In this blog post, our EERC colleague Kenneth Veitch reflects on the written sources gathered during the Dumfries & Galloway Study. These can be accessed in full on the Study website.
Account books, diaries, journals, letters and other personal documents are a rich source of material for ethnologists, historians and others interested in studying everyday life. Separately, they provide first-hand, detailed information about individuals, communities and occupations rarely found in other historical sources, and offer an opportunity to investigate life at the level of the parish, town, workplace or family. Collectively, they show the great variety of everyday life and how its rhythms, forms and customs differed not only across time and place, but also between occupations, social groups and genders. They are particularly useful for studying the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period that lies beyond the reach of first-hand oral reminiscences but when increasing levels of literacy meant that a wide assortment of people were recording their daily affairs. Continue reading
Over the course of the day we will be sending 24 tweets at half-hourly intervals, starting at 7.00am. Each tweet will carry the hashtag #Audiovisualheritage and will link to individual clips of fantastic audio material that can be listened to on the Study website.
