Izzy Pritchard is one of the volunteers currently helping us catalogue our collections. We are pleased to offer volunteering opportunities to people like Izzy who are considering following a career in archives. Izzy became interested in archives through researching her family’s history: she succeeded in tracing her ancestors back to various parts of the UK including Glasgow and Angus, Ireland, Shetland and London. Izzy is drawn to a career in archives because of her enjoyment of the challenge of learning, which working in the sphere of archives certainly affords. She has been helping us hunt out material for our display on 22 July about the home front in the Highlands one hundred years ago during WW1, and has been extracting references from school log books. One entry in particular made her smile, which related to schools hiring “ladies” to fill posts “temporarily” for the duration of the war. The writer seemed to be under the impression that everything would return to the way it had been before the war: a notion mistakenly shared by many at the time.
Izzy seems to be thoroughly enjoying her time with us, finding out about the collections we hold and the services we offer. We, for our part, are grateful to Izzy and to all of our volunteers for the time and effort they devote to helping us make our amazing collections available.
