DROITWICH Library is hoping to attract hundreds of people this Saturday for a new annual event which it hopes will rival the building’s Space Day.

The library is transforming itself into a local history hub with a day of events and activities to get people finding out about the town’s past and their own family history.

Members of the Droitwich U3A History group will be on site to show people the project they’ve been working on, unearthing the contents of a filing cabinet in the library, which is packed full of local history material.

The organisation have carefully organised all the information and added it to a computer ‘living’ database so that anyone can search through it quickly and easily, as well as continuing to add to its contents.

Claire Lloyd from the U3A said: “It’s just everything to do with Droitwich, collected together and organised. You’ve got everything there from information about outlying villages to a section about the high street and its people.”

There will be an exhibition of old photographs of the town arranged by Droitwich Archaeological and History Society, as well as the Our Droitwich oral history archives, which have recorded the voices of Droitwich people, and research from the ‘Our War’ and war memorial research which has been undertaken this year through the library.

People are also being invited to bring their own mystery photographs and documents into the library where history experts will be on hand to take a look and see if they can identify them. The U3A group is also hoping people will be willing to add their own historical documents and photographs relating to the town, to be scanned in and added to the wealth of community material so they can be accessed by others.

The filing cabinet also contains a number of articles by the acclaimed local historian Nelly Copson, who worked on collecting an impressive amount of local history information in Droitwich until she passed away in her 90s several years ago.

Representatives from other local history groups including the Civic Society, Droitwich Archaeological and History Society, and Historic Droitwich will have stalls and displays around the library, and staff from the Heritage Centre will be bringing over a number of mystery items they currently have in storage in the hope that visitors to the library might be able to tell them more about them.

The Local History Day is free for people to visit on Saturday, November 22 from 10am to 4pm, and people are urged to bring along their own local mysteries to see if they can find the answers in the town’s archives.