Are you a teacher looking for new ways to engage your class? A community group looking for a speaker for your next session? Or simply looking for a unique way to build your knowledge of your family or local area?

Our Archive, Local & Family History service strives to connect with schools, local history groups and wider community groups. We can teach you the skills necessary to undertake research in your schoolwork, in tracing your family history, or in tracking down the history of your local town, village, street or house.
You will find further details below. If you would like to book an activity please get in touch.

Culture Perth & Kinross is a registered charity and some of our education and outreach offers have a fee. Where this applies, the cost is noted below.

We would be delighted to come and speak to your local history or community group about our collections and services. Our talks seek to expand people’s awareness of Perth & Kinross’ history through the records and resources held in the Archive and Local & Family History collections. Available talks include, An Introduction to Archives, Local & Family History, Hidden Not Lost: Women in the Archive & Finding Perth & Kinross Maps on the National Library of Scotland’s Maps Website. We welcome donations for the first talk given to any group and have a fixed fee of £50 for any subsequent talks for the same group in any 12-month period.

We offer tours to local history and community groups interested in learning more about our service and the collections we hold. In these tours you will get the rare opportunity to see inside the archive store and gain a better understanding of how archives and local & family history collections are cared for. With examples from our rare and unique collections we will demonstrate the importance of historic record keeping and how it benefits our society.
There is a fee of £1 per person, with a minimum charge of £30 per group visit.

We welcome class visits to the Archive, Local & Family History Service where we will take pupils behind-the-scenes to learn all about our collections and how we look after them. In these visits we will discuss the value of primary and secondary sources, the importance of caring for our history and how our historic records can help us understand the past.
There is a fee of £1 per pupil, with a minimum of £30 per class visit.
We are working to develop a series of education resources using records from our collections to support in-class learning based around the curriculum. Available education resources:
The Experience of a First World War Soldier – This resource introduces pupils to a first-hand account of a soldier’s experience during the First World War. Through a series of activities, centred round the letters of a young soldier from Pitlochry, pupils will consider how his words inform their understanding of life for a soldier and his family during the War.
For more information, including related curriculum outcomes, please contact the Archive.

Ancestry is one of the leading family history resources in the world and you can access it for free in all Perth & Kinross libraries. If you would like to start using Ancestry, but are a bit unsure where to begin, you might benefit from attending one of our Ancestry taster sessions. In these sessions our Local History Officer will introduce you to the website and demonstrate some simple techniques to get the most out of using it.
Sessions are held throughout the year in AK Bell Library and all community campus libraries throughout Perth & Kinross. Please keep an eye on the What’s On page to see when one is available in your area.