Local History for Oxfordshire is a topic with a fair number of local picture resources. The Oxfordshire County Council website has indexed many other resources available and copies of those things can be purchased through the site; however, they are also available for children to access online without the need to purchase them.
I did several village or town searches:
For Carterton I found post war prefabricated houses POX0130593, the search took me straight to several images of houses. I tried the same for Kingham and eventually got some great images but the first four pages were not Kingham – the search facility is very poor but the images are there, if you persevere.
Put churches into the search though and there are 189 pages and 1890 images. School brings 21139 results in 2114 pages! It seems that the search term is all important!!
The collections are great if they fit with your local history study. Themes cover subjects such as Christmas, customs, the motor industry, World War One and World War Two.
There is also an oral history database: “Oxfordshire History Centre’s Oral History Archive has over 5,000 recordings:
- 3,400 extracts from Radio Oxford programmes back to 1970
- 1,300 field recordings made since the 1960s, covering a wealth of topics—work, childhood, shopping, The Thames, World War II, home life, transport, and much more”
For people with railway links, there are lots to listen too – see In Steam, one of many talking about the links between the pub and the railway:
“In Steam – (1) Marlow Donkey public house centenary, Morris Orham talks about the relationship between the train engine and the pub with same name. Mathews Wells talks about history of the line between Maidenhead and High Wykham” What is really sad, is that these are not available on all computers just those in libraries! However you can buy and download them to share on an IWB or similar.
There is also an Oxfordshire Heritage set of searchable pages: “The Heritage Search is a catalogue of Oxfordshire’s cultural and heritage resources. Use it to find a wide range of materials relating to Oxfordshire’s past. The reference and contact information associated with each item allows you to find out more about items of interest.” (OCC)