NEEPS

Jessica · Neepster Joined: 16 Jul 2007 Posts: 113

North-east voices bring history to life

The entire archive of interviews from the Formartine Oral History Project, a Lottery-Funded venture by the Formartine Partnership, is now available to University students and staff, through the Elphinstone Institute.

The project has involved a dozen community groups from the areas around Turriff, Oldmeldrum and Ellon. Over the last two and a half years they have collected 96 interviews from local residents, recording on CD their life stories and memories of Formartine stretching across the last century.

Dr Ian Russell, Director of the Elphinstone Institute, was one of the special guests at a launch ceremony in Fyvie Castle on Saturday 19 April, when both he and David Catto, the Aberdeenshire Local Studies Librarian, accepted the archive on behalf of their respective organisations. Dr Thomas McKean of the Institute assisted in the training of volunteer interviewers for the project.

Now we are inviting teachers, students from Ethnology, Anthropology, Sociology, the English Department, and in fact anyone in the University who may be interested in the social and local history of the area to come and consult the archive at Elphinstone.

The archive covers a huge variety of subjects including war-time memories, school days, working lives, farming, fishing, blacksmithing, soutering, laughter and tears, poetry and ballads, and of course, a celebration of the North-east Doric tongue in the voices of these wonderful people who have shared their memories with volunteers for posterity.”

The public can also access the archive at the three main public libraries in Formartine: Turriff, Ellon and Oldmeldrum. The three secondary schools of Formartine will also be presented with a copy of the archive for use by their pupils.

The Project website contains sample clips from interviews in MP3 format, as well as further information about the project and its collaborators. You can access it at http://formartine.pbwiki.com

If you have questions about the archive and its availability, contact the Co-ordinator on formartine_project@yahoo.com or go along to the Elphinstone Institute in the MacRobert Building Room 040 and consult the index and summaries. Full transcripts of the majority of interviews will also be available for those who wish to use the material for research.

Kind regards

Fiona-Jane Brown

Project co-ordinator and PhD researcher at Elphinstone Institute
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aka Dikeside