Rosemary Church obituary

My mother, Rosemary Church, who has died aged 86, was a primary school teacher and a local historian whose work focused on Faringdon in Oxfordshire, the town where she lived for much of her life. In 1978 she founded the Faringdon and District Archaeological and Historical Society, whose members catalogued gravestones in churches, transcribed documents of local interest, collected photographs from a bygone age, put on exhibitions and talks, and set up a history resource centre for use by the community. On occasion they also did field work, going in ahead of construction teams and excavators to see what they could uncover before anything was built over. Working with the Society, Rosemary was responsible for the transcription and publication of large numbers of parish registers, school logbooks, deeds and other sundry documents, and she also oversaw the publication of The Changing Faces of Faringdon and Surrounding Villages (1999), a collection of old photographs. In 1987, with Jean Cole, she wrote In and Around Record Offices in Great Britain and Ireland, a guide for local historians on how to use the various resources at their disposal. Born in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, Rosemary was the daughter of Florence (nee Street) and Norman Gibson, a police constable. After attending Kingswood grammar school in Bristol she went to Shenstone Teacher Training College in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, graduating in 1959. The following year she married her childhood sweetheart, David Church, an education officer, and after a decade bringing up their two sons, Colin and me, she became a teacher at Grange infant school in Swindon, Wiltshire, remaining there until her retirement as deputy head in 1994. Rosemary was incapable of idleness, and filled her years with purposeful activity – not all of it related to local history. She was a considerable craftswoman, knitting, crocheting, working with lace and needlepoint. She was renowned, too, for her excellent Christmas puddings, superb orange marmalade and, from her own trees, her greengage jam. She was the type of person who did not wait for others to take the lead. David died in 2017. She is survived by Colin and me, four grandsons, Sam, Fred, Ben, and Silas, and her sister, Diane.