Bridge and District Local History Archive
The records in this archive were made by scanning or photographing the documents in the Bridge Village Archive and are held in folders in an on-line database.
The aim of this Archive is to preserve the contents of the physical Archive by digitising them and to make the Archive available for examination by anyone interested in the history of Bridge and surrounding villages. Some folders and individual scans are not available for unrestricted public viewing, due to Copyright or other reasons. They can be made available by application to the Society.
The contents of the digital archive are listed in the Catalogue under multiple Categories, within which there are multiple records listed in ‘Archive Search’. Records which have been uploaded to the database are shown in Blue. The number of files and type of files in each record is also shown. Where records are not shown may be because they have not yet been uploaded, they may be missing in the original physical archive or they may be duplicates of other records.
Documents in each record have been scanned at 300dpi (else photographed) and stored as jpg files. Generally these jpg files have been concatenated into a compressed low resolution pdf file, intended for ease/speed of browsing each record, which may consist of one to several hundred scans. Most scans have been processed to produce a text file containing the text, if any, in each scan. These text files enable the database to be searched but are not a very good quality, unless the text is in a large, modern, printed font. They do not handle handwritten text at all. Some of the handwritten and/or poorly reproduced text have been transcribed into text and viewable Word files.
March 2021
Notes on the history of the 2016 archive created by Avril Leach
The Bridge Village Archive was established by John Williamson. After his death, the collection came to into the care of Maurice Raraty who housed and enlarged the collection. However, the archive represents the efforts of many individuals with an interest in preserving the local history of Bridge and surrounding villages. It is a testament to those who have donated or contributed items over the years.
Maurice Raraty previously catalogued a part of the collection based on a unique number for each item within the catalogue (then called The Williamson Archive, a copy of part of this listing may be found in the archive, M75). Many items still bear evidence of this cataloguing in the form of a small pencil number in the top right hand corner and a note in the catalogue. Where possible, the text of catalogue entries from this earlier catalogue have been used, however, all items have been incorporated into the new cataloguing system.
Categorisation is relatively broad and sometimes inherited e.g. there existed a full 'MS notes file which was then retained as a category. Each item has been categorised by 'best fit' whilst not breaking up items which were already placed together for various reasons. Since the cataloguing was carried out piecemeal over an extended period of time, there are some items which had already been catalogued before a later, perhaps more relevant, category was introduced. For this reason, it is advisable when looking for items of a specific nature or content to consider the archive as a whole and not to neglect any category which might, on the surface, appear irrelevant.
May 2016
The digital archive currently contains 2,578 entries and 35,547 images as well as 2,374 stored documents.