By Dave Williams – PDMHS Recorder
In the last 3 months PDMHS has taken in the mining history archives (courtesy of Jenny Potts and Mary Wilde at the British Caving Library) belonging to Doug Nash of Op. Mole and Eyam. Doug was the literary executor of Nellie Kirkham and came into possession of some 60 boxes of Nellie’s field notes and other archive material. It was immediately obvious that this material was unique and needed to be lodged in the County Record Office at Matlock to ensure its survival in a proper environment. Accordingly, I have, over the last few weeks, been transferring this material to Matlock, and the last part of the collection was delivered just before Christmas.
This has been celebrated in a blog from Mark Smith at the Record Office –
https://recordoffice.wordpress.com/2015/12/30/nellie-kirkham-archives-of-busy-local-historian/
As mentioned in the blog a catalogue can be found at –
http://calmview.derbyshire.gov.uk/calmview/overview.aspx?src=calmview.catalog&q=refno:D5675*
Some of the material had previously been scanned and this can be seen at –
http://www.pdmhs.com/resources/kirkham
As Mark says in the blog this material is roughly sorted but needs a great deal of work to make it more understandable. It has to be said that Nellie’s handwriting does not make this easy. I am hoping to make this a project for Winter 2016/17!