General Achnowledgements

All the Yateley Society's local history exhibitions have been a collective effort by a large number of Society members. In fact the debt of gratitude goes back before the Society was formed in 1981 to several generations of Yateley people who have done their best, over at least 100 years, to record Yateley's history, collect documents and artifacts, and to publish their findings for others to see.

The Society was formed as a Civic Trust by the Yateley Study Group, an adult education class run at The Yateley Centre. A conscious decision was taken from the outset that the Society would be the local history society, and run an ecology group, as well as attending to development planning. To achieve its aims in local history the Society ran two parallel groups. The Local History Group's aims were to keep ordinary members informed about Yateley's history, the research going on, and talks on "how to do it". The Society joined up with the WEA to sponsor The Yateley History Project to carry out formal research under a tutor, Dr John Porter, using primary sources.

Yateley was comparatively late in starting a formal tutorial programme, King's Langley in Hertforshire my home village started in 1954 for instance, but Yateley must have been one of the first to start digitising transcriptions of original records as they were worked on. In 1991 we issued our first four 3.5 inch discs of research scraped off a variety of different makes of computers and operating systems with files going back to 1985. This small beginning has now expanded to the Society's on-line database The Yateley History Project version 4. It has recently become fashionable to call this a community archive.

The Society thus does local history in two ways: the Yateley History Project sets out to collect and digitise whole classes of records; the Society's exhibitions look in depth at particular topics - often revealing classes of material which then need to be investigated for the YHP.

The on-line database, publications, poscards, the Society's talks programme and the annual exhibitions are the public face of the Society's involvement in local history. But each exhibition has had a team of people contributing research, text writing, and display skills. Instead of listing them all on this page I shall provide links to one or two of the acknowledgements displayed for the individual exhibitions which led up to the Yateley Fact & Fiction exhibitions in 1999 and 2000

Acknowledgements for 1999 Exhibition: Yateley: Fact & Fiction

Achnowledgements for 1997 Exhibition: Inns, Beerhouses and Maltsters

Acknowledgements for 1993 Exhibition: Yateley in 1878