Museum of London publishes a family’s Christmas home recordings from 1902

Last week, the Museum of London announced that it discovered “the earliest known home recording to have been made on Christmas Day.” The phonograph recordings, from a middle-class family in North London, date back to 1902 and were found in wax cylinders belonging to their descendants. As museum Curator of Social and Working History Julia Hoffbrand notes, “it is extremely unusual for wax phonograph cylinders, containing retrievable recordings of this age, to survive.” The museum received the cylinders in 2008 as a donation, and recently digitized them. The recordings are said to be the oldest ever found of Christmas celebrations, and the museum has provided them for public listening on its website.