“Pioneers in their own time”: inside the Diocesan Archives

The Diocese’s first yearbook, printed in 1921, was passed from hand to hand around a circle of people who had never met before. Its edges were worn. They had come to the Archives Open Day on Friday 17 April, and Fr Kevin Athaide, who leads the Archives department, was ready to welcome them.

About a dozen people made their way in across the afternoon; some with professional experience in archives, some with questions about a parish or a family name, all of them with a sense that what is kept here matters.

Fr Kevin walked the group through how the collection works: the preserving, the cataloguing, the slow and careful labelling that makes a record findable fifty years from now. He showed where and how volunteers could make a real difference. But it was when he turned to what the archives actually contain that the room leaned in.

The shelves hold baptism and marriage registers, parish foundation papers, school logbooks, photographs, and the personal letters of priests and religious who served here. Much of it began, as Fr Kevin put it, from “modest beginnings.” The families and clergy who built up Catholic life in this part of England were, he said, “pioneers in their own time,” passing on faith with creativity and courage in circumstances very different from ours.

“When you see what people did with so little, it encourages you. It reminds us that the Church is built up by ordinary faithfulness.”

That faithfulness is not only something to admire from a distance. It is something to learn from. “We can always learn from the past,” Fr Kevin said, “not because we want to repeat it, but because it can give us ideas for how we could work in our own time.” The records here, he added, are “not just archives”, they are “how the Holy Spirit has moved in our Diocese across the years.”

The Open Day was the start of a wider invitation: the Archives team is looking for volunteers to help with sorting, cataloguing, conservation, and welcoming visitors. If something here has resonated with you and you’d like to be part of keeping the story of our diocese alive, you can write to the team at archives@dioceseofnottingham.uk.