Student Placements at Armagh County Museum
February 17, 2026When visiting museums, we are drawn to the stories of objects, their history, and their previous owners, but often we gave little thought to the process of how they ended up in the display in front of us. As history students at Queen’s University Belfast and museum enthusiasts, we wanted to explore the history of museums and thus selected the module ‘Cabinets of Curiosity’ in our second year. As our colleague Ace Cheatham discussed in the previous issue, ‘Cabinets of Curiosity’ offered us the chance to research an object at the Armagh County Museum and write an accompanying label for display.
It became evident over the course of the module that the history of women collectors and curators is much less well known and recognised than that of men. For women with the wealth and means to collect, their collections were still often relegated to the realm of what was considered acceptably feminine: the domestic, the home, the family. Even these collections could be consumed by the legacies of the men in their lives, sometimes donated in the names of their husbands or their sons. The first known female museum curator in the UK, Kate Hall, assumed the position at the end of the nineteenth century (Kate Hill, Women in museums, 1850-1914 (Manchester, 2016). It wasn’t until the World Wars, however, that women became more visible in the curatorial space.
The objects we selected reflect our desire to focus on the lives of women. Kate chose a wallet with tickets to the Dublin International Exhibition of 1865 and the Crystal Palace owned by Anna Malcolmson. On the surface, the tickets served as a tactile representation of museum history in Britain and Ireland, colonial expansion, the commodification of Empire, and the emergence of the Victorian middle classes. Yet, they also serve as an heirloom of an unspoken history. Researching the owner of the tickets, Anna Malcolmson, proved frustrating and illustrates how women are often sidelined by the historical record. Her family were prominent linen industrialists in the Armagh area and her history has been largely defined by the men around her; her uncle, her husband, and her sons.
Lucy chose a 1943 Valentine’s Day card written by American-born Vivian Anderson, addressed to an American soldier called Bill who was stationed in Northern Ireland. The emotional sentiment of the Valentine’s Day card attracted Lucy; the expression of wartime love contrasted with the reality of one of the most brutal conflicts in modern history. The card represents the correspondence of one woman out of millions affected by the war. When researching the card, Lucy’s group was disappointed to find they were unable to identify Vivian Anderson. They had more success researching the card’s male recipient, Bill, despite the fact they had no biographical details bar his first name. His participation in the war meant that records of his life were more readily accessible.
ur collaboration with Armagh County Museum brought to light the wealth of local and women’s history in the collection. When exploring the history of our objects, we witnessed the privilege of preservation. Wealth and status meant that Anna Malcolmson was easier to identify than Vivian Anderson. And in researching both Anna and Vivian, we found that they acted as footnotes in the stories of men, rather than chapters of their own. Taking part in this module has allowed us to tell a small part of their histories.