Page 3 - Moravian Messenger July 2020

Fulneck Moravian Museum
The Saga of the Woodworm: part 1
Our 'gem of a museum' (to quote one of our visitors) here at Fulneck had a nasty shock last autumn. It had woodworm! What to do about it? The Pest Control Inspector had all the answers. First, each infested item had to be identified and prepared for treatment. Were there any live specimens still in the wood? Just in case there were each item had to be deep frozen for five days to kill any larvae. A sealed polythene bag was made to protect the wood from moisture whilst in the freezer. Have you ever tried to make a polythene bag for a baby's high chair?
Where could a large enough freezer for twelve pieces of furniture in their polythene bags be found? Again, we were given the answer. Leeds City Council Museum and Art Galleries have a Discovery Centre and in it is such a freezer
which we were able to hire. The three dozen or so small artefacts, each in its own sealed bag, spent five days in a chest freezer which had been bought and put in the museum specially for this purpose. Even each clothes peg from the scullery had its own bag. At the same time as the freezing was taking place all the other artefacts were packed into boxes and removed into storage so that they would not be damaged by the treatment chemicals.
On the appointed day the team arrived to treat the infestation. The sites showing the tell-tale holes were either sprayed or injected with chemicals and left for two days to dry. We were now half way through the process! Part two of this story will reveal what happened then.
Sr Maureen Ingham
Love Your Archives: Digitising Archive Registers and Records
Lorraine Bourke and Avril Loughlin from PRONI at Gracehill collecting the Gracehill registers
An occasional series about the archives that congregations hold. We would love to hear about news from the archives in other congregations.
Br John Costley of the University Road Congregation has recently been working at the Public Records Office Northern Ireland (PRONI) researching some of the Kilkeel Congregation records they hold there. Whilst there he was approached about the possibility of PRONI digitising the registers of the Moravian Church in Ireland. PRONI had already digitised the registers of The Church of Ireland, Methodist Church, Baptist Church and Presbyterian Churches in Ireland.
PRONI already hold microfiche film of much of the Irish Moravian archives but they explained how digitising makes it much easier to use the records.
The process of digitising involves photographing the documents with an overhead mounted camera under LED lighting and creating a 400dpi TIFF photograph. This is then the master reference photograph. Then, if necessary, for clarity they can enhance a copy of the master to bring up faint writing or block writing that has come through from the other side etc. This means that many documents are easier to read from this copy. The photographs are then brought together to create a PDF document of the original register.
PRONI keep the master reference photographs, the enhanced photographs and a copy of the PDF. They would then supply a copy of the PDF to the relevant congregation archives. The congregations would then use the PDF to do all the searches without opening the original documents and thus saving time and possible damage.
The PDF will also be used for people doing research at PRONI.
PRONI has a standard archive policy of 100-year closure on baptisms registers, and an 84-year closure on marriages but no closures on burial registers as these are a matter of public record.
Provincial Archivist was approached for advice about this and we discovered that she was hoping to get some of the Provincial archives digitised in the near future. Permission was gained from the Provincial Board for PRONI to proceed with digitisation of the Irish Moravian. Permission was given with this restriction: 'We ask that the image files have metadata embedded within them to indicate that it is third-party content that
belongs to the Moravian Church of Great Britain and Ireland. Unlike many other churches the Moravian Church is one charity with many congregations. So, the copyright for archives from each individual congregation belongs to the Moravian Church centrally. Copyright permission for anything other than fair dealing for the purposes of private study or non-commercial research and educational use for the purposes of examination therefore needs to be sought from the Provincial Board of the Moravian Church'.
So, in December last year staff from PRONI visited Gracehill, University Road and Cliftonville to collect the registers from all the congregations and to start work on them. Now we look forward to receiving our records back and having the lovely PDF documents with enhanced photographs to work from. They will be more accessible than the original documents and a great tool to share not only with researchers but also with our own young people to help bring to life the heritage and history of the Church that they are part of.
Sr Sarah Groves (Gracehill) and Br John Costley (University Road)
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© Sr Sarah Groves
© Br Bruce Newton