Friday, March 10, 2006

COCP Newsletter No 2

This week we have completed 2321 from 1871(Karen Duvall & Sue McNelly); 1559 from 1861(Tina Russell & John Ford) and St Austell from the 1851( Julia Mosman, Myra Davey, David Trounce & John Nance). The latter means that another complete 1851 piece is done and can therefore be uploaded to Free Census as well as our own web pages. These should all be online in the next week or so.

Here I go again - place of birth. Aids to working out what the enumerator wrote. More of us have broadband and are thus able to run various useful web sites as we work. These can be used to help in deciphering personal and place names.

The first and most obvious is Google. Just type in "St Tiller" and see what happens. Nothing! But you might be luckier than that. Even if the place name is still wrong, you can leave me a useful little note. Recently I had a record that gave some saint's name I had never heard of. But Google threw up a farm in the parish I was looking at that had the right name. Google is also good for personal names & occupations.

Second most obvious site is OURS! The COCP web pages contain over 1.2 million records. There is a search engine and who knows - we might already have encountered your difficult-to-read name.

A site for out-of-county names is Free Census. With nearly 7 million records online the name you are seeking might be there.

A site with zillions of names on is the LDS familysearch.org site. Only one of our checkers uses this to confirm tricky personal names (that I know of) and it is free & fast.

You can always check with me. I have the OS Gazetteer in paper form; every name that is on the OS Explorer maps is in it. I also have a file containing large numbers of Cornish place names - you can have a copy.

Finally, a suggestion from a new transcriber. Insert an extra column in your spreadsheet and enter the jpg ident as you start each page. You can delete the whole column when you have finished.

Of course, with all these aids, you must keep in mind that you are trying to combine speed with accuracy.

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