Welcome to the Military Mondays and the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Collections Project
Military Mondays: The King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Research Project, 2023-25
This week volunteers at the KOYLI Museum will begin working with us on an exciting project to explore parts of the collection and create a new public space, all in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Research Centre in the City of Doncaster Archives on Chequer Road.
The work is being funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and will see us running events, workshops, and building a new space which anyone can visit for help with their own family or military history research. The first of our public workshops will be running at the Danum Gallery, Library and Museum, covering Using First World War Records, and Tracing Your Army Ancestor. You can learn more about these events and book in to attend on our Local History Month page.
We’re also working with the talented local artist Mandy Keating to run an art club for local veterans, which you can also read about here if you might be interested in getting involved.
Meanwhile our hardworking volunteers are getting started on working with the collections and documents we have in our research centre. This is located where the old King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry (KOYLI) Museum used to be, for those of you who’ve visited the previous site. We’ve been refurbishing some of the rooms there. The new space will include a research and storage space, and a gallery to browse our medal collection and learn more about the soldiers of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.
The volunteers are working with staff in the museum on researching these medals and their recipients. They will also be photographing each medal set and scanning photographs, books, letters, and other documents, to produce digital records of everything we have there. Once we open the space to the public, there’ll be more opportunities to access KOYLI material than before, with the range growing as we progress with the project. If you’re interested in learning more about how the volunteers are researching and digitising everything, keep an eye out for future blog posts!
While we’ll be continuing to work on different parts of the project well into next year, we’re hoping to open up the new and revamped research centre later this year. In the meantime the KOYLI Museum remains open and free to visit in the main Danum Gallery, Library and Museum on Waterdale.
Finally, if this project sounds like something you’d be interested in getting involved with, please do get in touch with us. The best way to learn more would be to email us.
All images of objects from the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Collection are shared under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), credit to Heritage Doncaster.