The HISTORY GROUP
The Marden History Group aims to seek, preserve, inspire and transmit knowledge of the history of the village of Marden. It is a working group of eight who meet each month to plan the work, aided by a group of volunteers working on a variety of projects.
Marden Ancestors
Much of the work we are doing concerns the lives of the past inhabitants of the village. Current projects include indexing Poor Law records (Eunice Doswell), marriage records (Gill Tarry & Jane Cunningham), burial records (Janet and Alastair McIntosh), baptisms (Eunice Doswell), recording wills (Laura Cox), as well as the cleaning, deciphering, transcribing, photographing and marking the position of memorial inscriptions in St Michael and All Angels Church and churchyard (Gill Tarry, Eunice Doswell and a group of volunteers from the Women's Institute and the History Group, known collectively as "The Marden Scrubbers". Census data is being transcribed in alphabetical order by surname, to make searching easier (Janet and Alistair McIntosh). Thanks to work done by individual families, a number of Family Trees are available - these include the Days, Couchmans and Fancetts. In the future we hope to index baptism records.
Village topography
Work is taking place on a layered map which will outline the growth of the village over time. We are conducting a photographic survey of the village to record the way the village looks today. In conjunction with the survey, a major objective of the group is to identify potential destruction of sites and artefacts of historical interest, and to prevent their loss.
Preserving the heritage of the village
An important role for the History Group is to preserve village documents from both the past and the present so that they will be available for future generations. These include Womens' Institute records, the parish magazine, parish council minutes, and numerous photographs. One recent project was to extract references to Marden in the Maidstone Journal for 1830 - 1845 a summary list of which will shortly appear on the website (Catherine Alderson), and another is recording oral histories from residents of the village who have interesting memories to share.
Marden Heritage Centre
Marden Heritage Centre opened in November 2007 having completed a refurbishment of a quarter of Marden Library within the budget granted by Awards for All. We gave ourselves a four month learning curve period before our official opening in April 2008.
We are open seventeen hours a week, the same hours as the library, with volunteers running the centre ideally two people per two hour shift. We have various life skills which we use for the benefit of the Centre and its visitors. Our visitors number 80/90 people a month. Some come:
- To look at our exhibitions which we change every three months
- To use our resources to help them with their own family trees
- To offer us photographs and documents from their own private collections
- To purchase photographs or booklets which we have researched and published.
Marden is a three generation village with many people who have lived here their entire lives. Others go and then return. It is a rural community based on fruit and hopping and has witnessed many changes in agriculture. An active supporting population lived long lives and our records show grocers, butchers, bakers , a fire service and a medical service which has supported the farmers and their labourers as well as the visiting hoppers and apple pickers during the season. An industrial estate and newer housing has helped the village to remain vibrant and the Heritage Centre has provided a sense of community and belonging which we did not anticipate.
Our archive, cataloguing and research teams are extra volunteers working from home. We have done presentations to five history groups to encourage them with their records and research and for two years the top class from the Marden Primary School have come to spend a morning to work on a project with us using our resources.Our recent special event when we held a Descendants Day demonstrated the common heritage that the community in Marden share.
Disclaimer about the website all information on this website is given in good faith and to the best of our knowledge is correct, however we cannot be held responsible for its accuracy.