Author Archives: Stephen Mills

Working with CoDA to develop our online archive

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CoDA logoWe are very pleased to be working with Michael, Kelley, Tyler, Ruth and the rest of the team at the Center for Digital Archaeology (CoDA) in the development of the project’s online interactive archive. Based in California, the CoDA team are multimedia specialists dedicated to the development of tools and services to help individuals and organisations create, manage and publish digital heritage content. Across the summer of 2015 we have been working with CoDA to develop a multimedia database that stores and manages the images we are collecting and the information about them. At the same time we have been working together to design and build our project’s interactive online archive using Murkutu.net. Murkutu.net is the Content Management System (CMS) and hosting option developed by CoDA specifically to make digital heritage accessible online and for its long-term safe-keeping. We are now nearing the point in development when our project database and the online archive are synchronised. Once this is achieved we will be able to seamlessly upload the collected images and their associated information from the database direct to the online archive. We will let you know when this phase of development is complete.

Images of Egypt at the Firing Line Museum, Cardiff

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Private Horace Lewis

Private Horace Lewis

We have become very attached to Horace Lewis, a Private from the Heath, Cardiff, posted in Egypt. It was a joy to read his affectionate postcards to his sister Dorothy in Penarth. The collection of photographs and postcards document his service in Egypt between 1916 and 1919. We discovered that he served in Alexandria, Heliopolis, Cairo, Beirut and Jerusalem, so he got around a bit! In August 1918 he was in hospital, but still managed to stay up-beat in his postcard and comments on the lovely view of the lighthouse only 5 minutes away. We met his ‘pals’, Privates Griffiths and Maass, from Wrexham and Swansea respectively, and saw his barracks. While in Egypt, he saw a range of sites including, the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, views of Alexandria and Pyramids Avenue in Heliopolis. According to his postcards, we were amused to hear that he was ‘still in the Pink’ throughout his service! We were relieved to find that he survived the war and returned to South Wales. His granddaughter kindly supplied us with these images.

Project volunteers: Jessica Scorrer and Mike Rees