Research Group
Members of the Research Group usually work alone (or sometimes in pairs) for a couple of hours each week, or for as long as they feel like working. We meet up for coffee once a month to keep in contact with each other and to discuss our activities, interesting discoveries and any problems we have encountered. Our current work is mainly the updating of the Abergavenny Street Survey website and some of us write articles for publication in the two ALHS publications or in other local history journals. Some members prefer to work on their own projects and join the group occasionally to keep in touch. Please email alhsresearch@email.com if you would like to be a member of the group.
The History of Research Projects in ALHS
The Society has a long history of undertaking research projects. The St Mary’s Research Group was formed in 1978 to record all available sources of information about the History of St Mary’s Priory under the guidance of Dr (now Prof) Ray Howell of the University College Wales Newport (now UWN). Their notes can be downloaded from the St Mary’s Church page. In the 1980s the Street Survey group researched information for the Abergavenny Street Survey leading its publication in 1989, copies of which are available in Abergavenny Library. Documents listed on the page below can be found on our Downloads page.
A Town Remembers: Memories of Wartime Abergavenny 1939-1945 was published in 2003 as a result of the Society’s Oral History Project conducted by a team of volunteers and edited by Richard Davies. In 2010 the Castle Research Group was set up at the suggestion of Rachael Rogers, then curator of Abergavenny Museum, to discover the History of Abergavenny Castle between 1818, when Castle House was built on the site of the old keep, to the 1950s when the Museum was established there. This work made a material contribution to the Castle House 200th anniversary exhibition at the Museum in 2019. In 2015 members of the group, at the request of Gwent Archives, started transcribing the Abergavenny Vestry Book, covering the period from the 1704 to 1807, which initiated the Research Group’s interest in transcribing old documents to make them more readily searchable.
Some members of the group (now the Research Group) spent three years undertaking a Survey of the Headstones in the Old Hereford Road Cemetery. The Excel file with the Abergavenny Burial book database of burials plus details of which burials have headstones visible can be downloaded from the Downloads page. In April 2021 Monmouthshire County Council cleared the overgrown areas in the Old Cemetery, making many more headstones accessible, some of which have been added to the database. We have photos of many of the headstones which were visible at the time of our survey, plus newspaper cuttings relating to a few of the people buried in this cemetery. These files are named for all relevant burials in the ‘Photographs’ column (far right) of the Burials database. Do ask us if you would like to see a particular image.
The next major project the Research Group undertook was to update the Abergavenny Street Survey and make all the data available online. The first website went live in 2016 and a new website replaced this in 2025, www.abergavennystreetsurvey.co.uk . More recently the history of Plas Gunter Mansion has been collated on behalf of the Welsh Georgian Trust. Another project has been The Home Front in WW1 in Abergavenny which has contributed to two publications and a display which has appeared in the pop-up space at Plas Gunter Mansion, Newport Cathedral and other places. A WW2 project and a Tourism in Abergavenny project have also been completed. We are intermittently working on completing the transcription of the St Mary’s parish records from the 1650s to the 1800s. Those we have completed so far can be downloaded from the St Mary’s Church page.
Over the years members of the Research Group have contributed articles for inclusion in the Summer Newsletters, but one of our recent achievements has been to publish the Society’s very own journal, the Gobannium Gazette, which was first published as a pdf document in February 2023. We are also adding to our transcription of The Abergavenny Improvements Commissioners Minute Book 1794-1822. The Gwent Local History Journal has published a number of articles researched by the group or with their support. https://gwenthistory.org.uk/?page_id=150. A list of some of the articles written by Research Group members can be found here: Articles in the Gwent Local History Journal.
The ALHS Committee felt that the Society should be more child friendly so a children’s page was added to the website in 2024. Young ALHS appears monthly with short pieces about local history aimed at younger readers. In August 2024 we published a digital book of stories for children: Abergavenny Tales and Trails, written in the main by Research Group members and this is now in its third edition which you can download from the Downloads page.
As we came to realise that publishing our research and publications as digital documents that could be downloaded from our website was the best and easiest way to make them freely available to the public we have expanded that area of our work. We digitised A Town Remembers: Memories of Wartime Abergavenny 1939-1945 and that is now available from the Downloads page. Next, the authors of Wendy Boston and the Bears: the Toy Industry in Abergavenny and Crickhowell asked us for advice on reprinting the book and this led to us updating and republishing it for them in 2026 as a free digital document, also available from the Downloads page.
In 2025 the Abergavenny Street Survey website was given an update and a new image. It is now more user-friendly and easier to search. It is currently in the process of being updated with new information being added. We have recruited new members to the Research Group to help with this major task.