Cocoa Works Magazine Cataloguing Project

Our volunteer Stan Young is currently working on an index of named individuals in the Cocoa Works Magazine, the in-house magazine for workers at the Rowntree factory in York published from 1902 to 1971. Although the Cocoa Works Magazine was a company publication, it was essentially about Rowntree people; their working, social, family and economic lives, their hobbies, holidays and the places in York that mattered to them.

There’s more information on the Cocoa Works Magazine as an invaluable source for social history and family history research in this Exhibition Book compiled by Stan in 2018.

Each edition of the magazine names dozens of employees. As a way of recording societal and economic developments affecting staff, Stan is leading work to build a database of every named person in the magazine’s history.

The first phase of the project does not include births, deaths and marriages, but does encompass mentions of recruitment and retirement.

The project is ongoing and already contains in excess of 5,000 entries with many more to follow.

Our long-term aim is to develop an index of named individuals in the magazine that is publicly available as a resource for academics, local historians and family historians.

For more information about the project, you can get in touch with us via email.