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.
