The work goes on.

In the past year, we've added a lot more transcribed newspapers. These are from our two 'resident historians' Tom and David. Both these have been a little disconcerting for our members as they relate to events that happened within their lifetime!

I visited David Lindley in Beccles a week ago and was amazed by the huge archive of transcribed material he had collected. These aren't as immediately popular as newspaper transcriptions but immensely valuable to researchers and family historians. The complete register of births, marriages and deaths in Beccles, for example. the list of all serving soldiers in the wars etc.
We'll gradually be publishing all this material.

Tom has now started looking once again at my favourite period in the newspapers, the eighteenth century. He has uncovered a whole different world, different in its technology, but inhabited by characters that are immediately recognisable. How little humanity itself has changed.

Soon to go on the site too is a vast collection of photographs lent to us by one of the great local historians of Sudbury and Bures, Ron Wright. This will more than double our collection, and includes photographs of local buildings that everyone thought were lost even to memory.

We are, in a sense overwhelmed with the extent of the material we have, waiting to go on the site, but it is a happy state to be in, given the popularity of the site and the urgent need to collect together the painstaking work of a number of local historians. We are happy to publish any East Anglian materials, so if you are an East Anglian historian and you'd like other people to use your research, then let us know about it!