Keith Wysner, Principal of Knockloughrim Primary School, Magherafelt,  Northern Ireland was awarded a £900 grant from the Historical Association's Joan Lewin fund for his Bursary Project entitled Mid Ulster Your Place & Mine. The project focused on 10 & 11 year olds in the rural Protestant communities of Knockloughrim & Maghera working with children from a Roman Catholic Primary School in a third neighbouring village of Mayogall.  They collaborated on a Local Area Study of their own local areas and identified each of the most historically important sites and locations within each of their own communities and then began to inform their partners in the neighbouring areas about them. Information is being built up on a special website.  The children visited the local sites of interest identified and shared in a story telling and music session by local historian and folk musician Mr Willie Drennan

The project encouraged cross generational participation with the help of the children's grandparents and older relations who helped the children learn about what life was like growing up in the area around the time of the Second World War as well as encouraging socio-religious integration in the area through their history learning. The children reciprocated by showing their older relations how to upload their photographs and mp3 recordings on to the computer and internet.

From the Historical Associations seedling grant a much larger project is currently developing with the support of additional funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund.  Keith Wysner, working with partner teachers in neighbouring schools, has created an online podcasting repository of aural history, local stories and poems recorded on MP3s provided by the Historical Association grant.  The site is in the early stages of development through this initial project but can be accessed here.  

Over time, with the additional support of Heritage Lottery Funding, more and more children and their relations will be able to add to and build on the repository so that it will be of value as a primary and secondary source of local historical information.