Oral History - guide to resources: People (A-M)

Ambleside Oral History Group has been conducting oral history interviews since 1976 on a broad range of subjects relating to life in Ambleside and the Lake District area. They maintain an expanding archive, currently numbering over 450 interviews. The interview transcripts for the entire archive are available online and are fully searchable by keyword, or browsable by topic. Access to the online transcripts and search facility must be requested using the registration page on the website. The audio recordings themselves are not available online and only accessible by prior appointment at Ambleside Public Library.

Topics: People; Work

Keywords: agriculture; childhood; community; education; leisure; WWI; WWII

ATS Remembered is a private research project that records the history of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British army from 1938 to 1949. The memories and service details of a range of former members of the ATS are available to access online, including those who served as cooks, drivers, gunners, military police and wireless operators.

Topics: People; War & Conflict; Work

Keywords: military; women; WWII

Between 2004 and 2006, the Refugee Communities History Project conducted 160 in-depth life story interviews with individuals who came to London as refugees. The complete project archive is accessible to readers by appointment at the Museum of London. Extracts from the interviews have been arranged by theme and are available online.

Topics: People

Keywords: migration; refugees

This website includes recorded interviews and a video produced as part of a project, established in 1990, to record the memories of older generation black and asian migrants to Birmingham.

Topics: People

Keywords: family; migration; race; work

From 1999-2000 this project recorded the experiences of African-Caribbean and Asian migrants to Wolverhampton since the Second World War. Video clips from the interviews are accessible online. The archived clips are searchable by theme, and also by the respondent’s gender, ethnic origin, religion and country of origin.

Topics: People

Keywords: community; migration; race

This project conducted life narrative oral history interviews with individuals who remained in Ireland during the 1950s at a time when so many were emigrating. The purpose of the project was to consider the impact of emigration on those left behind. 50 of the 78 interviews conducted can be listened to online, either in their entirety or in sections. Relevant interview extracts can be located using a keyword or free text search facility.

Topics: People

Keywords: childhood; community; education; family; gender; migration; politics; religion; work

This research project was established by the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies in 2000 to record the experience of Hindus who migrated to Britain. The oral history interviews focussed on both the interviewee’s personal history and on his or her religious practices and beliefs. Interviews were conducted with members of Hindu communities from across Britain. The recordings and transcripts of 46 interviews are available online. The complete archive of over 300 interviews is accessible at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, Oxford.

Topics: People

Keywords: community; migration; race; religion

British Library Sounds provides online access to a selection of the British Library's extensive collections of sound recordings, including oral history resources on a wide range of subjects. The recordings are arranged by subject area and are keyword searchable.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore; Arts & Culture; Education; People; Politics & Government; Science & Medicine; War & Conflict; Work

Keywords: portal

This website contains written extracts from oral history interviews with British individuals regarding their experiences and reflections of British colonialism in India before Independence in 1947. The focus of the interviews is particularly on the social and cultural aspects of British life in India and with intercultural influences.

Topics: Arts & Culture; People

Keywords: colonialism; migration; race

Undergraduates at Aberystwyth University have been interviewing the people of Ceredigion about life and work in the county during the twentieth century as part of a project organised by the Centre for Historiography and Historical Cultures in the Department of History and Welsh History. The project aims to create a lasting record of the community, culture and language of Ceredigion and also forge links between the University and local community.

This link searches the National Library of Wales holdings for works on "Oral history -- Wales -- Ceredigion"

Topics: People; Work

Keywords: community; language; POW; tourism; WWII

Epping Forest District Museum conducted a series of oral history interviews about everyday life and work in the district. The collection also includes memories of historic events, such as the Second World War. Four audio clips on the themes of farming, housing, industry and transport are available online. The entire collection is accessible by appointment at the Museum.

Topics: People; Work

Keywords: agriculture; childhood; housing; industry; WWII

This website provides online access to selected audio recordings of the Cork Folklore Project. Interview extracts can be accessed through an interactive map of the Cork area or are searchable by topic.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore; Arts & Culture; People; Work

Keywords: agriculture; community; death; games; music; sport

The Corner Shop was a social history project to document Black Country shops from 1950-2010. Community volunteers were given training and asked to interview corner shop-owners, their families, and their customers. 31 interviews were recorded in total. Audio extracts from the interviews are available to listen to online.

Topics: People; Work

Keywords: community; family

This project aimed to explore changing financial management practices in working class homes within the city of Belfast. A series of oral history interviews recorded individual experiences of credit, debt and money management. The interviews adopted a life history approach, which enables the gender, generation, neighbourhood, occupation, income and religion of individual respondents to be considered alongside their personal and familial experiences of financial decision-making. The transcripts of 26 interviews, including two with licensed money lenders, are available online through the UK Data Service. Researchers must first sign into the UK Data Service using their institutional login and state their intended use of any material accessed.

Topics: People

Keywords: community; family; finance; gender; religion

This website provides online access to short audio clips from oral history interviews with individuals involved with the sport of cricket in the West Yorkshire boroughs of Calderdale and Kirkless.

Topics: Arts & Culture; People

Keywords: community; cricket; family; sport

The complete oral recordings and transcripts of 98 interviews that chart the experiences of disabled people have been made freely available through British Library Sounds. The interviews are listed under four sub-headed sections which relate to the particular disability or theme discussed: Cerebral Palsy (31), Disability Athletics (2), Hearing Loss (64) and Polio (1). The entry for polio is a self-recorded reminiscence but the other three sets of recordings are the result of organised oral history projects conducted by the British Library: ‘Speaking for ourselves: an oral history of people with cerebral palsy’ (conducted in partnership with Scope), 'An Oral History of British Athletics', and 'Unheard Voices: Interviews With Deafened People' (conducted in partnership with Hearing Link).

Topics: People; Science & Medicine

Keywords: disability; healthcare; medicine; sport

This project set out to consider the differences between Chinese and British festivals. Three different groups of people were interviewed, including those who moved to the UK a long time ago, mixed marriage Chinese who share and celebrate both East and West festivals, and finally Chinese or half-Chinese individuals born or brought up in the UK. 11 audio recordings are available online, in both a short and full version, along with complete interview transcripts.

Topics: Arts & Culture; People

Keywords: community; festivals; migration

This website aims to improve accessibility to a collection of 444 oral history interviews conducted by Professor Paul Thompson in the 1970s as part of his study of Edwardian society. An online searchable catalogue of the interview transcripts has been created, which provides summary descriptions for each interview. Five full electronic transcripts and a number of audio extracts from the interviews are also available online. The complete set of paper/microfiche transcripts are held at the National Social Policy and Social Change Archive, University of Essex, and the audio recordings are held by the British Library.

Topics: Education; People; Work

Keywords: childhood; community; education; family; leisure; politics; religion

This archive hold the audio and transcript collections for three oral history projects conducted by Elizabeth Roberts during the 1970s and 1980s on the social and family life of Barrow, Lancaster and Preston from 1890 to 1970. Sets of transcript extracts from the interviews are available to read online on five different subjects: The Lancashire Way of Death, Health, Childbirth, Neighbours, and Working Class Marriage 1890-1940. The subject indexes for the archival interview collections are also available to download from the website.

Topics: People

Keywords: community, death; family

The Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) Qualidata provides online access to the data collections of a number of oral history projects, including interview transcripts. Researchers need to register and state their intended purpose for any data accessed. The collections are keyword searchable. Their introduction to Oral History resources provides links to key oral history project data deposited with ESDS and also to other key national resources for oral history.

ESDS Qualidata has recently been taken over by the UK Data Service but much of the website content remains accessible.

Topics: Education; People; Politics & Government; War & Conflict; Work

Keywords: portal

The Exmoor Oral History Archive holds the complete audio recordings of 78 life story interviews conducted with a wide variety of individuals who have lived and worked on the moor. The website is intended as an introduction to this collection, which is housed at the Somerset Heritage Centre. Short audio extracts from each of the interviews are available online, and are searchable by person, place or via a thematic index.

Topics: People; Work

Keywords: agriculture; childhood; community; education

Also known as ‘100 families’, this project examined the connections between family life and social mobility by means of in-depth life story interviews, where possible with different generations of the same family. The collection consists of 170 complete interview transcripts. The transcripts have been anonymised and fully digitised. They are available to download in searchable Word and RTF formats. It is further possible to carry out keyword searches of all the transcripts and also to filter search results by sex, year of birth, geographical region and occupational class on the ESDS website. In order to download the interviews it is first necessary to sign into the UK Data Service, using your institutional login, and state your intended use of any data accessed.

Topics: People; Work

Keywords: childhood; education; family; leisure, politics

Feminist Webs is an online archive and resource for practitioners, volunteers and women involved in youth and community work with young women. Volunteers in the North West of England interviewed feminist women about their lives and the work of young women and girls. A number of the interviews and some three to four minute samples of longer interviews are available online. If you are interested in hearing more contact the North West Sound Archive.

Topics: People; Work

Keywords: community; feminism; women

Foundling Voices, established in 2008, has recorded 78 life story interviews with individuals who grew up in the care of the Foundling Hospital during the first half of the twentieth century. The project website provides access to audio extracts from the interviews. London Metropolitan archives hold the complete audio recordings and transcripts of the interviews.

Topics: Education; People

Keywords: childhood; education; family; school

This oral history project was commissioned to commemorate the 125th Anniversary of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). Oral history interviews were conducted with Irish people about their experiences of the GAA and its impact on their lives. A number of these interviews are available to read on the project website.

Topic: Arts & Culture; People

Keywords: family; migration; religion; sport; women

This website presents peoples’ memories of the former Gravesend Airport (RAF Gravesend) during the 1940s, and also of the construction of the new estates of Westcourt and Riverview which replaced it. Four short audio extracts are currently accessible online but more may be added.

Topics: People; War & Conflict

Keywords: bombing; children; community; housing; RAF; WWI

This website provides access to transcriptions of interviews conducted with elderly residents of the Glens abut their early memories of the area.

Topics: Anthropology & Culture; Arts & Culture; Education; People; War & Conflict; Work

Keywords: agriculture; childhood; community; sport; WWI; WWII

This site contains audio files and transcripts of complete oral history interviews that were contributed by the public about their everyday experiences of life in the South West of England. The interviews are searchable by location or browsable under six subject areas, which are further divided by sub-topic. The subject areas are farming, the war, social activities, places, local matters and rural industries.

Topics: People; Work

Keywords: agriculture; childhood; community; music; WWII

Healthtalkonline provides online access to over 2000 video and audio clips of people sharing their experiences of health-related conditions and illnesses. The collection of these personal stories was designed to help patients, families, carers and healthcare professionals, rather than explicitly provide a resource for academic researchers. They offer, however, to provide an insight into social attitudes towards health and illness, and allow an examination of the social impact of health-related issues.

Topics: Science & Medicine; People

Keywords: death; health; family; medicine

This website provides links to a number of community oral history projects recording life in the East End of London. Several of these have online access to audio files or transcripts of interviews conducted in the course of the projects.

Topics: People; Politics & Government; War & Conflict; Work

Keywords: community

From 2001 to 2002, the Irish Centre for Migration Studies at the National University of Ireland in Cork conducted 11 life narrative interviews with recent immigrants to Ireland. Traditionally a country of emigration, the economic boom during the 1990s encouraged a wave of immigration into Ireland in the latter years of the decade. This project sought to record the experiences of some of these immigrants within their individual and collective life stories. The complete audio recording of six interviews with individuals from Nigeria and the Phillipines are currently available to listen to online.

Topics: People

Keywords: migration; refugees

This oral history project established in 2006 recorded the stories and experiences of people from all over the world who came to settle in Reading. 22 interview transcripts are available to read online and extracts from the interviews can also be searched by selected themes, including Childhood, Children’s Identity, Community, Economic Situation, Education & Training, Family Values, Food, Jobs, Old Reading, Political Situation, Racism, Self Sufficiency, and Where Home Is.

Topics: People

Keywords: childhood; community; education; family; migration; race; refugees; work

[no longer freely available.] In the First Person is an in-depth index of thousands of collections of English language personal narratives from around the world. Along with diary entries and letters, the index contains approximately 17,00 entries for oral history. The index is searchable by keyword.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore; Arts & Culture; Education; People; Politics & Government; Science & Medicine; War & Conflict; Work

Keywords: portal

The British Library has made available online 65 oral history interviews with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust living in Britain. The complete audio recordings and transcripts of the interviews are accessible to everyone through British Library Sounds. The interviews were collected as part of a much larger project on the Living Memory of the Jewish Community, which ran from 1988 to 2000.

Topics: People; War & Conflict

Keywords: Holocaust; Jews; race; Third Reich

This project, which resulted in a book publication, sought to explore the memories of the Jewish population in Leicester during the 1940s and 1950s. Six short audio extracts from interviews recorded at the project book launch are available to listen to online. It is also possible to download chapters of the book from the website.

Topics: People

Keywords: community; Jews

Between 2004 and 2008, King’s Cross Voices captured the memories and experiences of a large variety of men and women who lived, worked and studied in King’s Cross before its physical landscape and communities became transformed by the redevelopment of the area. Oral history interviews were collected with those who worked in the railway industry, as well as with students, teachers, shopkeepers, market traders, police officers, artists, office workers, campaigners, squatters, politicians, prostitutes, factory workers, builders and many more. Written extracts from nine of the interviews are available to read online, as is an audio sound trail of Argyle Square in the King’s Cross area, which includes audio extracts from the original interviews. The recordings and transcripts are archived at Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre and are available to access in full on public computers in all Camden Libraries.

Topics: People; Work

Keywords: community

In 2007 Kiveton Park and Wales History Society interviewed residents about their lives and experiences in the area. Audio extracts from 12 interviews are available to listen to online. Many of these relate to coal mining.

Topics: People; Work

Keywords: childhood; education; football; mining; industry; sport; union; WWII

The Listening Project is an ongoing project run in partnership by the BBC and the British Library. The project has requested people from across the country to submit an audio recording of a short, meaningful conversation held between two individuals. The recordings are being broadcast across BBC radio and archived by the British Library. A significant number, currently over 300, are also available to listen to through the BBC Radio 4 website. The conversations cover a wide range of topics including education, family, health, religion and war.

Topics: Arts & Culture; Education; People; War & Culture; Work

Keywords: education; family; healthcare; religion; sexuality; sport

This database of the digitised Mass Observation archive is available to University members. As well as providing online access to top level file reports produced by Mass Observation from 1937 to 1972, this resource also provides access to the raw data used to produce them for a series of topic collections, including Juvenile Delinquency; Korea, 1950; and Radio Listening, 1939-1948. This raw material consists of interviews as well as questionnaires, observations and ephemera. To access this resource from outside the Oxford University network, follow the link through SOLO.

Topics: Arts & Culture; People; Politics & Government; War & Conflict; Work

Keywords: cinema; family; music; politics; radio; television

This website provides access to a number of videos created as part of a project to record stories of migration into the East Midlands from the UK and further afield since 1945. The project, which was managed by the East Midlands Oral History Archive, trained a number of local groups to conduct and edit the oral history interviews into a number of short videos about their communities. The videos can be accessed by clicking on an interactive map of the East Midlands area on the website homepage. It is worth noting that this map does not seem to load correctly when using Firefox web browser but works fine when using Internet Explorer.

Topics: People

Keywords: migration; refugees

The Millenium Memory Bank (MMB) represents one of the largest single oral history collections in Europe. From 1998 to 1999, BBC local radio stations interviewed a total of 640 individuals from around the UK about their local, everyday experiences. These formed the basis for a series of radio programmes entitled The Century Speaks. Interviewees ranged in age from five to 107 years olds and were drawn from a variety of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. British Library Sounds has made 395 audio extracts from these interviews available for anyone to listen to online. Each audio extract is accompanied by a linguistic description of the item. The interviews are geographically browsable by county and within this by town.

Topics: People; Work

Keywords: agriculture; community; environment; family; language; work

This website provides online access to ten extracts from oral history interviews recorded between 2001 and 2008 about life and work on Dartmoor. The complete recordings have been fully transcribed and archived in full onto CDs, which can be listened to at the Dartmoor National Park Authority’s High Moorland Visitor Centre in Princetown, and various other information centres, museums and libraries throughout Dartmoor. They are also available for sale through the website’s online shop.

Topics: People; Work

Keywords: agriculture; community; housing; industry; tourism; WWII

This project, also known as Fatherless Families, explored the lives and experiences of mothers living alone through a series of oral history interviews. It sought to examine both the detailed indicators and the subjective experience of poverty, as well as the problems faced by families as a consequence of both low incomes and lack of fathers. Topics covered in the interviews included housing conditions, living arrangements, marriage, factors that led to fatherlessness, family structure, work, health, diet, clothing and education. 119 interview transcripts (composed after the event) are available to download through the UK data service. To access the material, it is first necessary to sign into the UK data service using your institutional login.

Topics: People

Keywords: community; gender; housing; women; poverty

This study examined health history, beliefs and attitudes to health and medical care, inter-generational relationships and social history with members of a grandmother generation. The transcripts of 46 oral history interviews conducted with grandmothers from 1977 to 1978 are accessible online. The transcripts have all been converted by OCR from paper to searchable Word and .rtf format. In order to download the interviews it is first necessary to sign into the UK data service using your institutional login.

Topics: People; Science & Medicine

Keywords: family; healthcare

Amongst other sources related to the history of the area, this website provides online access to approximately 150 complete audio recordings held by the East Midlands Oral History Archive (EMOHA). The interviews primarily relate to life in Leicestershire from the turn of the century to the 1930s and cover a wide variety of topics from WWI to influenza, education and work. A number of recordings also relate to the interviewees experiences abroad, particularly in India. The interviews are all summarised and categorised and available to search by keyword.

Topics: Arts & Culture; Education; People; Politics & Government; Science & Medicine; War & Conflict; Work

Keywords: agriculture; community; engineering; family; religion; WW1

This project recorded the experiences of people in the UK living with haemophilia and HIV by means of life story interviews. Audio and transcript extracts from eight interviews with individuals with haemophilia and HIV are available online, as are seven interviews with members of their families. Extracts from the interviews have also been arranged into a number of browsable key themes.

Topics: People; Science & Medicine

Keywords: death; family; healthcare; medicine