The KOYLI Volunteers
For the last year and a half, the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Museum has been plugging away on a project several years in the making. We acquired a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to help us open our new Research and Collections Centre within City of Doncaster Archives on Chequer Road. If you’ve not been yet we’d love to see you! We’ll be talking more about everything that has gone on over the project next week, but none of it at all would have been done without the work of our volunteers.
More than 20 volunteers have given us their time since April 2024, helping with a huge range of activities. Some worked from home and others came in-person. Volunteers are such a core part of the work we’ve been doing and we sat down with several volunteers who’ve worked on different parts of the project, to talk about their experiences. Here’s what they had to say.
Sarah Ellen
Sarah Ellen has been volunteering with us for about 5 months now. Over that time she’s done some digitisation work, scanning and recording documents and photographs in our collection, but has generally found her calling in historical research. This has involved working through the hundreds of sets of medals on display in our medal room. While we have the names of many of the soldiers they belonged to, we sometimes don’t know much about them as people. Especially not the regular soldiers, whose service typically isn’t recorded as well as an officer’s. Sarah Ellen and the other research volunteers have been working through the medals, using military and civilian records like censuses and electoral registers to piece together the lives of these men, before, during and after their time in the army. The stories they’ve uncovered are a core part of the new touch displays we’ve been able to add to the medal room (but more on those in our next blog!).
All our research volunteers get training to help them find their feet with military history, regardless of their levels of experience. King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Museum, Heritage Doncaster
We sat down with Sarah Ellen to talk about why she volunteered. Sarah Ellen is a mature student, currently working towards a history degree with the Open University. Perhaps unsurprisingly she therefore has a bit of a passion for the past, and had volunteered previously with Lincoln Cathedral, working in their historic library. When the cathedral was forced to pause its library volunteering Sarah Ellen decided she wanted to have a go at some military history research, which was an area she wasn’t very familiar with. The longstanding ties to between Doncaster and the armed forces spurred her on, tying in closely to local history she’d learnt over the years.
Despite not having a background in military history or research, Sarah Ellen has leapt into the role, gaining useful skills interpreting and searching historic documents, both in-person and using online resources like the websites Ancestry and FindMyPast, and taking part in training we’ve run internally, including identifying and researching military medals, and the proper care of historic objects and documents. She’s also hoping to start helping out Heritage Doncaster’s archaeology curator with some of his projects soon as well.
Volunteer session of object handling and conservation training, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Museum, Heritage Doncaster
When we asked what has stuck with her the most so far about the volunteering, she had two answers. The first was how useful it has been to have the chance to gain more practice doing research, especially working with groups of likeminded volunteers. The second was how amazed she was by the resilience of the men she’s been researching. Their ability to work through discomfort and suffering and to often return to civilian life and work in the 17 and 1800s when there was little to no support for veterans consistently impressed her.
Carol and Ruth
Our medal gallery contains hundreds and hundreds of medals, all being carefully photographed and recorded. King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Museum, Heritage Doncaster
In contrast Carol and Ruth have both been volunteering with us off and on for nearly 11 years now. They were both teachers, but are now retired. Ruth began volunteering with the museum in 2014, when we were starting work on our First World War anniversary project. She heard through a local newsletter that the museum was interested in recording wartime memorabilia, and she brought some along for us to look at. Before too long she had decided she wanted to volunteer, and started work on a collections photography project. She brought in Carol, who was and still is a committed photographer in her free time. They worked on all sorts of projects since, and have come back for the 2025 King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Collections Project.
With their experience in photography, Carol and Ruth have been helping us in the medal room. Last year we installed three new touch screens to the room, which anyone can use to help explore and search the sets on display. They contain information about the medals split between each individual soldier, together with biographies of the men and photographs of their medals. Many of these photos were taken by Carol and Ruth, who’ve been steadily working through the room, working to get detailed images of each medal set. They then edit each image using specialist software before we upload them onto the touch screens for everyone to see.
Like with Sarah Ellen, we asked Carol and Ruth what they thought about volunteering over the years and why they wanted to do it in the first place. Carol had always been interested in history at school, but dropped it to pursue a different career. Ruth had considered becoming an archaeologist or looking into careers in museums when she was younger, but had ended up in teaching. They both remained interested though, and took the chance offered by retirement to jump in. Neither had any experience working with historical documents or museum objects before becoming volunteers, but have greatly enjoyed learning as they’ve gone. The things they’ve picked up over the years have allowed them to explore family and military history research in their own time. As well as keeping themselves challenged, they’ve learnt more about the local area and the world as a whole, and aren’t keen to slow down anytime soon.
Sarah
Sometimes all we have for a soldier is his medals and a photograph. Sarah’s research is all about building on that and telling that man’s story. King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Museum, Heritage Doncaster
We understand that its often hard to find time for something like volunteering. Not everyone can commit to a day or half-day every week, even if they’d like to. That’s why we have a number of remote volunteers, who work from home when they can, fitting volunteering around the rest of their lives. One of these is Sarah, who is a remote researcher with the project. She has been volunteering from home with other Heritage Doncaster projects for about 18 months now, and has been working with the KOYLI Museum for 5 months or so.
Most of our volunteers have been doing research on KOYLI soldiers who fought in the First World War, using the resources available to our in-person volunteers. Some remote volunteers also help us transcribe handwritten historic documents too, making them easier to read and research for future generations. Sarah chose to research because she’s been working on her family history for years now, and is already familiar with some of the resources available to her. She was completely unfamiliar with military records to start with, but has picked them up with gusto. She’s also very interested in local history around the Doncaster area, having previously done research for Heritage Doncaster about the jockey Fred Archer, as part of our Changing the Record project. After this she thought that looking at something related to Doncaster’s great military heritage would be a good thing to do next. Incidentally, if you’d like to read more about Fred Archer, you can find the Changing the Record project blogs here. There’s a display in the Doncaster Gallery, Library and Museum until May as well.
When explaining why she volunteered, Sarah said that she loved the chance to give a voice to the soldiers she has been researching. At the end of the day a lot of individual records list soldiers as a name and an ID number, and maybe a rank or battalion too. It’s only when you start to put multiple records together that a person’s stories come out. It’s those human stories that are the best part about the research, be it the more poignant stories of soldiers who didn’t come home or the stories of those who did. The impact on their families and communities was huge too, and is a huge part of the research process as well.
Medal Index Card for soldier of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, Ancestry
Where to from here? Sarah told us that the research she’s done has given her lots of ideas for things to research herself in her spare time, as well as the resources to do it. There’s her own military ancestors, but also her local village war memorial, covered in names whose stories might otherwise be lost.
So there we have it. Four volunteers, all doing different jobs in different ways. At the end of the day, museums exist for everyone, and we couldn’t do the work we do without the help of volunteers like everyone above. We haven’t had a chance to touch on all the other areas they’ve contributed to during the project either, including helping out with research centre open days and events, working with our photo and document collections, or joining in on events like our art club and veteran’s cafes.
Volunteer Christmas party 2024, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Museum, Heritage Doncaster
The volunteers above have all joined as part of our 2025 Collections Project, but this doesn’t mean volunteering will stop after this year! If you’re at all interested in getting involved with the KOYLI Museum, or any other part of Heritage Doncaster, do get in touch with us at the link here. Join us back here next week to have a look at the rest of the Collections Project, and how it ties into Doncaster’s fantastic military past.