Archives in Action - Journeying to Cheshire
Part of our mission with Cheshire’s archives: a story shared is to build on our collections with stories of people from all our communities across Cheshire.
Over the last two years, Cheshire Archives and Cheshire Halton & Warrington Race & Equality Centre (CHAWREC) have partnered together for the Journeying to Cheshire project, to collect interviews with people who have moved to Cheshire from other countries. Building on a similar project undertaken in 2011 and 2012, the aim was to show why people have moved here and what living here is like for them and collect evidence of what might have changed in the last 15 years.
We held events at the Unity Centre in Chester, and spoke with English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) and asylum groups across Cheshire to recruit interviewees. Through public displays, stalls, and talks, we reached people with information about the project and histories of migration in Cheshire.
From this, nineteen people volunteered to be interviewed about their experiences. They had come to Cheshire from eleven different countries, including Ukraine, Syria, Sudan, France, Iraq, Hong Kong, Spain and Kurdistan.
Interviews were carried out by trained volunteers and our team, in the form of a loosely guided conversation. Participants were asked questions about their lives, about why they came to Cheshire, and about how they feel about living here. Care and support was provided before, during and after the interviews, as some of the questions were personal or about sad memories.
The interviews, and summary transcriptions of them, will now be stored in the archives. They will be valuable for future researchers who can listen to and study them. They will also help people today to better understand the lives of migrants, refugees, guests and asylum seekers.
The interviews will be used to create display banners using quotes and photographs from some of them. These will be used at libraries and museums in Cheshire, and events such as talks, at which clips may be played or discussed.
One of the project’s most exciting next steps has been creating a ‘zine’ around the experiences of some of the interviewees, and others who have made the journey to Cheshire. More on this in a future instalment.
By Michael Keegan, Archives Assistant
