Family and local history

Following on from Louise’s post about Company magazines, the Library also holds collections of regimental magazines from the 1890s onwards. They contain a mixture of material: obituaries, sports successes, regimental history, appointments and discharges – and photographs! The one shown is from ‘The Borderers’ Chronicle’, the quarterly journal of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers (now part of the Royal Regiment of Scotland), and dates from June 1926. It shows the 1st King’s Own Scottish Borderers’ Association XI in their winning 1925-1926 season, where they lifted the Scottish Command and Logan Cups (foreground of the photo).

Our colleagues in the Modern Scottish Collections department recently highlighted this journal in their blog. Produced by the Scottish Genealogy Society, the articles in this journal are indexed in the National Library of Scotland’s freely accessible database Scottish Bibliographies Online. You can read more about this in the post ‘Scottish family history research using Scottish Bibliographies Online’ in the Modern Scottish Collections blog.

A recent enquiry reminded me of the usefulness of company magazines for both family and local history research. Many businesses and industrial companies produced in-house publications aimed at staff and customers and the Library has rich and varied collections of these. The example shown here describes itself as ‘An illustrated social magazine for the workers and staff of the Burntisland Shipbuilding Company, Limited’. As well as providing a snapshot of the shipbuilding industry at the time in the form of technical articles about ship design and commentary on the state of the industry, it also chronicles the achievements of the many shipyard sports clubs such as the football, cricket and badminton teams. This is typical of this type of publication which often contain articles about company events, sometimes including photographs, as well as articles about individual staff achievements.  Coal, the magazine of the former National Coal Board in the UK, is another example. The articles in this publication range from accounts of mining disasters to descriptions and photos of company events such as colliery brass band competitions. If you have a family member who worked for a particular company then you may want to check our catalogue http://www.nls.uk/catalogues to see if we hold any publications relating to that company.