News from the Archives

Busy, Busy, Busy is the motto this year with lots going on to tell you about.

The transfer of North Bierley Union Records from our archives at Keighley to West Yorkshire Archives Service at Bradford took place late last year. This was a large Poor Law Records collections associated with the main Bradford Workhouse situated at Nab End Clayton. As it covered the Bradford area, we all felt the collection was best served at the Bradford Archives Office. This transfer has allowed Keighley some much needed room to add to our collections.

You may be aware that we were closed for collections week from Monday 12th February this month. This time gives us the opportunity to spend time in the archives, tackling jobs we cannot address when we are open to the public.

This week we have spent time moving and reorganising the archives into a continuous numerical run enabling archives to be found quickly and efficiently. Since we were last able to update our records, we have had over 50 new collections deposited with us bringing our total of numbered collections up to BK709, the rest of the large collection being Township and Borough archives. Work on these collections is ongoing with accessioning, sorting and listing taking place and we hope to add them to the digital searchable Catalogue at West Yorkshire Archives Services very soon. https://www.wyjs.org.uk/archive-service/our-collections/search-our-catalogue/

In January we had the pleasure of visiting the Brontë Parsonage to deliver an archive on loan. The Diary of John Kitson (BK 463) will be on loan to the Brontë Parsonage for a year and will be on display as part of a year long exhibition, ‘ The Brontës Web of Childhood’ which explores what life was like for the young Brontë children.  

We were very fortunate to have a preview of the exhibition and found it fascinating and look forward to working with the Parsonage in the future.  More information on the exhibition can be found here. The Brontës’ Web of Childhood | Bronte Parsonage Museum

Carnegie Visit 

This year on the 20^th of August Keighley library will celebrate 120 years since opening in 1904.  Keighley library holds the honour of being the first library in England to be funded by Andrew Carnegie and what better way to start off our library’s celebration than a visit from Sharron McColl and Frank Connelly of the Dunfermline Library, the first Carnegie library in the world. Dunfermline are celebrating their 140^th anniversary and it was great to welcome them. Mrs Carnegie (Irene Lofthouse) was here too to greet our guests and help show off our wonderful library. Gifts were exchanged and we discussed how the two libraries could share links and work together on events throughout the year.  Our visitors then signed our original visitors’ book from 1904.  

Frank Connelly from the world’s first Carnegie Library, in Dunfermline, signs Keighley Carnegie Library’s original Visitors’ book from the opening in 1904.

Keighley receives a new collection

Finally last week we accepted the donation of a wonderful collection to Keighley Local Studies Library. 

Jan Perkins and David Kirkley ran the Keighley Schools’ Heritage Group for many years and we had the pleasure of working with them both. They attended many of our Heritage Open Days and people from far and wide came to look at their magnificent displays and reminisce about their Keighley school days. David sadly passed away last year and was a great loss to the local history community. Jan has decided to pass their collection on to us and we collected it last week during collections’ week. The collection will be known as the Keighley Schools’ Heritage Collection, we will be working through the collection and hope to have some of the collection on display soon. So, watch this space.