A DAY in my life might start at 8am in a warehouse – just me and 100,000 files for company – and it might finish at 9pm in a Memorial Hall at the other end of the county with a group of local history enthusiasts and a nice slice of cake, writes Helen Palmer, county archivist, information and records manager.

In between, I will have checked our records are safe and in good order, researched some enquiries, talked to various people, and got a few more grey hairs! The life of the county archivist is seldom dull.

There is no typical day at Ceredigion Archives. Will an exciting new document be given to us? Will someone come in and rediscover a precious fact from the lives of their ancestors? Every day is an adventure! That’s one reason I still enjoy the job after 27 years in archives.

My first encounter with archives was in 1980 when an inspired history teacher took a small group of students, including myself, to Portsmouth City Records Office, to help in a project studying historic parish records of baptisms, marriages and burials.

It wasn’t love at first sight. The handwriting from 200 years ago was faint and hard to read, written on parchment using a quill pen. As I tried to copy the details, I could feel a grittiness on the page beneath my hand. It was the sand that the clerk had used to blot the ink, his hand on the same page so many years before. That moment delighted me; simply, it showed me how archives are a unique, irreplaceable and essential link between the past and the present.

From a big Portsmouth Comprehensive School, I went to London in 1984 where I studied for a degree in English at University College London.

From there I went to Lampeter and spent a brilliant year on an MA in English and art history. After a further year in Lampeter, where I had the privilege of working in the Founders Library, I came to Aberystwyth and took the course in archive administration, where I later taught on the same course for 16 years which was interesting and fun.

I’ve been so lucky – I really wanted to work in Wales, and here I am. A few months after qualifying I spotted an assistant archivist’s post at Carmarthen Record Office, then part of Dyfed Archives.

Read the full feature in this week’s south editions, available in shops and online now