Part of our job is to continue to collect items that will be of interest to others in the future.

Its been a long year for us all but hopefully there is now some light at the end of the tunnel. Our weekly Heritage Zoom chats have started to turn towards the possibility of reopening in May and restarting all the projects we have had to put on hold. We need your help.

One thing we feel it is important to do as an archive, is create a file or box for the archive and future historians about the last year. Historians find it hard to find records of some events, for example, what was it like for families on the home front during WW2. There are few records. In a hundred years or more they will be looking for information about how Lockdown affected local people. So we thought we could collect anything related to it and also ask people to write a page or two about their thoughts, the impact it had on them, and if they feel there will be a long term impact. We will place it in the archive for someone to look at in the future and hopefully it will give generations to come an understand of this period of history. Items we could put in are: face masks, letters from the government, test kits and information. It will be the personal stories that will be most important though, did you learn to Zoom, were you home schooling, did you learn to rely on neighbours for help, did you support others, did you get corona, what was that like? How did the year make you feel? If you have children, please give us any drawings about the pandemic or they could write up life from their perspective. Once we are over this pandemic it is likely that most of us will want to forget it all, but it will be useful to have a record for the villages about what life was really like.

 You can keep a collection of things you might think are of interest and drop it off to us once we are open. (We need to take some care with these for obvious reasons) If you want to do a record then you can email them to us pluckleyheritagecentre@yahoo.com or drop it to us when we are open again.

Thanks

The Pluckley Heritage Team