Together Trust Archive

With a milestone in the history of the Together Trust and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic coinciding in 2020, plans to celebrate our 150th anniversary suffered many setbacks. Whilst we were able to move some of our events online, others have been postponed indefinitely.

As promised we return to share our Explore Your Archive tweets for the year so far , so you can explore our archive.

In 2019, the Together Trust secured a generous grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to support the charity’s 150th anniversary celebrations and community projects in 2020. As part of this grant we are digitising and making accessible the charity’s annual reports dating from 1870-1919.

It's all go here at Together Trust HQ as we prepare to celebrate our 150th anniversary! Thanks to a generous grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund , Together Trust has been awarded an astounding £99,200 to make 2020 a memorable year in which we celebrate our past, present and future with 'The Ever Open Door - 150 years of Together Trust' project.

Next week sees the gathering of archivists and conservators from all over the UK and beyond, to London, for the annual Archives and Records Association (ARA) conference. For the lone archivist working in the north of England, it’s a chance to travel to the bright lights of the capital city and mix with other like minded professionals. This creates an opportunity to share new ideas, receive advice from your peers and hear about some of the wonderful work going on in archive repositories across the country and beyond.

We told a story all the way back in 2011 about twelve lads who set sail from our orphans homes across to Northfield in Massachusetts under the guardianship of the well known preacher Dwight Lyman Moody . The recent digitisation of our orphan home books by Borthwick Archives , at the end of last year, has revealed more information about the younger children who entered our homes, including the individual circumstances of the Moody party. 

We had a little trip to York last week. Lovely though the city is however, our adventure did not take in the sights of the Cathedral, a trip through the Yorvik Centre or a walk around the city walls. Instead it took us to York University, and more specifically to the Borthwick Archives , in order to deposit a number of our precious books. One of the History Books ready for digitisation

It’s been an exciting day here at the Together Trust Archive. We’ve gone digital! One of our most viewed group of documents within our extensive collection include our large leather-bound emigration books. These run from 1883 to 1914 and record all of the children who were emigrated to Marchmont our Receiving Home in Canada during this time. Each child was allocated a page within one of the books. Any reports or correspondence sent back to the Charity was glued into the book. Although they provide a wealth of information on what life was like in Canada, they are also a conservator’s nightmare! One of our emigration books