Seeing Our History - Employment – and the case study of William Finlay
Aug 13, 03:42 PM
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“Seeing Our History” was an RNIB Scotland project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
It explored the lives of people with sight loss in Edinburgh, the Lothians, and the Borders of Scotland one hundred years ago.
Here you can discover the findings of our volunteer researchers. They explored the lives of visually impaired people who lived in the wider community. They were sometimes known as the 'outdoor blind' because they didn’t live in the blind institutions, or 'asylums' as they were known at the time.
Our research was based on The Register of the Outdoor Blind for the region from around 1903 to 1911. We matched entries against the census and birth, marriage, and death records to build up life stories, tracing the lives of individual blind people.
"If poor people were on the margins of society, those with sight loss were on the margins of the margins. How they survived in an era before the welfare state or technological aids is a story of great hardship, but also of resilience, isolation and sometimes tremendous family solidarity. It’s a story that deserves to be told." - Dr Iain Hutchison, project historian
It explored the lives of people with sight loss in Edinburgh, the Lothians, and the Borders of Scotland one hundred years ago.
Here you can discover the findings of our volunteer researchers. They explored the lives of visually impaired people who lived in the wider community. They were sometimes known as the 'outdoor blind' because they didn’t live in the blind institutions, or 'asylums' as they were known at the time.
Our research was based on The Register of the Outdoor Blind for the region from around 1903 to 1911. We matched entries against the census and birth, marriage, and death records to build up life stories, tracing the lives of individual blind people.
"If poor people were on the margins of society, those with sight loss were on the margins of the margins. How they survived in an era before the welfare state or technological aids is a story of great hardship, but also of resilience, isolation and sometimes tremendous family solidarity. It’s a story that deserves to be told." - Dr Iain Hutchison, project historian