A village archive for Stillington, and its neighbouring parish of Marton cum Moxby, was an idea proposed in a questionnaire from Stillington P. C. as part of the five year review of the ten year Parish Plan.
It was a popular proposal and the inaugural meeting was attended by an unprecedented number of people, not all from Stillington itself.
The thoughts on what exactly is the purpose of an archive were many and varied. What came from the lively discussion was this:
Still and video images, documents and oral narratives should be collected.
Copies of material should be made for the archive while the owner keeps the originals and, if necessary, is given advice on their care.
Everyone donating to the archive should sign a copyright release form.
Any material collected should be made available on both the internet and through paper copies.
The archive should be owned by the community and run on a non profit making basis.*
A steering group was formed from those present at the meeting to put these thoughts into action. The response to the group's efforts to create an archive has been wonderful, both in the support from the community and in the amount of material which has been donated. However a steering group can only accomplish so much - the time came to form a committee proper.
A meeting was held in our village hall on 10th March 2009, which was well attended, a constitution was established and a committee was formed from those who were willing to become members of the group.
Then the real work began!
March 2014
Five years on and our Archive has gathered information on a wide range of topics.
We have undertaken research to give many of our acquisitions relevance. This was never one of the Archive Group's intentions. However we felt this was important particularly in the case of the photographs and postcards we have collected: without dating, information and background these would have less value.
Certainly we know much more of the histories of Stillington, Marton and Moxby than we did five years ago and we sincerely hope we can continue to unearth more in the next five.
If you are interested in Stillington and Marton please keep visiting these pages. They are regularly updated as we receive material and information suitable for the site.
Please sign our guestbook.
We welcome any comments on our site. We are particularly interested if you have found the information on our pages helpful in any way.
* In 2017 the Archive £500 of its surplus funds towards a projector, screen and sound system to be kept in Stillington village hall. It was half the cost of the package which, though second hand, is excellent and is proving a valuable addition to the facilities in our village hall.
