Evaluating More Than Oliver Twist

We were really excited today to receive our FINAL evaluation report from consultant Harriet Foster. This summarises all the learning and achievements of the last year and a half. As you might imagine it is a pretty big document! We are so proud and excited to be able to demonstrate how we have hit our objectives and how we have a made a difference to museum working with workhouse collections and archives.

There is a long gap (20 years) in Sarah’s life. In 1851 aged 21 Sarah was working as a servant in Marylebone London and in 1881 she was at Gressenhall, where she was listed with a specified health condition ‘imbecile’ and where she lived until her death in 1905. I often wonder what might have happened to her in the ‘lost’ years between those two censuses. I suppose no individual’s story is every truly closed. She was the first person I researched so I learnt to keep better records as I go along and discover information. I often had to look for things that I had previously seen and had not annotated the source properly. I try to be more methodical now and have developed my own system.  
(Research Volunteer working on the project talking about one of the pauper biographies)

Most of the evaluation has been qualitative but we have been able to capture some numerical data too:

• 128 volunteers working on pauper research, plus 9 Regional Mentors who gave in excess of 2,048 hours (estimated) on research; Regional Mentors gave 1,860 hours (estimated) to support volunteers and deliver associated tasks
• 3 national training events recording 70 attendances overall
• Skills Sessions in regional groups amounted to 16 group sessions and 22 one-to-one sessions
• At least 203 pauper biographies have been researched so far

• The Workhouse Network website received 2,758 unique visits and recorded 6,177 page views between June 2019 and August 2020. It had 30 enquiries, including 8 that were requests to volunteer for the project.

We are really excited to build on this workforce development and have already started talking about what comes next for the network!

Megan Dennis
Curator, Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse
Chair, Workhouse Network