About the archive

The South Ainsty Villages Archive aims to make available the numerous images that have been collected during the course of research by members of the Society and the Ainsty Villages History Group for various books and exhibitions.

The core of the archive is the material collected by the Ainsty Villages Group during their oral history project. They collected far too many photos to publish in their book Living History in the Ainsty, published in 2010, so it was suggested that the rest be made available via a website. For various reasons this has taken a long time to come to fruition, but we can now make these, and many other images, available. The archive will also include images collected during the SAAS book group’s research for the book From Coppenthorpe to Copmanthorpe – Aspects of life in an Ainsty village (also published in 2010), and some of Acaster Malbis originally published in Of Malet, Malbis and Fairfax – A history of Acaster Malbis (2000). As well as archive images, we’re including modern-day pictures of historic sites and events around the area.

We will also add pictures from projects undertaken by the Society, so in due course, this will be the place to go to for information on the South Ainsty area.

Uploading all the images takes time, so bear with us as we slowly add more material. We will also be adding more information about many of the images, where we have it, but if you can put names to faces, give us more accurate dates etc, we’d love to hear from you.  We’d also love to hear from you if you have historic photos that we can add to the Archive – see our Contribute to the archive page for more details.