Lost life stories

Every life has a story to tell. We can’t all talk of major achievements, life-saving inventions or headline-making discoveries, but we all have our own unique story. Several years ago, when I set out to research the ‘lives behind the stones’ in the local Jewish cemetery, I was not looking for the big names. I wanted to know about the lives of the ordinary people, people like myself.

Regular visitors to this blog will remember me talking about this Heritage Lottery funded project that I coordinated in 2014/15. We created a website with information about Leicester's Jewish cemetery and a complete database of the graves providing a genealogical search facility. The website is testament to my team’s commitment and hard work and I am proud of what we created.
(Apologies if you’ve had trouble recently accessing the Jewish Gilroes project website. It has been undergoing routine maintenance but I have been reassured that it's fully functioning once more.)

I do regret that we only had time to research nineteen stories. We were not even able to recount entire life stories, but mere snapshots of those nineteen lives. So much has not been told and there are about a thousand graves in the cemetery, so there are more than 900 lives yet, if ever, to reveal their stories. Maybe some were refugees from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s or descendants of refugees. Others may have come later in the 20^th century from Germany. They would possibly have been evacuated to Leicester during the Blitz. They must have experienced so much that I will never know about because now their lives have been lost behind the brief descriptions on their headstones.

On the left is the headstone for the very first burial in the cemetery. It marks the grave of a young girl called Nina Rosina Berger who died aged 13. We could find very little about her short life but there was information to be uncovered regarding her family. A small group of us put together our findings and this is the story that I was able to write up for the website. Nina Rosina Berger.

Looking to the more distant past, apart from a few exceptions, only the lives of Kings and Queens, their Chancellors and Priests were recorded. I want to know what the ordinary people did. I want to know about their daily lives, worries, joys, habits. If only they had been literate, with their own blogs and Twitter accounts, think how much more we would know about life in days gone by… or would we be bogged down with their daily recounting of what they had for breakfast and what the weather was like?

I'm out and about

I'm so pleased with the results of the Lives Behind the Stones cemetery research project that I'd love it if other communities followed suit and created their own website along the lines of the one that I've been responsible for developing during the last year. Indeed, one of the final aims of the project is to promote the idea as a template and so I have been out and about these last few weeks doing just that.

Today I'm over at Simon Mayer's blog talking about the project. If you'd like to pop over and visit me there you can find me at Simon Mayers - Researcher and Historian

I can also be found in this week's copy of the Jewish Chronicle and you can read an online version of the article here.

Learning how to research

The Heritage Lottery Funded project, Lives Behind the Stones, is moving on a pace. [I've explained more about the project here.] Last week we went to the Leicestershire and Rutland Records Office for our first training session. We are hoping to research some of the names on the stones in the oldest part of Leicester's Jewish Cemetery. We know that we will draw complete blanks with some of them but we are hoping to at least find out something of interest, though first of all we have to learn how to find our way around the myriad of resources in the Records Office.

The Leicestershire and Rutland Records Office

The office is an old Victorian School House, quite appropriate for the collection of so many historical documents. Jenny Moran, the Senior Archivist, gave us an introduction followed by a guided tour. The place is packed from floor to ceiling with scrolls, maps, photographs, letters, wills, not to mention shelf after shelf of books packed with names, addresses, jobs, the list is endless. It was a fascinating experience. We were even taken into the private area, where documents are stored at about 14 degrees to prevent damage, and the vast shelves are moved to and fro by means of a hand-controlled wheel.

Jenny Moran showing us one of many sets of shelving packed with documents

 I'm sure that Agatha Christie has used just such a setting for one of her mystery murders.

As Jenny said, there's always someone who can't resist turning the wheel to move the shelf

Jenny had laid out a number of fascinating documents for us to browse including the Synagogue's marriage register dating back to the 19th Century and a number of newspapers from wartime Leicester, a time when a lot of London Jews arrived in Leicester to escape the bombing.

For the second part of the morning we considered a selection of photographs of possible headstones for research and our brave volunteers launched enthusiastically into their work. 

Will they find out about exciting life stories and produce evidence of what life was like in early 20th Century Leicester? 

We hope so. Watch this space! 

Apologies if I have not visited your blog or been on Twitter this week. A young and very dear friend died suddenly on Monday and it has been a particularly difficult time.