COCP Newsletter No 12

Hello folks


First wave of grandchildren leave tomorrow morning; second wave arrives on Monday afternoon; 3rd wave the following Sunday. Even so, we have managed to keep the show on the road.

We are now down to the last five pieces of the 1861; might be finished in October. 25 of the 235 1851 parishes remain to be completed and about half the 1871. More of the 1881 is now being tackled, with a couple of new checkers arriving.

I would like to remind everyone that our aim is to reproduce what the enumerator wrote - "as is". Not what he should have wrote (it is nearly always a him); but what he actually wrote. If he has a 70 year-old woman with a five-year old son don't bother to flag it up or write me a note that it is obviously not a son.

On place of birth names, someone pointed out to me recently that it would be difficult to search for a parish name on the Free Census OLDB, because many of our transcripts (although "as is") have variations on the modern names. I am afraid that we are between a rock and a hard place on this one. Because we also put our returns online as texts, we don't believe this is an unsurmountable problem for researchers. And it is nice to leave them something to do......

Is everyone aware of C-PROP on http://www.cornwall-opc.org/search/ ? Currently it has 326,931 parish records online - all FREE! We are concentrating on CoE records at the moment, but have also started to extract the data from the West Briton project. If you have any transcripts - why not send them in - we will sort them out for uploading.

This project is built on the use of emails. You can, and should, be dropping Kay or myself or both of us, an occasional line saying how things are going. Don't leave us in the dark. There is also the alternative of using Instant Messaging. There is an earlier piece on this blog about jabber. Try it out and you might get an instant response. You can use it for census queries or anything else. Do I, for instance, know your great aunt Ethel? You never know.....

If you have tried Google Earth, it has recently released v4. It has a really nice shot of Mitchell, my home village; you can almost see me waving from the top of my jungle (garden)

Rgds

Michael