RomMig

In November 2024, Josephine Lena Winterwerb, a Master’s student from the University of Münster, joined the RomMig Project as a student assistant, working with archival materials from the Polish State Archives. In this invited blogpost, she shares insights from her work with these documents. Josie also draws a comparison with her own Bachelor’s thesis on bureaucratic discrimination in the German Kaiserreich, reflecting on key differences in archival material, methodology, and the forms of violence documented.

I joined the German RomMig Team as a student assistant working closely with Felix Brahm and Volha Bartash. Volha’s extensive research in the regional branches of the Polish State Archives in Koszalin, Szczecin and Poznań provided hundreds of scans of archival files. These files mainly contain governmental decrees and lists of Sinti and Roma persons, produced by the police. The latter include their biographical information, descriptions of physical attributes, validity and status of their documents and occasionally details about the group they were accompanied by.

I started work on the archival files by reviewing every document and recording all mentions of Sinti or Roma persons. So far, the list of names runs to 76 pages. Alongside this, I worked with a previously researched list of individuals that possibly made the 1906 journey to Britain and are thus of relevance to the project. For these people, I have recorded all available information from the documents. From the archival material and comparison with the previously researched list, I have been able to identify 13 new locations connected to the persons who potentially undertook the journey to Britain and back. These span a time period from 1899 to 1914.

By working with the Polish archival material, we can add valuable details to the map, discover new information about individuals, and trace networks and ties between groups. This ultimately further enriches our understanding of Romani migration between Britain and Germany from the 1880s to 1914. 

The work I have had the opportunity to undertake for the RomMig Project aligns closely with my personal interests as well as the research for my Bachelor’s degree. Alongside my position as a student assistant, I completed my Bachelor’s thesis this year titled “Agency in the face of bureaucratic power: Appeals against the denial of itinerant trade licenses in the province of Westphalia between 1912 and 1914 and the discrimination against Sinti* and Roma* in the German Kaiserreich”.

For the thesis, I conducted my own archival research at the State Archive of North Rhine-Westphalia in Münster and chose four case studies on which to focus. These consisted of appeals submitted by itinerant businesspeople to high-ranking administrative bodies in the province of Westphalia, as well as the internal communication between different government departments and their responses to the appellants.

When comparing the archival research for my Bachelor’s thesis with my work for RomMig, I noticed several significant differences and have gained valuable new insights. My Bachelor’s research followed a qualitative and detailed approach whereas the work with the Polish archives relies more on quantitative methods, complemented by only a few specific case studies. Another distinction lies in the content of the documents and the type of analysis they allow. For my Bachelor’s thesis, I examined the mechanisms of state administration and the non-physical violence that bureaucratic processes exert. The Polish archival files, however, often contained less abstract and more direct, interpersonal forms of violence, for example mentions of relentless police supervision or forced displacement and deportation. This closer examination of police files has allowed me to gain deeper insights into the police persecution of Sinti and Romani people. 

The body of documents I analysed for my thesis consisted mainly of personal appeals written by Sinti and Roma individuals alongside documents created by state authorities. The Polish archival files, on the other hand, almost exclusively reflect the perspective of the state. This contrast gave me the opportunity to further investigate the mechanisms of administrative bodies in the Kaiserreich and their role in the discrimination against Sinti and Romani people. This led me to further reflect on how to approach the bias of such archival material. 

Being involved with RomMig and engaging with the associated archival materials has made me especially curious about several important points. I am particularly interested in how the project can rework insights from racist archival materials into a meaningful outcome that supports understanding of Sinti and Roma history while being respectful of and accountable to the community. I am intrigued by how the broader picture the archival research data creates can be interwoven with the personal stories which emerge. Perhaps most exciting for me is the emphasis on community involvement – I am looking forward to future collaboration and opportunities for open dialogue.

We are pleased to announce the publication of Eve Rosenhaft´s chapter in the recently released volume The Routledge Handbook of Information History (edited by Toni Weller, Alistair Black, Bonnie Mak & Laura Skouvig / Routledge 2026).

The  chapter “Information and Mobility: Migrants and Roma as Historical Cases” (pp. 442-456),  explores how information and movement intersect in European history. Eve begins by framing information as “knowledge in motion” and shows how, from the eighteenth century on, migrants’ decisions to move — where to go, how to reach it, how to settle — were deeply shaped by the information networks they accessed and created. The second half of the chapter shifts focus to Roma communities, whose mobility challenges conventional notions of migration. Rosenhaft demonstrates how Roma travellers employed informal communication systems (for example, landscape markers) and adopted technologies like telephones and postal networks — even as they were subject to state surveillance, classification and persecution. This chapter offers fresh insight into how mobility and information practices are intertwined — and how mobility may at once be enabled and constrained by the circulation of information.

On 19 August 2025, a new standing forum for discussion and policy making on issues affecting the Sinti and Roma communities in Lower Saxony was formally launched. The event, organised by the Lower Saxony Association of Sinti and the Roma Center / Roma Antidiscrimination Network and hosted by the Hannover City Council, took place in Hannover’s historic town hall.

The Runder Tisch (Round Table) is the result of years of work on the part of our project partner, the Lower Saxony Association of German Sinti, under the leadership of Mario Franz, which resulted in intensive discussions with the Lower Saxony Ministry of Culture starting in 2024. It points to a new era in relations not only between Romani communities and the regional government and other public stakeholders, but also within the Romani population itself: Sinti from families resident in Germany for over 400 years and Roma whose families have arrived as refugees and migrants since the 1990s are represented at the Round Table, and work together to represent shared interests while acknowledging differences of history, culture and social circumstances. Also at the table will be representatives of government and public agencies in the cultural and educational spheres. Any of the parties can summon a meeting to discuss matters of common concern, practical solutions to specific problems and – perhaps most important – the financial framework required to support the social, cultural and civic flourishing of Romani communities.

The event was attended and addressed not only by Mario and the Chairman of the Roma Center, Kenan Emini, but also by the leaders of other local and national Sinti organisations and the national associations of German Sinti and Roma, by the mayor of Hannover and local and national parliamentarians, and by the curators of museums and memorial sites. Eve Rosenhaft, who has been co-opted as a member of the Round Table, spoke about the importance of researching, teaching and exhibiting Romani history. She made a plea for capacity building in the communities and the creation of sustainable co-managed institutions for archiving and studying the Romani cultural heritage.

In this blog, RomMig Co-Lead Tamara West introduces the interactive 1906 ‘StoryMap’

One of the key events informing the RomMig project is the 1906  migration of two hundred German Roma and Sinti to the UK. Entering ports in Scotland and England on steamships arriving from Hamburg, the visitors caused a political and public stir.  During their 8 months stay they formed smaller groups and undertook several concurrent sub-journeys. Some followed the horse fair calendar with the aim of trading horses. Others undertook song and dance performances at local theatres. The event was referred to in the press and in public debate as the ‘German Gipsy Invasion‘.

Understanding the Journey(s)

In some ways, creating a map detailing external coverage of the 1906 Germany-UK migration was simple. There were so many UK newspaper articles, UK Home Office files, local and regional police reports, and postcards of the event that sources were not a problem. The scale of the media spectacle meant that almost every day one or more newspapers reported – often using discriminatory and racialised language – on the whereabouts of the 1906 visitors. 

Understanding the routes taken turned out to be more difficult. By visually mapping a selection of the newspaper articles in ArcGIS it became clear that there were concurrent ‘mini-journeys’. The resulting ArcGIS StoryMap highlights how groups could be at different locations at the same time. Sometimes these mini-journeys could be isolated and followed, but more often than not they couldn’t.

Creating the Maps

The first stage was to create a basic static map, populated with a chronological spreadsheet of UK newspaper articles. For this, over 300 press reports were manually filtered according to content, with duplicate stories, very short reports, or those not specifically mentioning a geographical location removed. As such, of the several hundred reports, only 73 articles were selected for use in the initial static map to visualise the journey. Here each dot represents a newspaper article that ties the visitors to a specific place on a specific date.

The next step towards the interactive StoryMap was to target specific dates and places and publications, this time informed by the complimentary archival research undertaken. For example, if a police record mentioned activities at a certain place, or a postcard was from a certain town or village, then the corresponding local newspapers on that date were cross referenced. Finally, twenty-two items were selected to form the basis of an interactive, chronological map that could present an overview of the 1906 ‘invasion’ via newspapers, photographs and reports.

A Starting Point

The StoryMap available here is to be viewed only as a starting point. It is a means of visualising a selection of the external coverage of the event via archival and media research. This is presented in order to stimulate further discussions with communities who might question the external narratives and coverage, highlight gaps, contribute stories or community perspectives to follow up on, make new maps, or develop the research themselves in different ways. Whilst it signifies the end of my part of the RomMig mapping work, a German language version will be discussed by the other members of the RomMig team at our community partner hosted workshop in Germany in September. They will report on the next steps.  All of the maps I created will be uploaded to this website shortly, alongside a more in depth discussion of the methods and sources to follow in our project publications.

This Summer, Megan Thomas from the University of Liverpool undertook a Masters Research Internship supervised by RomMig Co-I Tamara West and by Katy Hooper from the University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives. In this invited blog, Megan reflects upon her complex work during the internship, the potential of visual mapping, and on the need for compassionate archival practice.

In April, I began work on the Gypsy Lore Society (GLS) Archive in the University of Liverpool’s Special Collections & Archives (SCA) as part of the Masters Research Internship Scheme (MRIS). My small role within the larger interdisciplinary collaboration was designed to build upon understandings of the collection through an exercise in ‘identifying’ missing or separated material. Here, photographs, correspondence, postcards, and newspaper cuttings previously separated from this central record series (to be rearranged in the ‘photograph’ series, for instance) were flagged within the GLS SCA finding aid. This affects the reinscription of meaning and relationships between archival material, subjects, and creators. The meticulous process of combing through Society correspondence from 1926-1966 illuminated the multiple and capacious networks represented across the GLS collections.

Setting the tone for the duration of the internship, my first day in the archive saw the surprising identification of a photograph, acting as somewhat of a ‘missing piece’, in the visual record of the 1906 Romani migration to the UK from Germany. Here, recently relocated photographic evidence of historical presence offers the exciting potential to ground community narratives in a visible, tangible past. The applicability of this for the RomMig project is immediately striking.

Throughout this internship I was fortunate enough to gain some insight into the amalgamation of archival research, cultural geography, and community outreach in the form of the geospatial storytelling software, Humap. The software seems uniquely appropriate to represent what Humap itself calls ‘imperfect spatial data’. Tracking the physical movements of any group or individual through the archive will be, as a consequence of preservation or interpretation of ‘value’, by nature ‘imperfect’; however, material representations Roma and Sinti migration to the UK in the early 1900s are increasingly dislocated by racist generalisations in the British press and the assumption/appropriation of the cultural authority by academics (‘gypsyologists’). This, in turn, has resulted in multiple and disparate assemblages of archival material across the country relating to Roma and Sinti migration (often remaining out of community control).

Promisingly, Humap makes possible the visual collation of what is known rather than be ensnared by absences. The opportunity to build upon pinned geographical locations and previously ‘unfindable’ photographs with rich, textured narratives is made possible by community collaboration in a software that interactively layers geographical space-time with archival material.

Relating to my MA study of Archives and Records Management, the MRIS project engages multiple strands of critical archival theory with its principle objective; ensuring the usability and accessibility of the collection. Compassionate archival practice creates space to negotiate how previously harmful collecting practices can be mitigated in the present to avoid recreating or perpetuating traumatic interactions between the GLS archive and the community it purports to represent. This became a key element of my process when surveying GLS correspondence.

The finding aid used by SCA is helpfully flexible in allowing additional layers of contextualisation and description. When working with particular periods of GLS correspondence, eg. late 1930-40s, it seemed necessary, both in consideration of potential users and recognition of the subjects of the correspondence, to flag the material with Nazi iconography or policy. Similarly, my close reading of the collection series highlighted additional material that requires more compassionate archival care. Flagging photographs of children, as well as, racist language, and sexist/violent descriptions of women demonstrates a recognition and move away from the colonial, ethnographic interpretation of Roma and Sinti lives that were foundational to the practice of GLS “research” and publishing. An awareness of the presence of this material, made visible by sensitivity flags, promotes dialogue between the archive and its users; particularly, in regard to collaborative records-management approaches (eg. repatriation and record closure). Acknowledging potentially traumatic material emphasises the necessity of archival approaches that redress the unequal power-dynamics and colonial mindsets which facilitated the breadth, extent, and intimacy of collated GLS material.