This week, Librarian Antony Ramm brings us a very brief history of cemeteries in Leeds, and highlights some related stock held at the Central Library. You can read much more about this history in Jim Morgan’s essential The Burial Ground Problem in Leeds, c.1700-1914, while on this site you can read a previous article about burial…
Tag: University of Leeds
Traces of Tolkien in Leeds
Dr. Alaric Hall will deliver a talk at Leeds Central Library on the 12th of October, using the Special Collections at the University of Leeds, to explore the scholarships and friendships made by J.R.R. Tolkien during his time (1920-1925) in Leeds, and how these affected his creative writing. Ahead of that talk, Local History Librarian,…
Burial Records – An Introduction
The article below was originally published in 2017. It has been lightly-edited to fit our 2020 series examining family history resources for beginners. This Saturday 25 March, our Local and Family History department will have a stall at the Be Curious festival at the University of Leeds. We were kindly invited by the Brotherton Library’s Special Collections,…
Who Led Leeds? Public Service between the Wars
University of Leeds PhD student Pushpa Kumbhat is working on a new project with the support of Leeds Central Library’s Local and Family History department. She writes… We are creating a collection of short biographies commemorating the lives of public servants – local leaders of Leeds who served on the Council between the First and…
Sweeping Through Time
Two weeks ago, we let you in on some of the secrets of the Henry Collection in Oliver Twist with a Twist. This week it’s over to our two experts on the subject, Jonathan and Natascha, to share a few of their favourite finds. Did you know that Leeds Central Library holds extensive collections on the English…
It’s Oliver Twist… with a Twist
by Rhian Isaac, Collections Manager, Leeds Central Library Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be welcoming two new bloggers to the Secret Library. Natascha and Jonathan are students from the University of Leeds, who joined us on a Faculty of Arts Research Placement a few months ago to experience working with our collections and bringing them to a wider…
A Hidden Victorian Treasure in Headingley
by Nick Tasker, PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Leeds During pleasant afternoons in Leeds Central Library I have been discovering a story of upward social mobility in Victorian Leeds. It’s also the story of my front room. I recently moved into a new place in Headingley. It’s in a large Victorian house…
Making a Drama Out of a Catalogue Card
by Ross Horsley, Local and Family History, Leeds Central Library Last weekend, we welcomed a group of Leeds University students to the Local and Family History Library to take part in a mystery project for the Out There Challenge programme. None of them knew each other, and none even knew where they’d be meeting until…
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