Rosemary Steer

Rosemary Steer worked as an archivist at Gloucestershire Record Office and Cleveland Archives Department before moving to East Anglia in 1985 to set up the Lowestoft Branch of Suffolk Record Office. She subsequently became Archives Service Manager with operational responsibility for all three branches of Suffolk Record Office before ‘crossing the floor’ to work in Suffolk Libraries in the 1990s. Her last position there included responsibility for the Home Library Service, prison libraries and a Big Lottery funded project to build a new library at Gainsborough, a suburb of Ipswich.

Since leaving Suffolk County Council in 2011, Rosemary has been working as a freelance researcher and lecturer in family and social history and has tutored Workers’ Educational Association groups in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. She has a particular interest in the Poor Law, especially how it affected children, in the history of elementary education and researching those named on local war memorials. Rosemary graduated from the University of Dundee with a Masters in Family and Local History in 2014, researching a 19th century Norfolk charity for destitute and workhouse children for her dissertation. She is currently starting work on her first book, on the wider subject of children in care from 1834 to 1914, with examples from the children in the care of the Norfolk charity, amongst others.

Rosemary also has a BA in English and History from Newcastle Polytechnic, the Diploma in Archive Administration from University College of North Wales, Bangor and an MBA (Public Service) from Henley Management College (Brunel University).