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 current project is extracting references to Marden in the Maidstone Journal (Catherine Alderson), and another is recording oral histories from residents of the village who have interesting memories to share.
Community Heritage Centre
As the collection of heritage material grew, the need to make it widely available to the village and the public in general became greater. Finally, in 2007, after 10 years of planning and persuading, the Marden Heritage Centre opens.
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.