St Albans Masorti Synagogue (SAMS) Roots is a digital oral history collection held by St Albans Masorti Synagogue and Hertfordshire University. It holds interviews with members of the St Albans Jewish community as well as Mapping SAMS Roots, a digital mapping project which contains family documents and photographs.

Archive Description

SAMS Roots was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and contains summaries of twelve in-depth interviews conducted by the biographer Caroline Pearce. SAMS members spoke about where they came from, and what brought them to SAMS. The full transcripts and interviews are housed online in the University of Hertfordshire’s Heritage Hub.

The follow-on Mapping SAMS Roots project contains over 100 family documents, photographs and stories from SAMS members which have been mapped on to a virtual collection using Historypin. These present a rich picture of the SAMS members’ roots.

Digital Accessibility

The archive is available digitally on the SAMS Roots website and the digital Mapping SAMS Roots project can be found here. SAMS can be contacted here for more information.

SAMS Roots has also launched an online exhibition: ‘Arriving and Belonging: Stories from the St Albans Jewish Community‘ which reveals personal stories of migration and heritage, examining universal themes of sanctuary, courage, compassion and starting a new life in Britain through testimonies, objects and family photographs.