Archive in the News

Reprinted from East Anglian Daily Times with kind permission from Brad Jones, the news editor. The ladies keeping Suffolk’s past alive 12 December 2008 | 13:00 STEVEN RUSSELL Betty Milburn and Margaret Statham from the Bury Past and Present Society in front of the Abbygate in Bury Here’s a funny thing: two champions of Bury St Edmunds and its history hail not from Suffolk but Yorkshire. Steven Russell meets them to hear about the Past and Present Society . . . and a Mexican pop band IN one corner we have folk like my teenage daughter, who’s adamant history is s-o b-o-r-i-n-g. Diagonally opposite are enthusiasts who realise that all those yesterdays make life what it is now. It’s also true that the past has the power to connect people in the most unexpected of ways – across the generations and across the oceans. Take a massive project that’s been soaking up time and attention like a hungry infant. Hundreds of old pictures of Bury St Edmunds – from Gibb’s shop on the corner of Skinner Street to Flashlight Group’s presentation of Iolanthe – have been put on the worldwide web for everyone to enjoy. Meanwhile, committed volunteers dig away, unearthing richer detail to make the captions more informative than simply “Lady on horse outside Norman Tower”. About 850 images can be called up at the click of a mouse, so it’s not surprising folk doing Google searches around the globe have stumbled onto paths that led to Suffolk.

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