This week on the Secret Library we hear from Local and Family History’s Josh Flint, who will be exploring the incredibly useful family history resource, military service records. This article will explore what military service records are, how to access them and how they can be useful for your own family history research. Military personnel records…
Tag: WW1
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… A hundred years ago, approximately 250,000 Belgian men, women and children came to Britain after the invasion and subsequent…
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…
Leeds in the First World War: New Leodis Collection
To commemorate the centenary of the end of the First World War, it seems a good time to delve into our Leodis photographic archive to see how Leeds fared during this period. The image below shows a recruiting tram for the Leeds Pals, a volunteer battalion from the business and professional communities of the city,…
A Partial History of Leeds Central Library
This last Wednesday, to mark National Libraries Week, four of our Local and Family History team, plus one intrepid volunteer, delivered a talk offering a brief history of Leeds Central Library, primarily derived from material found in several volumes of news-cuttings covering public libraries in Leeds. So, this week on the Secret Library we offer…
Oliver Cromwell and the First World War
Following last week’s look at our latest Speed-dating our Library Treasures event, Josh Flint from the Local and Family History department explains his fascination with Captain P.A. Charrier’s early 20th-century book on Oliver Cromwell… The Campaigns of Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War: 1642- 1649, was written by Captain P. A. Charrier in 1906. Charrier,…
A History of the Leeds City War Memorial
As Remembrance Day draws near, librarian Helen Skilbeck looks back at the history of the war memorial in Victoria Gardens, close to Leeds Central Library. Until the 1930s, there were buildings occupying the now paved area that now runs the whole length of the Library, City Art Gallery and Henry Moore Institute. These included the Leeds…
The Lady Tram-Conductor
Here’s a little insight into First World War-era Leeds for you today, in the form of a poem written by Burley resident Edward Carless, and dated 12 February 1916: The Lady Tram-Conductor: A Working Man’s Tribute Strange things happen in time of war; A lady now conducts the car! In uniform, so smart and trim, She’s…
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