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Explore Your Archives

November 2016

Explore Your Archive is a joint campaign delivered by The National Archives and the Archives and Records Association across the UK and Ireland. It aims to showcase the unique potential of archives to excite people, bring communities together, and tell amazing stories.

So we spent 9 days writing about some aspects of Mary Gillham’s archive. There was a new blog each day written by members of the Mary GIllham Archive Project team – staff, volunteers and Steering Group members which should make for a varied and interesting read, just like the archive! Follow the links below to read the blogs...

  1. Explore Your Archives! 19th November: Mary left a variety of materials which the project is working to digitise. The two main aims of the project is to mobilise some 150000 wildlife records from Mary’s documents and to tell the stories of her and her colleagues’ lives… and there is no shortage of material to do either...

  2. Mary’s love of language: Whilst studying a Zoology degree at university we are constantly reminded to be as concise and precise as possible in the way that we write. This can be advantageous when trying to make a point when writing a scientific paper, however it also means that the writing style is less engaging and more difficult to read...

  3. Food for my spirit: On my very first day of volunteering on the Mary Gillham Archive Project I was reading Mary’s diaries of her time in New Zealand, my homeland, and almost immediately came across the name of someone I knew so I feel a personal, albeit very tenuous connection to Mary...

  4. At Sea with the Great Whales: Mary visited Cape Cod, Massachusetts on the 15th October 1988. She set off with the Whale Watch Dolphin Fleet of Provincetown, the first ever whale-watching company to be established in Cape Cod. I visited the same area in August 2012, 24 years on and it seems we had some very similar encounters...

  5. Accessing memories: One of the aspects of Mary’s archives which fascinates me is how much of it acts as an extention of her memory. Natalie has already talked about how accessible the language is that Mary uses but, more than that, it feels like a lot of the archive is written as if to herself – to remind her about the places she visited and even the conversation she had whilst there...

  6. Chapman’s Peak Road and Hout Bay, Cape Peninsula, South Africa: The drive along the west coast of the Cape Peninsula from Noordhoek to Hout Bay takes you on the Chapman’s Peak Road. The road, an engineering feat of its time, is cut into the rugged, near vertical side of the Chapman’s Peak mountain from which it gets its name. The winding road caresses the mountain side and the scenery in both directions is absolutely stunning...

  7. Penelope: Everybody remembers their first car with affection and that glorious sense of freedom. My first car was a Renault 5 called “Liberty” which allowed me to collect zooplankton samples from lakes throughout Ireland, from Donegal to Kerry. It was fun to discover that Mary Gillham’s first car also gave her the freedom to explore Ireland. We could have exchanged tales of adventure...

  8. The March of Mary Gillham: Throughout her life, Mary Gillham had a fascination with seabirds and their effect on surrounding vegetation. This founded her interest in penguins and seeing as today would have been Mary’s 95thbirthday, we have explored a few of her many fieldtrips in which she studied the feeding and mating behaviour of these birds we have all grown to love...

  9. Colleagues and contemporaries…: Dr Mary Gillham was obviously quite an exceptional person. The willingness and drive to travel at a time uncommon for many women; a database-like mind that could come up with the location of a piece of paper hidden away in a particular folder; the foresightedness to write down everything she saw in the knowledge that it would be useful at some point in the future. She was, by all accounts, a very good botanist and teacher educating hundreds (thousands?) of people throughout a lecturing, teaching and authoring career spanning well over half a century...