The genesis of the Historians Collaborate network can be traced to an academic project led by Dr Laura King and Dr Jessica Hammett at the University of Leeds called Living with Dying.

The project focused on how families remember their loved ones after they’ve died. To explore this, Dr King and Dr Hammett worked with a group of fifteen family historians. All family historians were experts in their own stories and background, and contributed knowledge of memories passed down, objects and photos inherited, and often extensive research into their family’s past. In turn, as social historians, Dr King and Dr Hammett helped the group to put their family’s history in context, by exploring subjects as diverse as the mining industry to the First World War, and from changing family size to the diseases from which family members died. What was perhaps most exciting was the joint consideration about what history actually is – the story of a nation, a community, a family or a layered version of all three? Is it what you find in a formal archive, or the stories a grandmother told? Sharing different perspectives, knowledge, skills and ideas was truly valuable for both sides.