This week we welcome back Becky from the Local and Family History Library who tells us about a recent enquiry and how she went about solving it.

The enquiry came from a customer keen to track down a photo of a home that their family used to inhabit:

I am trying to find a photograph of the coachmans cottage (middleton lodge) middleton Leeds my dad grew up there until it was demolished to make way for the golf course. I have seen it on your website before but can’t find it now. Can you please point me in the right direction?

This is a very common use of Leodis, our photographic website. People all over the world use it to reminisce about houses, streets and areas. We very rarely remove anything from Leodis, so if the picture had been seen there previously, it should still be there, but the question was, how would it be described? A search on the archive for Middleton returns over 400 results – too many to comb through. We then had a look at our map collections – It was easy to see the golf course appearing, but there didn’t seem to be any buildings that answered the description. The next stage was to turn to our Leeds by Place stock.

This section is housed around the outside edge of the main Local and Family History room on the second floor of the Central Library. The word eclectic might have been invented just to describe this collection. It ranges from scholarly articles about historic buildings through community art projects to yearbooks for local amateur rugby teams. There’s an additional set of pamphlets in the collection too, where you might find a copy of a guided walk created for a beer festival in the 1990s, or a flyer put through doors to encourage locals to attend a planning meeting. The stock is still being added to, meaning that researchers of the future will be able to build a picture of local activities happening right now. Many of the items are searchable on our digital catalogue, but significant chunks of it only exist in our card catalogue which we still maintain and use most days.

Here at classmark L MID 942 we found Bygone Middleton with a picture of a building titled Peaches Cottage, but with a mention of it having been a coachman’s cottage. A search of Leodis for Peaches Cottage in Middleton later and there it was again:

It always makes us happy when we find comments attached to images on Leodis, especially when they help to tell more of the story. This one is my favourite where without the comments, we wouldn’t have a story at all.

However we noticed that while the comments contained some similar information to that from the book; some of it was contradictory. When Bygone Middleton was published in 1987, the author would have been relying heavily on local folklore and knowledge. They couldn’t have easily consulted the internet and the release of the census would only have gone as far as 1881. Even then, the only way to consult those censuses would have been to visit us at Local and Family History and use our street index to try and find the correct address.

So what else could I do but try to corroborate the information in the book and /or the comments? Both are secondary sources of local and personal knowledge something a family historian will have to work with a lot. Is it possible to verify any or all of this? That’s right, we’re off down another LFH rabbithole!

Part two of this multi-part blog coming soon.