Staffordshire Appeals: Opening access to Staffordshire’s Great War Local Military and Appeal Tribunals

Funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund enabled the Staffordshire Archive Service to scan, repackage and list all of its rare collection of the military tribunal papers with the support of over 50 volunteers, who contributed over 4,000 hours between them. Over 20,000 individual names from the Local and Appeal Tribunals have since been made available on the Staffordshire Names Index site. On the back of this work, a research project ‘The Mid Staffordshire Appeal Tribunal: A Window onto Everyday Life on the Staffordshire Home Front’ (funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council) was a response to how best to explore and analyse this wide range of new material unearthed by the initial HLF project. The project focused on revealing local hidden histories, about both those who were called to serve, but also the experience of Staffordshire’s communities at the time, helping us to understand how a particular home front was experienced and changed over the duration of the Great War. With guidance from Professor Karen Hunt (Keele University), our volunteers searched a wide range of sources - including newspapers, school log books and county minute books - to explore what the Tribunal papers revealed about the changing nature of everyday life on the Staffordshire Home Front. Findings were toured around the county in the form in an exhibition.