Exciting announcement! Jess, our Coordinator in Honiton, and several of our dedicated volunteers, were interviewed this week by BBC Radio Devon. Find out more about the diverse stories they've been researching and uncovering in Honiton as well as their own personal...
Exploring the rich multicultural history of Devon.
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About us
About us
Telling Our Stories, Finding Our Roots is a community heritage and oral history project focused on diverse and multicultural histories. It explores the stories, memories and hidden histories of Devon’s towns and cities – past and present. We are currently focusing on Honiton and Ilfracombe.
If you have links to these towns, are interested in history, heritage and diverse cultures and/or have a story to share, then please get in touch with the Project Coordinator Hilda Kalap: hildatosfor@gmail.com
Through building an archive of oral history interviews, Telling Our Stories aims to preserve, share and celebrate the voices, stories and heritage of the wide range of people who live in Devon today, ensuring that the voices we listen to today and in the future are more diverse and more inclusive than the ones we’ve heard before.
To date the project has gathered histories and contemporary stories from three towns and one city: Exeter (2012-13), Bideford (2020), Okehampton (2020) and Tiverton (2020).
The project is community-led and community-powered, supported by teams of local volunteers, and featuring the voices and contributions of many community participants.
Telling Our Stories is a Devon Development Education project, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Public-facing activity has been made possible thanks to heritage partners Ilfracombe Museum, AllHallows Museum Honiton, Tiverton Museum of Mid Devon Life, The Museum of Dartmoor Life, The Burton at Bideford, and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (2012 – 2013).
Our locations
Our locations
Telling Our Stories has engaged with 3 towns and 1 city across Mid and North Devon.
We have worked in Exeter (2012 – 2013); Bideford (2019 – 2020), Okehampton (2019 – 2020) and Tiverton (2019 – 2020).
These towns and cities are each very different. Exeter is the county’s capital; Tiverton is a centre of industry / manufacturing; Bideford is a port town; and Okehampton is an agricultural market town on the edge of Dartmoor.
Latest project news
Latest project news
Devon Life magazine profiles Telling Our Stories and talks to Ghee Bowman about how the project has impacted his life and career
Telling Our Stories, Finding Our Roots is featured in July's Devon Life magazine - a four page article. Thank you to our fantastic team of coordinators and volunteers for all of your research and hard work in uncovering new stories which reveal Devon's multicultural...
Honouring the courage, strength and determination of refugees on World Refugee Day
Media Release 20th June 2024: Honouring the courage, strength and determination of refugees on World Refugee Day Today is World Refugee Day, an international day organised every year by the United Nations, that aims to honour and celebrate refugees from around the...
BBC Radio Devon talks to Jess Huffman and four of our Honiton volunteers in a series of radio interviews about Telling Our Stories, Finding Our Roots
Exciting announcement! Jess, our Coordinator in Honiton, and several of our dedicated volunteers, were interviewed this week by BBC Radio Devon. Find out more about the diverse stories they've been researching and uncovering in Honiton as well as their own personal...
Devon Life magazine profiles Telling Our Stories and talks to Ghee Bowman about how the project has impacted his life and career
Telling Our Stories, Finding Our Roots is featured in July's Devon Life magazine - a four page article. Thank you to our fantastic team of coordinators and volunteers for all of your research and hard work in uncovering new stories which reveal Devon's multicultural...
Latest blog posts
Latest blog posts
Celebrating Cultural Diversity and Taking Over the Airwaves – read this month’s blog from Jess Huffman
Celebrating Cultural Diversity It was great to discover that May now has a whole day dedicated to celebrating cultural diversity, and to honour it we have been working with Honiton Library to create a display of inspiring books that tell the story of England's...
Storytelling matters, and people matter too. By emphasising the role of the person, says Abi Obene, the stories will follow – in time, at a slower pace, but all the more free because of it.
The Next Stage… It’s been several weeks of digging into the local history of everything from shipwrecks to gravesites, shopkeepers to witches, hovels to hotels, steadily uncovering an increasing number of interesting and interweaving accounts. Our forays into...
Tellers of Stories – Jess Huffman considers why storytelling is such a fundamental part of being human
Why Tell stories? As Jean Paul Sartre the 20th Century French Philosopher put it, 'All human beings are tellers of stories. We tell stories to survive; to make sense of the terrifying confusion that is our existence.’ Storytelling is a fundamental part of being human....
Celebrating Cultural Diversity and Taking Over the Airwaves – read this month’s blog from Jess Huffman
Celebrating Cultural Diversity It was great to discover that May now has a whole day dedicated to celebrating cultural diversity, and to honour it we have been working with Honiton Library to create a display of inspiring books that tell the story of England's...
Storytelling matters, and people matter too. By emphasising the role of the person, says Abi Obene, the stories will follow – in time, at a slower pace, but all the more free because of it.
The Next Stage… It’s been several weeks of digging into the local history of everything from shipwrecks to gravesites, shopkeepers to witches, hovels to hotels, steadily uncovering an increasing number of interesting and interweaving accounts. Our forays into...