Community Archive welcoming relocation
VOLUNTEERS with the Feilding and Districts Community Archive at the Coach House Museum are looking forward to their upcoming move to new premises in the town as interest in the region’s social history continues to rise.
Archive Manager, Marilyn Wightman, said the archival area at the planned site would be double that currently available and allow the public better access to community records.
The Coach House, containing the archive, is moving from its location on Bowen Street to the old Feltex wool spinners plant on South Street, with a major revamp now underway to prepare the building for the museum’s collection of antique vehicles and equipment.
It is hoped to have the museum opened by early next year.
Mrs Wightman said it had been two years since the archive moved into the Coach House and she was pleased with progress and the amount of historical material that had come in for safekeeping.
“The extra space will be better for the public,” she said, “and is likely to attract more volunteers and enable us to be open for a longer period of time, rather than just on a Thursday afternoon.”
A proposed purpose-built room in the museum would also allow researchers, visiting when the archive was unattended, to request access, by appointment, to targeted material.
“The community archive centres on the area’s social strata,” said Mrs Wightman, “looking at its people and the schools they went to, the buildings they worked in, the businesses they worked at and the sporting and recreational clubs to which they belonged.”
FDCA's material is comprehensive and includes community records (not council ones) previously held by the Manawatu District Council and including extensive photographic collections of people, events, businesses, schools, clubs and organisations.
The collection also keeps personal biographies and diaries, newspapers, business records and a small library of printed texts.
A list of all catalogues is viewable on the website, www.feildingarchive.org
Mrs Wightman said the relocation would also hopefully clear up some public misunderstanding in regard to the Feilding and Districts Community Archive, which concentrates on social history, and Archive Central, a recently established repository for council records from seven local bodies within the Horizons Regional Council catchment.
“There are some people who believe the two resources are the one and the same,” she said, “a notion that may have been compounded by Archive Central planning to move into our current space when we are gone.”
She said it was a marvellous idea to centralises all the councils’ records, as the two organisations, along with the Feilding Public Library (with its photographic collection), would be able to complement each other and offer to the public three different historical sources.
* In the meantime, more than 12,700 items from Manawatu District Council’s archives have been successfully listed and added to the Archives Central online database. They start in 1876 with the minute book of the Manchester Road Board, going through to the extensive collection of files, minutes and other records of the Manawatu, Oroua, Pohangina and Kiwitea County Councils, and Feilding Borough Council, who amalgamated in 1989 to form the MDC.