UNITED KINGDOM – On Nov. 15 at the Witchfest International the Doreen Valiente Foundation (DVF) launched a new program to capture the history of the “mother of modern Witchcraft in the United Kingdom.” Over time the Foundation’s trustees have been collecting fragments of Doreen Valiente’s legacy, through her possessions and writings. Now they are looking to the public. They have asked people to digitally record their memories and stories to demonstrate “What Doreen Means to Me!”



“It’s so important that newcomers to Witchcraft and Paganism are aware of their heritage, if we don’t keep talking about Doreen and Gerald and the people who put their life into creating the Pagan community we have today then who will?” said Ashely Mortimer, a trusteee of DVF. He continued to say that DVF organizers felt that “this was a great way for people to express their feelings about one of the founders of our modern traditions and to help new people come to learn about the roots of modern Paganism.”

Currently, DVF has a play list on You Tube Channel with an introduction video starring trustee John-Belham Payne. In his short 1:45 intro, Payne shares one of his own memories, as well as asking others to join him. He says, “all of these little stories will help make a larger picture of Doreen the person, as well as Doreen the witch and poet, and High Priestess.”

DVF began filming these segements themselves at Witchfest, but has received more since. The trustees are currently uploading the new videos as fast as possible. At this time, there are eight available segments, each ranging from 2-4 minutes and each containing a short story about a personal encounter with Valiente.

Included in these videos is one by Janet Farrar, who reveals Valiente’s love of football (soccer). The amusing tale includes the unlikely combination of Ray Buckland, a bouquet of flowers and the World Cup. Through this video, we get a peak into Valiente’s own life through Farrar’s eyes, as well as a look at Farrar’s own personality as a storyteller.

The other seven videos include stories from Gavin Bone, Melissa and Rufus Harrington, Pagan Federation President Mike Stygal and Colin, who drove Valiente to an event and ended up befriending her. The DVF trustees are pleased with the early response to the project and are looking forward to hearing more from the extended community. The Foundation’s website says, “The first way to contribute is to make a short video of yourself telling the world what Doreen Valiente means to you personally.”

Why are they doing this now? Mortimer said, “Simply because we thought it was a great idea and one we’d not had in detail previously. We’re a small team, and we like to think we always deliver beyond our resources. We just hadn’t thought about doing this until now.”

Not only will the acquired information, memories and stories be available online or in a future DVF museum, but they will also be incorporated into a future biography. Author Philip Hesleton has recently taken on the role of Valiente’s official biographer. According to DVF, Heselton “has been researching through the Foundation archives and many other sources.”

The Doreen Valiente Foundation is using is a relatively new technique in archiving and recording history, one that takes full advantage of the proliferation of digital technology and internet connectivity. Such projects, which began popping up ten years ago, use crowdsourcing methodologies to build, update and enhance their catalogs of the human experience.

For example, The National Archives is currently looking for “citizen archivists” who have previously taken digital photos of some their logged material. The website says, “If you have taken scans or photographs of records you can help make them accessible to the public and other researchers by sharing your images with the National Archives Citizen Archivist ResearchGroup on Flickr.” At many archives, museums and libraries, the hired professionals do not have enough time to digitize all the stored materials. To speed up the process, they’ve turned to the public for help.

According to Jan Zastrow, an archivist and librarian in Washington D.C.:

Crowdsourcing in archives and special collections can take the form of transcribing handwritten documents, indexing genealogical records, identifying people and places in photos, correcting optical character recognition (OCR) errors in digitized newspaper collections, tagging or captioning historical images, adding pictorial content to maps, transcribing oral histories, and much more.

Similar to the DVF, the Atlanta History Center has asked the public for personal photos and videos, in order to better tell the city’s rich history. The Center maintains a community database to which people can upload their images of Atlanta. This database is part of an album, which already “contains 16,000 photographs from 84 collections of the Kenan Research Center … The images document people, places, and events in Atlanta, and the state of Georgia from 1863 to 1992.”

The Atlanta History Center is also part of wider movement to record people’s stories, part of the StoryCorps initiative. Since its inception in 2003, StoryCorps has facilitated, “collected and archived more than 50,000 interviews with over 90,000 participants.” The digitally captured tales are stored at the American Folklore Center at the Library of Congress. StoryCorps has also partnered with NPR to air many of these tales. According to the website, the organization is one of the “largest oral history projects.”

The Doreen Valiente Foundation’s newly launched video project is another example of an oral history project. This is a uniquely contemporary method of capturing human experience through the everyday person before it gets lost in time. In fact, there is now even a push to create digital archives of one’s own personal history. Columbia University Libraries has a resource guide to personal archiving.

While opponents are quick to point out that one digital error can “can obscure a document from researchers forever,” as noted by Zastrow, digital archiving and oral story projects are becoming more prevalent. The format allows libraries to house more material, offer research over the internet and capture a greater amount of human history with, perhaps, a never before seen level of detail.

For relatively new religious movements with short histories, citizen archiving and digital oral recordings may prove beneficial, even crucial, to preserving the past. At this point, there are only a few places in which someone can perform any archival research specifically on Pagan, Polytheist, or Heathen collective religious practices, traditions, organization, events and groups. Much of that data – that history – is still scattered around the world, in personal homes and in basements, and much of it is not even written down.

Could citizen archival projects and “oral history recordings,” as being used by the Doreen Valiente Foundation, provide a way to capture that history for future generations? Julie Belham Payne, a trustee of the Foundation, believes so. She said, “For me it is an important project and these testimonies must be recorded before they are lost forever.”