Erica Wyeth – ‘Ashingdon Through The Years’

Erica Wyeth – ‘Ashingdon Through The Years’

(Church and Village History)

 “The Exhibition”

Many people will already know that Erica sadly died in April 2012 after a long illness. Erica has been a close friend of our family for 37 years.

In 2008 she came to see us both and asked if we would personally accept the ‘Ashingdon Through The Years’  collection of memorabilia as a personal bequest on the event of her death as she was concerned about its future.

We talked about this and we learnt from Erica that she had already explored possibilities with Ashingdon Parish Council in 2004 and showed us a letter which contained a very long list of issues.

Erica explained to us that she had failed over the intervening years to solve these problems with either the Parish Council or other organisations and she was now asking us to help her.

Erica recognised that it would not be possible for us to continue in her role as the exhibitor at various public venues particularly as we are both active Members of Rochford District Council and Christine runs the Smellies for the Sick at Southend Hospital.

However Erica wished her Exhibition to be available to the public at large.

After a further great deal of thought we all felt that the Archive should be made available to the public on the Internet, recognising that this is accessible free of charge at our Public Libraries, and Erica agreed with this option in the event of her passing.

So Erica made the personal bequest of the Exhibition part of her Will to us to deal with as we saw fit. On her death and given the Grant of Probate to us as Executors we have taken the Archive to our home because “424” has been sold so that we could distribute her Will to Charities and relatives.

We have taken advice from the Media Department at Greensward Academy and our first task, because of the risk further deterioration, has been to transfer the video and audio tapes to digital storage with back up. This has, and still is, taking much time and hard work as we still have to create and load extracts for YouTube. The latter has proven to be technically very challenging but we think that in 2014 we have now finally succeeded in purchasing appropriate software to create extracts. You can see the first one  on this site.

As a start John has built this web site ready to receive the material.  We hope that you like it.

The video and audio content should be the first part of the Exhibition to be uploaded to the Internet. This is a huge task but it will make the Exhibition ultimately on permanent public display.

Originally we planned for the A4 Folders of photos will be converted to Flipbooks but once uploaded to the Internet we found that these often did not function much to the dismay of visitors so we had to remove them and research another approach that was not reliant on that software.

John has created a new suitable workflow using a scanner and watermarking of the A4 Folders of photo by photo which will be compiled by each book and converted to video and posted to the Internet.

This means that Erica’s original format as exhibited on the “tables” will be retained.

Nevertheless the task is enormous as each page will still have to be scanned manually but the first “pilot” copy is expected to be posted in the Autumn of 2017 on this site.

This will all take several more years but as it trickles in we will keep “Ashingdon” advised of progress through this web site.

If anyone wishes to add to this permanent display of Ashingdon’s history and past on the internet please feel free to contact us using the Contact Page on this site.

John and Christine Mason
August 2012 (updated 2013, 2014 and 2017)