Lives Behind the Stones - The Finale

As many of you know, for the past year I have been coordinating a project to catalogue our local cemetery. I’m delighted, relieved, pleased to say that the year is almost over. This weekend I’m holding a presentation to celebrate our achievements and, as I jot them down in preparation for my speech, I’m proud to say that the outcomes far outstrip the aims. In fact, had anyone suggested at the outset that we would get this much work done, I would have been quite ‘negative’ with them.

We now have information boards at the cemetery. These include plans of all the plots. There are row markers and small plaques for every unmarked grave…

And more than that, we now have a website with all the basic information that anyone might need to know about the cemetery…

And much more than that, the website contains a record for every burial with data about that person and search facilities. It is now a fully functioning genealogical website…

And even more than that, the website contains many researched stories about the lives led by a number of the people buried there. This is why we called the project The Lives Behind the Stones. We’ve managed to gather a fair cross-section showing contributions made to the local community, to the city, in some cases to the country. There are contributions to commerce, celebrations of scientific developments and, sadly, many moving stories of refugees and evacuees who sought shelter here in Leicester.

I’m sorry you can’t all come to the presentation but, if you’ve not looked at the website recently, you might like to see the finished product and discover what I’ve been up to all year.  You'll find it here.

Thanks to my team and to all the volunteers who have worked so hard and, of course, many thanks to the Heritage Lottery people who have funded the work and supported us during the year. 

Can you research a family tree?

Project Update

Cataloging a Cemetery and researching some of the older headstones is, I have to admit, far harder than I ever expected but it is such a worthwhile task that I can forgive it all of its difficulties.

The Cemetery Entrance

We've sorted the names for the unmarked plots and now the Stone Mason is working on our order, creating plaques and row markers. Meanwhile, we've moved on to writing the information for our Website, designing Interpretation Boards for the Cemetery entrance, inputting basic data so that our Website has a fully functioning genealogical search facility and then of course there's the family research. For many of us this was the main attraction but even this is harder than I thought it would be.

You may have created your own family tree and know all about what I'm going to discuss. I hadn't and so this was a steep learning curve for me.


This is what I've learnt so far:

The first place to look is the Headstone. It should provide the date of death, age, relatives and possibly birthplace. Unfortunately, there's always the possibility that it's so old, it provides nothing more than a difficult-to-read name! 

The Censuses from 1901 and 1911 are freely available to the public now and they can give valuable information about family members and addresses. 

In the Records Office there are shelves full of local Trade Directories which provide people's names and addresses covering the last two centuries and more. They also have sections organised by trades. 

The local newspapers are on microfilm at the Records office. You need to have a good idea of what date you're looking for as they are generally not indexed which means hours of sliding screen after screen of old newspaper pages. This can take even longer than expected as there are always fascinating articles to take you off on irrelevant tangents and as for the adverts… they’re hilarious! 

Our Records Office has a Person Index for anyone who ‘hit the headlines’ during their lifetime and a lot of information can also be gleaned from Congregation/Parish records. 

We have signed up for www.ancestry.co.uk and www.findmypast.co.uk but there are a number of free family research websites. Free Births, Marriages and Deaths can be found at www.freebmd.org.uk. The National Archives catalogue is at www.nationalarchive.gov and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is at www.cwgc.org. 

Failing all that you can always try Googling a name to see if there’s anything out there.

We have until the end of October to get the project completed so I shall take another deep breath and throw myself back into ancestry.co.uk. If anyone would like to help with researching any of the names then do please let me know. This is one of those jobs that is never done! We can never have too many volunteers!

This is a Heritage Lottery Funded Project.

How different the world would be if.....

I’ve been spending so much time at the Cemetery lately that I’ve started to think about the ‘what ifs’ of life. What if those who died young had lived and had the chance to make a valuable contribution to society? How different would our world now be?

My total involvement in all things cemetery is to do with the Heritage Lottery funded project that I’m coordinating. We're cataloguing Leicester’s Jewish Cemetery. I explained about it here and here. We now have a database which contains a record for each grave. Most of them have yet to be filled in but when we have completed this mammoth task, the information will form the basis of our genealogical website.

I have been researching the first burial at the Cemetery; a young girl, Nina Rosina Berger, who died in 1902 at the age of 13. From my research it would seem that she did not live long enough to make significant contributions to her society but her father did. I have a picture of him, Mr Frank Louis Berger, found at the Leicestershire and Rutland Records Office.

The photograph illustrates an article about Mr Berger's struggle to escape from relative poverty and create a successful Leicester-based business manufacturing boys’ suits. The article explains as follows [I’ve retained the original grammar/print style] 

“From small beginnings the firm has risen and it is a fact that to-day they have over one thousand different styles of Boys’ Sailor Suits in Velvets, Plushes, Serge, Tweeds, Worsted, &c…..”

There are plenty more snapshots of life to be rediscovered as we progress with our project, but this got me to thinking about other lives lost. This year there will be a lot of rediscovering events from 100 years ago as it is the Centenary of the outbreak of The Great War. Leicester’s Jewish Community sent 49 men to fight in the 1^st World War, a major contribution as there were only 37 Jewish families in Leicester at that time. Fortunately only three of those men died in action. 46 returned to continue their lives but, as history reminds us, millions and millions of young men never did return. The total number of deaths has been estimated at over 16 million. 

If you speed read that then please slow down and think how many parents mourned and how many lives were lost... a million lives 16 times over.

How many of those young people would, had they lived, have made major contributions to life, cures for diseases, innovative developments in the arts, exciting new technological advancements? How different would life have been if these people had not been pointlessly slaughtered? We’ll never know. I’d like to think that at least we’ve learned lessons about the futility of war but I know that we haven't. 

Do you think we'll ever be able to put an end to war?

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.

Problems With Photography

Last month I blogged about our Heritage Lottery funded project to catalogue and research the headstones in our local cemetery. You can read more about it here. Thanks to all those who commented. Some of you asked for updates and so here is my first.

We’ve been photographing headstones - not as easy as it sounds. Some headstones slant. Some are subsiding. This is precarious work! Some cameras run out of battery half way through a session. Some people [ok, so it was only me!] are so out of condition that squatting down to photograph one stone after the next is more painful than a step-aerobics class.

Overgrown shrubbery posed yet more problems. The cemetery is surrounded by a huge old hedge with trees growing through the hedge and, in some places, hanging over the stones. Cameras had to be repeatedly discarded while we removed ivy from stones, lifted tree branches, pinned back bushes, covering ourselves in mud, leaves and unidentified insects. [Shudder!] But the main problem has been the weather.

I knew that the rain would be an issue so when we arrived at the cemetery on a clear, sunny autumn day we thought how perfect it was… until we started to photograph. The sun cast such heavy shadows across the marble headstones that our automatic cameras couldn’t cope, and when it came to photographing the shiny granite headstones, all we got were shots of the photographer reflected off the granite. So if anyone can forecast when the next dry, dull, not-too-cold day will be, I would be very grateful.

The photography is almost completed. I’ve booked two training sessions at the Records Office and we’ll soon be absorbed in researching some of the more obscure names that we’ve photographed. You can be sure there will be problems. It won’t be as easy as they make it look on the TV programme, ‘Who do you think you are’ but I could be wrong so watch this space. I’ll be blogging about it as the project proceeds, warts and all!

If you're local to Leicester and you'd like to join our group of volunteers then let me know in the comments below or email me at rosalind.kathryn @ gmail.com

Lives Behind the Stones

With many thanks to the Heritage Lottery Team 

Several years ago I was fortunate enough to coordinate a Heritage Lottery funded project called Jewish Voices. It involved helping groups of local elderly people from Leicester's Jewish Community to record their memories. The work was fascinating but what made it extra special was that the memories, when gathered together into a book, told a story of demographic and social change in a provincial town during the 1940s and 50s. I hadn't expected the results to be so conclusive and I'm very proud of the book.

I recently submitted an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund [HLF] to run another project, very different but I'm hoping it'll produce just as exciting an outcome. Grant applications are long detailed affairs and I've spent far more hours than I care to count with my Deputy Project Leader, supported by a small but enthusiastic team, filling in forms and working out timetables and costs. It's been a long, nail-biting wait but...

*drum roll* 

Our application has now been approved by the HLF and so for the next year I'll be leading a team of volunteers as we record and catalogue all the headstones in Leicester's Jewish Cemetery. Part of the cemetery dates back to the early 1900s and is in a poor state of repair. We'll be recording all the inscriptions on the stones while they're still legible, creating a website for genealogical research, producing Interpretation Boards for visitors and, most excitingly of all, selecting a cross-section of names and conducting research at the local Records Office into the lives behind those names. This is why I've called the project 'Lives Behind the Stones'.

If you're local and you'd like to volunteer then let me know in the comments and I'll get in touch. Our volunteer list is growing and we're spending the next few weeks recruiting even more people [you can never have too many volunteers!] for one or all of the following:

• digitally photographing headstones
• inputting data onto a database
• researching selected names [There will be a training session run by the Records Office for all those volunteering to do research.]

About the Heritage Lottery Fund  

Using money raised through the National Lottery, the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) aims to make a lasting difference for heritage, people and communities across the UK and help build a resilient heritage economy. From museums, parks and historic places to archaeology, natural environment and cultural tradition, we invest in every part of our diverse heritage. HLF has supported almost 35,000 projects with more than £5.3bn across the UK.

A Memory Project

In 2008 I was lead facilitator of a Heritage Lottery funded project called Leicester Jewish Voices. The brief was to collect memories of being Jewish in Leicester during the 1940s and 50s and to turn those memories into a book, a website and a touring display. Val Moore, the Head of Writing School Leicester, managed the funding and I set about organising the collection and sorting of the memories. Our original idea was to run a small project. It turned out to be far bigger than either of us had expected.

This was a Writing School Leicester project and so the emphasis was on writing rather than oral work. I decided not to run the writing workshops as I had known these people all my life. I needed someone from outside the community and I knew just the person, Miriam Halahmy, an experienced workshop leader who I was sure that the contributors would love. Together we planned a series of themed workshops which were to form the nucleus of the project. We would be working with people who would not normally call themselves writers, including many elderly with sight and mobility problems. We planned a range of methods to keep things flowing; brain storming with flip chart and brightly coloured marker pens, fluorescent post-its for capturing those special sound-bites and scribes for any contributors who needed help.

My fears that we might encourage people to relive past pains, holocaust memories or wartime losses were soon banished. The project was full of laughter, warmth and friendship. Miriam was brilliant and I was right. The contributors loved her. She led a series of more formal workshops while I organised smaller discussion groups and one-to-one interviews. As non-writers, some contributors were initially reluctant to write but we only had to mention a word like ‘rationing’ or hold up a sepia wedding photograph and there was no stopping them. Our carefully planned themes were soon ignored but this was perfect. We were receiving stories that we could never have planned for because we didn’t know they existed. We were collecting priceless pieces of social history that would otherwise have been lost forever.


I was determined to reach a wider range of contributors than just those who were attending workshops. I used our original plans to develop a distance pack and sent out copies to anyone who expressed an interest. Word spread in a way that would not have been possible pre-Internet and I started to receive memories not only from all over the country but from all over the world too.

By the middle of the year we were working as a team; Miriam and Val with their invaluable writing experience, Glen Tillyard who organised the photography, scanning of old photos and the web design, George Ballentyne who helped with the checking and proof reading, Micky Wright who produced the cartoons and Ian Simons who is still in charge of delivering, setting up and maintaining the touring display. There was also a team of enthusiastic volunteers led by Judy Hastings who kept the whole project alive and buzzing.



The hardest part of the project for me was sorting the memories into a book. It took many weeks of reading, sifting, sorting and re-reading until slowly what had started out as random reminiscences emerged to tell a story of a small, self-contained community and the enormous upheaval it experienced in the 1940s when families of Londoners flooded into Leicester to escape the bombs. No one knows for sure how many Jewish people came to Leicester at that time. Many families spent the war here and then when their men were demobbed they returned to London. I managed to contact a few of these people and so was able to include a little of how being Jewish in Leicester felt for them. A large number of evacuees settled in Leicester, and it was these people, together with refugees from Europe, many of whom had experienced unspeakable atrocities, who helped to create the new, vibrant and diverse Leicester Jewish Community of the 1950s.

I now had the story but not quite the book. My previous writing experiences had ended here, with the typed manuscript being posted to the publishers, but this was different. With Val Moore's invaluable help we planned the pages, chapters, glossary, in fact all the parts of the book that I had previously taken for granted. Time was running short. With only two weeks to get the entire manuscript ready for sending to Think plus Ink, a brilliant team of local book designers, much of the final checking and rechecking was done late into the night. Only when the manuscript was placed into their hands could I breath easily again. Within days they produced A3 proof sheets and for the first time we saw a real book emerging from the typed pages that I had spent so many hours agonising over. With their design eye and expertise we worked together to produce the professional, attractive book Jewish Voices. It was then that I knew that I had achieved my goal. I had a book of memories that would be of interest to more than just the family and friends of the contributors.