Our Mission
The society has been in existence for seven interesting and eventful years and continues to pursue its objective to study, record and stimulate interest in the history and heritage of the two Northamptonshire villages of Cogenhoe and Whiston, situated between the A45 and the A428 roads east of Northampton on the side of the Nene valley.
Membership of the society is open to anyone and costs £8 per year (£14 family) and then entry is £1 to all open meetings for members and £3 non members.
Our plans
Over the seven years that the society has been in existence its membership has steadily grown and now meets either on a Wednesday night or afternoon - see events page for details of meetings.
Apart from this regular series of talks there are other activities looking at and researching into the history of the area.
Our first major project was gathering the oral history of the villages and from this we produced a book A Century of Change and a CD both of which are still available. In addition the society produces a quarterly newsletter "Your Heritage Matters" - the latest copies of which can be downloaded as a pdf from the products page.
During April 2008 the society held an exhibition of old photographs from local collections dating from World War Two. This exhibition attracted nearly 300 people with former villagers travelling back to their origins to renew friendships and reminisce. The many photographs contributed have added considerably to the society's valuable collection of the villages' heritage.
The Society’s current project includes the House History Group with the general remit of recording the history of interesting houses - some past, some present. The idea of recording floor plans and the materials in the form of a data base has been looked at before moving on to think about the people who lived in the houses being studied.
During the Oral History Project, a splinter group set about another task, that of researching who lived in Cogenhoe in 1925.
That year was chosen because it was the year that a new and hopefully up-to-date map of the area was published and also there was an electoral register available for that year.
The small group who worked on this project found it quite difficult because there were only a few people left in the village who could remember that far back and so verify the documentary evidence. After a great deal of effort, some very good results were obtained and these appeared in the book “A Century of Change”.
What the group aims to do is to try to examine the village 10 years later, in 1935 when, it should be a little easier as this is in living memory of several people and there is another electoral register. Several of the older residents have been helping by looking over maps and lists of names to reconstruct the 1935 village of Cogenhoe. The aim is to repeat this exercise at intervals covering 10 year periods to create a major database of the properties and the occupiers.