by Karen Downham, Local & Family History Library After the amazing feat of distance runner Eliud Kipchoge, breaking the world record for the marathon in a time of 2 hours, 1 minute, and 39 seconds, at the Berlin Marathon earlier this year, on 16th September, and as runners thoughts start to turn to training for…
Author: Leeds Libraries
‘Xmas at the Libraries’
This week Assistant Librarian Manager of Local and Family History, Sally Hughes, takes a look back at festive performances gone by in Leeds Libraries. ‘Children who attend the “Story half-hours” in the Leeds Public Libraries are preparing for extra jolly programmes…’ During the mid to late 1920s Leeds Libraries saw a huge increase in…
Tracing the Belgian Refugees
This week we hear from Dr. Philippa Read, Research Fellow in the School of Languages, Culture and Societies at the University of Leeds, on a new family history database from the Universities of Leeds and Leuven… *Please note the Tracing the Belgian Refugees database is currently offline. It is hoped that it will be accessible…
Yorkshire Star Chamber Stories
This week, Collections Manager Rhian Isaac explores the importance and the usefulness of stories from the Yorkshire Star Chamber in the Tudor era… The lives and exploits of the Tudor monarchs and nobility are well known and are often the subjects of films and TV shows but finding out about how every day people lived…
Leeds in The Builder
This week we hear from Library Officer Kiera Falgate on images of historic Leeds in the Central Library’s collection of The Builder, an architectural journal that begin in the mid-19th-century… The Art Library on the first floor in Leeds Central Library holds the complete collection of The Builder from volume 1 in 1843 to the final volume…
The Magic of Books from the Golden Age of Illustration
This week we hear from illustrator Teresa Flavin on some magically-illustrated books from her childhood… When I was about nine years old, my family visited a used bookshop where I discovered a fairy story with graceful line illustrations. The book was cheap enough to buy with my pocket money and though it was somewhat battered…
Leeds Baby Week and US. Patent 3,216,423
This week, Librarian Louise Birch takes a look at an intriguing patent for Leeds Baby Week: an “Apparatus Facilitating the Birth of A Child By Centrifugal Force”. Leeds Central Library is home to a Business and Intellectual Property Centre, part of a network of regional centres here to help out all you inventors, designers and…
November 11, 1918: A Brief History of Leeds on Armistice Day
Librarian Antony Ramm takes a look at Leeds on the day the First World War ended… When the Lord Major Joseph Henry announced to the people of Leeds that “the armistice has been signed and that fighting has been stopped from 11 o’clock this morning,” he sparked celebratory scenes which commenced almost immediately. Crowds began…
The Secret Library | Leeds Libraries Heritage Blog 