Our blogging and social media prompts have been designed with our members in mind, but anyone can take part – even if they don’t have a formal one-place study (see One-place study blogging prompts 2021 – everyone’s invited!). The prompts are a series of monthly themes or topics for one-place study activities. Those activities can be any or all of the following:

  • Posts to BlueSky, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Threads, or X (formerly Twitter)
  • Blog posts (for Society members these can be for your own website/blog, or for the Society’s, or for both)
  • For Society members, articles for our journal Destinations

You are free to use any or all of these prompts – you might look at the topics and see that you can do something for January, March, April and June but not for February or May, for example. We hope that this approach will be flexible enough to give everyone an opportunity to take part, whatever the nature of your Place, your favourite areas of research, or the amount of time you have available.

Articles on the topics written by members for Destinations can be sent to the editor at any time for publication, but where possible please post related blog and social media posts during the relevant months. 

Hopefully you will find at least one topic which will spark your interest and prompt you to participate. If not, we have more to come – Hopefully you will find lots of topics which will spark your interest and prompt you to participate – and we have more to come! You can of course put forward suggestions for any that you would like to see included.

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Voices | #OnePlaceVoices | Jun 2025

A prompt for you to investigate oral histories, local accents, dialects or sayings, and more. Have the voices of any people from your place been captured, in writing or through sound recordings, bringing their interests, concerns, or details of their daily lives into the present day, in their own words? Are the voices of current OPS residents being captured, and if so how (and how are they being preserved)? As always, creativity and broad interpretation is welcome: you might try writing (or posting to social media) in the voice of one of your OPS residents, or, if your place itself had a voice – if its walls could talk – what might it say?

Social media hashtag: #OnePlaceVoices

Census | #OnePlaceCensus | May 2025

For many one-placers, censuses are a key source for building up detailed pictures of the individuals, families, population and economies of our places, from the early-mid 1800s into the first decades of the 1900s. What techniques have you used to extract and analyse information from censuses covering your place? What other records have you used in conjunction with the census to verify and add to it – or instead of the census, for periods for which this source is not available? Finally, what have you learned, and what else do you plan or hope to do make the most of the census?
 
Social media hashtag: #OnePlaceCensus
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AtoZ | #OnePlaceAtoZ | Apr 2025

This month’s prompt ties in with the A to Z Blogging Challenge held in April each year. Some one-placers are planning to add 26 posts to their OPS blogs over the course of the month, one for each letter of the alphabet. For our prompt however, you can opt for something less demanding. Possibilities include a single or two-part blog post tackling an A to Z of people, features or themes connected your place, in words or perhaps in pictures. If you frequent social media platforms, you could contribute a series of A to Z posts over the month. Have fun finding, and sharing, someone or something for each letter of the alphabet!

Social media hashtag: #OnePlaceAtoZ

Education | #OnePlaceEducation | Mar 2025

Pay attention at the back! On your one-place studies syllabus for this month is the world of education. Take a look at, and share the stories of, your place’s educators and students, and of schools or other educational establishments in your place, or attended by your place’s residents. For extra marks, you could also consider barriers to education, and changes over time regarding those who were eligible to teach or be taught, what was taught, how education was delivered, and the drivers (and results) of those changes. We hope that pursuing this prompt will teach you a lesson – in the best possible way!
 
Social media hashtag: #OnePlaceEducation
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Geology | #OnePlaceGeology | Feb 2025

What lies beneath your place? Use geological maps or other sources to find out what rocks or other materials (such as gravels, sands, clays and mineral deposits) your place and its environs sit upon, and when those rocks and other deposits were formed. Consider how that underlying geology has affected the local topography, soils, watercourses, and vegetation. How, in turn, has all this affected human activity in your place, including settlement patterns (and locally-sourced building materials), agriculture, industry (including mining or brick-making, for example), and transport routes?

Social media hashtag: #OnePlaceGeology

Cohorts | #OnePlaceCohorts | Jan 2025

An opportunity to study a cohort of people born in your place in the same year. You can choose any year for this, and you might even choose two cohorts separated by time to discover the similarities and differences between their members’ lives. If you can, however, we would encourage you to help expand upon the ‘Born in 1819’ project (using the hashtag #Born1819 alongside #OnePlaceCohorts), by tracing the lives of people who were cohorts of Queen Victoria (and Prince Albert). After identifying members of your cohort (and their parents) from baptismal register entries, use other sources to ‘weed out’ any who clearly weren’t born in your chosen year, then find out how long they lived, where they lived, the families or households with whom they lived, and what work they did. Find out more in this 14-minute video: Victoria’s Cohort: Who in your Tree/Place was born 1819
 
Social media hashtag: #OnePlaceCohorts (and optionally, #Born1819)
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