Today I found a piece of our own history.

While going through old files, I came across this short film from the early Proud Gypsy Traveller exhibition work. It is only just over a minute long, but it took me straight back to the point when families were opening boxes and suitcases, sharing photographs, stories and memories, and trusting us to help put Gypsy and Traveller history into public spaces.

A small film from a much bigger story

The film belongs to the first chapter of Proud Gypsy Traveller in Doncaster. Before the CIC existed, the original project was working with local Gypsy and Traveller families to collect photographs, oral histories, objects and family knowledge that rarely appeared in museums or local archives.

This film was made in 2016, before our first soft launch at Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery. That early museum exhibition was followed by the bigger Suitcase Under the Bed launch at DARTS’ The Point later that year. The idea was simple but important: if our communities were constantly being spoken about, then we needed spaces where we could decide what we wanted people to know about us.

This little piece of footage captures some of that early work: family images, exhibition material and the visual language we were beginning to build around Proud Gypsy Traveller. Looking at it now, I can see how much has changed. I can also see how much has not.

The work grew. The purpose stayed the same.

What began as a local heritage project grew into research, advocacy, planning and welfare work, training, health work, policy, exhibitions and creative projects. But the principle underneath it is still the same one we were learning then: community knowledge should not be treated as decoration around somebody else’s interpretation.

Our photographs, stories and memories are history. They are evidence. They belong in the record.

Finding this film again also reminded me why the archive matters. Not everything important arrives beautifully labelled and ready for a museum catalogue. Sometimes it is an old video file sitting quietly in a folder for years until somebody opens it again.

Placed back into the archive

The surviving MP4 carries a technical creation timestamp of 27 January 2017, but I know the film itself was made in 2016, before our first soft launch at the museum. That later timestamp is therefore most likely connected to a later copy, export or encoding of the file rather than the original production. I have placed the film with the 2016 archive material, where its history belongs.

You can explore more of that first project in Our Story: The Proud Gypsy Traveller Doncaster Project, see the original Doncaster Museum exhibition announcement, and browse photographs from the exhibition.

And now this film is back where it belongs too.

Sometimes preserving history starts simply by finding it again.