The Volunteering Story - End of an Era!
Since 2004, the fantastic team of collections volunteers at Cheshire Archives has been an invaluable part of our service. Over the years they’ve taken part in a wide range of activities including research, indexing, transcribing, extracting information for the catalogue, conservation cleaning and, more recently, repackaging collections in preparation for the move to our new archive centres.
These important tasks enhance and support the work of our team to ultimately make the collections more accessible to the public, uncover interesting stories and preserve them for future generations to enjoy. Along the way, volunteers have had the opportunity to learn new skills and gain experience, meet new people and sometimes even have fun! From October 2024 to May 2026 alone, 50 volunteers contributed the equivalent of 651 days in person at the Record Office, and we want to extend our sincere thanks to each and every volunteer.
We recently brought everyone together for a volunteer social and celebration, as the time had come to pause the current programme and for them to say goodbye to our Record Office home since 1986. We marked the occasion with cake, conversation and a creative session, giving everyone the chance to reflect on their experiences and share their thoughts for the new centres, for example by choosing images that represented their time with us. There was also a quick taster of palaeography, or ‘horrible handwriting’! At first glance, many historic documents can look illegible to the modern eye, but Archivist Caroline shared some helpful tips and tricks for interpreting the text.
People choose to volunteer with us for all sorts of reasons, and it’s important to mention that they do not need to be experts – just enthusiastic. Some are studying, have recently graduated, or are just starting out in their careers and want to gain experience in an archive setting. Others are looking to try something completely different from their professional backgrounds, gain confidence, or meet new people. We also have plenty of history enthusiasts who volunteer with us, as well as complete beginners who are just curious to learn something new. And in some cases, retired team members have returned as volunteers because they enjoy hands on collections tasks so much.
When our new sites are up and running, we look forward to welcoming back our volunteers. With our extensive archive and a steady flow of new deposits, there will be no shortage of interesting projects to get involved in, and we’ll have a new range of roles on offer. As well as collections volunteers, we would love to introduce volunteer support in welcoming visitors, supporting activities, learning and engagement and more flexible and group volunteering where possible. If you’d like to be the first to hear when opportunities open up again, you can register your interest via our newsletter here, and we look forward to sharing more updates!
By Katie Owen, Volunteer Officer
