A window to Tameside's past continues to be opened up as old photos from the area's history are made available online for the first time.
‘SMILE! Reporting Tameside’s Social History Project’ has been working for the past year to make its way through 26,000 photographic negatives and glass plates from the Reporter archive - digitising them all.
It covers pictures taken from the 1940s all the way to the 2000s and is set to be available on one of the world’s largest imaging sites for everyone to view.
Now, the volunteers behind the project are asking for your help to identify places, people and events. They want anyone with an interest in local history to view the images once they’ve been uploaded to help build a visual history of Tameside.
Jane Donaldson, Project Coordinator, is excited about finding out more about the images that she and other volunteers have been scanning and researching for the past year.
She said: “We’re looking at events that have happened in the past, discovering new stories and rediscovering old ones.
“It’s a fantastic resource that covers lots of stories, and lots of themes, so it’ll be really interesting to get that available and accessible.
“We’re now starting to get some of the images onto that site. We’ve had a few for a while and they will be added to as we’re able to catalogue and put information on them.”
Images will be continually uploaded from now until the end of June.
Jane explained: “We’ve got some images from 1949 and we’ve just put some images on from January 1973, so we’ll be putting on a lot more images covering different years, mainly from the 1940s to the early 2000s.
“We only have the images for a lot of these glass plates, some of them do have a little information like the titles on envelopes, but we’re asking people, if they can, to add information and give us more information about these images whilst we can’t access the newspapers to get that information. If people know where the location is, if they know more about the events, the names of people, the names of football teams, then that can be really useful to us.
“You can use the ‘contact us’ page to give information, to tell stories, to add information to the images and people have also been using our social media. We’re on Twitter, Instagram on Facebook and you can also leave comments there too. Those can all be found on our website.
“Looking at these images is going to engage people in conversation and I think that’s the biggest part of it. You show people these images and somebody recognised a place and gives you a bit more information about what happened when they were young. There may be stories in there that were once told but haven’t been told again. There’s so many different stories and so many photographs there.”
To view images already uploaded and to view the Flickr album, visit https://smiletameside.wordpress.com
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