Saturday 10 May 2008

Gwinear Transcriptions

A while ago I was looking at the Gwinear (in Cornwall) page on the website following on from some of the transcribing that I was doing of both burial and marriage records.

I noticed that there was very little in the way of baptisms except for a short period from 1813 to 1820 which were originally done for me by a willing volunteer. I thought that it would be nice to do the period from 1800 up to1812 and it should be a reasonably quick task.

Should have known better, as at this time period in the history of Gwinear, it was a fairly large parish and some weeks later I have only done 2 years!! some 110 entries. Not much you are probably thinking, why is he so slow??

Well to put it into perspective by way of comparsion with the other Cornish Parish I am working on (Mawgan in Meneage), Gwinear averages just over 60 baptism entries for each year whereas Mawgan is less than half of this. On top of this everything goes into 3 databases all in different formats. The 1st Database is in html for the website, the 2nd database is in CSV text for the Cornish OPC Database and the 3rd in Excel for a 3rd database, so it is very time consuming and slow, especially for a parish which had a large population.

The advantage of doing 3 databases is that it does mean an automatic re-checking of the transcriptions as I go. Anyway just keep on chipping away at it as I get the time is the best way for me.

All the Best

Sunday 4 May 2008

North Cheriton - South East Somerset

North Cheriton is a small parish to the North of Horsington on the road to Wincanton. Many of the families that lived here had family links to Horsington as well.

Todays update to the website is for this parish, starting with the main page being updated to bring it into line with the other South East Somerset Parish pages. A transcription of the 1841 census has been added as well as links to two offsite web pages, the first covering the history of the parish and the second to a parish map, which is very useful for researchers.

Roger