This chapter explores the archive strand of the Manchester Voices project, focusing on the analysis of historical speech recordings from Greater Manchester, particularly oral history interviews conducted in the 1980s in Oldham. Originally intended as a comparison to contemporary data, these recordings became central during the Covid-19 lockdown. The analysis focuses on rhoticity (the pronunciation of postvocalic /r/), a feature now rare in most of England but variably present in the archive data. Using both acoustic and auditory methods, the team tracked rhoticity across six speakers, revealing intra-speaker variation linked not only to linguistic context but also to social meaning. The chapter uses Lectal Focusing in Interaction to explore how shifts in rhoticity relate to speakers’ orientations toward tradition, modernity, and personal identity. The findings suggest that rhoticity can index alignment with older values or ways of life, while non-rhoticity may be linked to modernity and change. This chapter highlights how variation in archived speech can offer insight into past social meaning and ongoing processes of language change.