Formartine Training Night: Glebe House Church Centre, Fyvie - November 2006

This is the Glebe House, Fyvie's modern church hall, meeting place and events venue.  At the suggestion of our local volunteers, we decided to use it for the first of our training sessions last year.  On a weet and cauld nicht, several volunteer interviewers turned up along with myself, Dr Tom McKean of the University of Aberdeen's Elphinstone Institute and David Atherton of Aberdeenshire Council to have a shottie of the minidisk recorders and discuss the techniques for recording reminiscence as part of the project

Participants included: Ian Sandison, Pat McKay, Helen Taylor, Jennie Chalmers, Matt Kaye, Sonia Stephen (Formartine Projects Manager), Carol Eddie and Marion Richardson.

The main hall of Glebe House provided a great space to have our training session.  Here you can see the volunteers attempting to set up their recorders according to the instructions I wrote for them.

(L-R: Matt Kaye (Udny CC), Marion Richardson (Turriff Heritage), Ian Sandison & Pat McKay (Turriff Heritage), Carol Eddie (Fyvie Heritage) and Jennie Chalmers (Barthol Chapel CC))

Dr Tom McKean (far right) holds court on the perils of recording at home as Helen and Carol listen intently and David contemplates silently.

Tom has been involved in countless oral history projects including the very first interactive CD Northern Scotland, which Elphinstone Institute produced at least a decade ago! 

One of his many current projects is the digitising and indexing of the James Madison-Carpenter archive, a huge collection of songs from a US collector who toured Britain in the 1930s recording traditional ballads and sea shanties on wax cylinder.

To contact Tom, check out http://www.abdn.ac.uk/ephinstone/ and see his staff profile.

Your project co-ordinator, "leading the horses to water"!!

I really have to thank Carol and Helen for doing the teas and pieces that night as I was late due to late-night shopping traffic in Aberdeen! 

This wasn't the last event at Glebe House, AROHA (Aberdeen & Region Oral History Assoc) used it in February 2007 for talk.  It's a great venue and that event also spawned my idea to get Helen Taylor to film the Fyvie Songs of Praise service at the departure of Choirmaster and Organist, Ben Torrie in the Kirk under the shadow of that fabulous Tiffany Window!!

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