Last week, Geoff Holman’s family – including widow Lynn, children Tim and Sophie and niece Sarah – attended a presentation on the work completed by a team at the Archive.
We received Geoff’s Collection at The Mills Archive back in 2012. Before Geoff died in 2011, he had been working on writing a book about his family’s business, Holman Bros., Millwrights of Canterbury. The Holmans began as millwrights and engineers during the early 19th century before later expanding into agriculture.
I worked with Trustee Mildred Cookson and Information Manager Elizabeth Trout, which took me 4 months of research as a volunteer, during which time I made sense of Geoff’s notes and formed a narrative.
The family were presented with bound copies of the work and heard about what we had undertaken to compile the information, as well as nuggets that we each found personally fascinating. They heard about the many avenues of research that we had gone down. I particularly enjoyed finding tantalising stories about the staff, including accidents and deaths, and who went to war.
A copy of the report is available in our Library, and related webpages will be added to our new website in the future.