghamshire’s Past: This is the database containing the Historic Environment Record (HER) for the county. This includes historic buildings and landscapes as well as archaeological excavations. It is a great resource for exploring the history of an area. It also provides an overview of each parish and their main sites or periods of interest. You can also find a link to the Historic Environment Map – a new interactive map showing the HER for the county of Buckinghamshire. British History Online: Victoria County History: The Victoria County History is an encyclopaedic record of England’s places and people through history. It describes Buckinghamshire by parish and may provide useful insights. Sharing Wycombe’s Old Photographs (SWOP) https://swop.org.uk/. An online collection of more than 30,000 photos of High Wycombe and surrounding villages. Family Search www.familysearch.org. A database of genealogical information free to use. I suggest you check your findings with other databases that you can use at the above libraries, such as Ancestry.com. Maps: for old OS maps of Britain, from the 1840s onwards, see www.oldmaps.co.uk, www.british-history.ac.uk and https://maps.nls.uk/ For contemporary OS maps www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk Trade Directories from 1750 – 1919: www.historicaldirectories.org. The Buckinghamshire Family History Society has an excellent website - https://www.bucksfhs.org.uk/ as do local history and heritage societies around the county. Please let us know of other resources as you find them. 2 Recording and saving your research We need to systematically record our research and the reference sources we have used. The Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies will be taking our records, giving them and the proJect a valuable legacy. We will all be using Excel sheets to keep control of our research and to make the ‘raw’ data more easily accessible to other researchers when the proJect ends. After you have talked about your own particular research proJect with Helena or Lesley, they will give you a simple personalised spreadsheet for making brief notes of your findings and logging the resources you used, together with full instructions for using the spreadsheet. We will be using the Sharepoint Drive to store the proJect’s work. Details of how to access the Drive will be part of your research recording package after your initial discussions with Helena or Lesley. Each volunteer will have their own folder on the Sharepoint Drive, where they can keep their work, including their research recording sheets and any write-ups. If you work on more than one topic or theme, please keep separate sub-folders for each of them within your main personal folder. We suggest that each time you finish a tranche of your work, you save your documents with a different version number so that it is easy to keep track of changes. If you agree, all the Woodlanders volunteers and workers will have access to each other’s folders. 3 Guidelines for writing up research As the proJect progresses, your researches will go public in a variety of brief formats, such as social media and blog posts, or as part of walks and talks and maps and apps. We are on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/woodlanderslives And Woodlanders news appears on the Chalk Cherries and Chairs Twitter feed @Chilterns CCC. We encourage you to Join the conversations but please use the Woodlanders Facebook page, not your private page, to talk about your research and remember to abide by the copyright and ethical guidelines given below. We would also like to turn the research recorded in your sheets into written stories. Some of these will be posted on the Woodlanders Blog (you can find a link to this on the Woodlanders web page https://www.chilternsaonb.org/woodlanders-lives.html). Others could be used for talks, walking tours, or an exhibition. At the end of the proJect, all the research documents and stories will be deposited in the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, Aylesbury. If you would like to write up your own stories, we suggest that: • You keep your writing to no more than 1000 words for a blog, or 3,000 words for a longer story. If you want to go longer than that, it would be good to break your stories down into more than one topic. • You use sub-headings • You make clear which dates/periods and places you are discussing • Consider the wider background of what you are discussing – which may be legal, cultural, economic, educational, medical &c • It would be good to include images: photographs of people and places; maps; documents &c. But please note what they are, where they come from and the copyright holder (see below) • Although we also have a system for keeping a record of sources and references (see next section), it would be helpful if you would give brief references in your write-ups (maybe in brackets) It would be fine if you’d rather use some other format – such as spoken recordings or drawings. Have a chat about it with Helena or Lesley. 4 Good research practice i. Copyright We have a responsibility when researching and publishing materials from both public and private archives to protect the interests of collections and collectors. We can keep copies for our own research and can share it with the others on the proJect, but without the consent of the copyright owner, it is an offence to: • Copy the work, unless it is on public display (see below) • Rent, lend or issue copies of the work to the public • Perform, broadcast or show work in public • Adapt the work.

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