World Alzheimer’s Month: Helping people live well with dementia

At the Royal Commission we are passionate about heritage and how it can enrich people’s lives. One way it can do this, is through the use of our visual resources in stimulating reminiscence with people living with dementia.* We have a dedicated webpage featuring some of our special collections and detailing how to search our records or find historic postcards.

Memory Archive

The ‘Memory Archive’ gallery gives a flavour of the kind of images that are held in our archive, the National Monuments Record of Wales (NMRW), which is available for consultation via the online database, Coflein.

However, the main focus of our work in this area is through the People’s Collection Wales partnership, in collaboration with the National Library of Wales and Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales. The People’s Collection website can cater both for simple reminiscence – in the form of thematic engagement with its content – and for life story work – through the downloading of relevant photos from the website or, by contrast, through the uploading of personal photos to the website and creating one’s own Collection or Story. To promote the former, we have developed Memory Archive, a curated account aimed at facilitating reminiscence with people living with dementia.

For this year’s World Alzheimer’s Month, we have created a short video presentation introducing the Memory Archive:

Music and Dance halls

Finally, we’d like to shine a light on one of the latest additions to the Memory Archive, Music and Dance halls, a collection featuring images ranging from 1930s jazz bands to 1960s pop groups, town hall dances to jitterbugging, as well as two 360-degree videos inviting you to sing along to the Welsh folk songs ‘Moliannwn’ and ‘Hen Ferchetan’.

We continue to add to the Collections and welcome your suggestions

We hope that these resources will spark memories and stimulate discussion. We’d love to hear from you if they do – please leave a reply below!

Reina van der Wiel, Governance and Risk Manager

* We recently took part in research by Isabel Deards from University College London on “Social stimulation and enrichment potentials within archives for people with dementia”.

23/09/2020