The Nice People Thread, No.16: A Universe of Niceness.

PasturesNew

vivatifosi wrote: »

Pastures and other family history buffs.


New website launched April that you may be interested in, if you haven't already come across:


https://ourcriminalancestors.org/

Cheers. I prefer sites with information on them though, not just telling you where you can get stuff.... as you're really no further forward

It's so annoying that stuff is sitting on shelves hundreds of miles away and the only way to find out if there's anything, is to physically arrive and sit and manually search ... and a lot of the time they don't know what they do have "Box of Misc papers from a Mr A.B.S, 1818-1847" .... and there could be all sorts of stuff in there about all sorts of people ... you just never know. Maybe one box even contains a missing original Parish Register under "Misc account books of Mr B Utcher"

vivatifosi

AIUI the idea is that over time the website will have user generated content on it, it's very much in its infancy.

But I totally get where you are coming from. I want to look at some records in an archive 2 hours drive away. The good news is that they are all in one book. But I have no idea how big the book is or how difficult it will be to read. It is from 1540-1601, so it won't be easy, but how difficult? Can I go for a day and photograph it, then work through in my leisure? There's also a partial transcript, but how big?

I have emailed and asked the archive, but it's all very "how long is a piece of string".

PasturesNew

vivatifosi wrote: »

...records in an archive 2 hours drive away. The good news is that they are all in one book. But I have no idea how big the book is or how difficult it will be to read. ... Can I go for a day and photograph it, then work through in my leisure? There's also a partial transcript, but how big?

Bummer.... and, will they allow you to photograph it if it were suitable ... or is that banned, or a chargeable extra? And, whatever the rule, will the person on the desk on the day know that rule or start snatching it back from you screeching "not allowed! not allowed!"



Your record set "seems easy" - you know it exists, you know where, you can go and see it .... but then "what you don't know" puts unknown barriers in front of you ... that whole "could I do it in half a day, or do I need to go full-time and book a B&B for 2 nights to go through/check what I've got that day ....

It's not right is it ... all this stuff that council tax payers are paying to be held, stored, paying for all the staff and the systems ... and they can't actually tell you anything except "We have something... not sure what ... you can come when we're open" - and for a lot of offices they're not even open often/much!

The county one here, "... History Centre" giving it a grand name ... opens just Tue-Fri 9-5 .... and 2 Saturdays a month.

GDB2222

https://ourcriminalancestors.org/ The ones that were caught, I presume?

vivatifosi

There isn't a lot of money for archives. They have been squeezed massively with the government cutbacks. Although they are lumped with libraries in a general "libraries and archives" category, libraries have a better deal. We are a statutory and regulated service. Archives are not. So for every article you read about library cuts, well nobody is bothering to write about archives.

There is also a cross cut between museums and archives. At that level there is a big debate about how you treat the past. Some say you should treat it with kid gloves and reverence, being very respectful to those who went before. Others think you should get down and dirty with history and get into its nooks and crannies. Both sides exist and in some respects govern how you can access and what you can get. Plus just as archives are the poor relative to libraries, they are to museums too. There's one that the public of all ages want to visit, e.g. there's a lovely, shiny new museum in St Albans, but archives rarely get that much love and attention. But they still have to care for the written DNA of an area.

This in turn impacts on how quickly things get digitised or even indexed. The technology to do this stuff has come at the same time that the staffing and budgets have shrunk. So the will is often there but not the means. And things vary massively by archive. Most are working with a commercial organisation on mass digitisation. Norfolk has made great strides with their Parish Records and most are now widely available for free online, with more being released all the time. Similarly Herts has an agreement with FMP for the release of theirs.

This doesn't help with the random boxes of stuff, but they are working on items where they can methodically go through big masses of data. This tends to be in core areas... baptisms, electoral rolls, school records, etc. These are photographed then the likes of Ancestry, FMP and The Genealogist set their armies on transcription.

There are often articles in the family history magazines about how to get the most out of a particular archive. Over the course of about five years they cover most of them. They also cover key themes. In this month's WDYTYA mag for example there is an article on what is happening with each parish record collection. This is a particularly good issue. I read WDYTYA every month and it is free online from my local library. It also gives free short term access to certain online collections. This month there's some bits and bobs for Worcester. They also do a free email newsletter saying what the changes are and new collections added to e.g. Ancestry. That comes out weekly.

vivatifosi

GDB2222 wrote: »

https://ourcriminalancestors.org/ The ones that were caught, I presume?

Mine were caught. Regularly. My question is why they weren't sent to Australia. Looking how many of them are in my tree it is a great mystery as to how I managed to be born in Hertfordshire and not Hobart.

PasturesNew

vivatifosi wrote: »

....

One set of records that would be most useful to family/social historians would be access to the assizes/b4st4rdy records ... especially for those "who is the daddy" questions

Some FHS have transcribed some over the years ... indeed, I bought a transcription of the assizes covering about 20 years to find out my grandfather's name when granny went to court to get maintenance... not that it did her any good as she was back the next month as he'd not paid it - he'd skipped the country! By that time he had a wife/daughter to pay for, an illegitimate child (5 years old) and here was granny wanting him to put his hand in his pocket for her little sprog.... three babies (maybe more if I had more access to more records as he could've popped over the county border as he was a driver) .... he legged it as he couldn't afford to pay. Probably had back claims from all three babies' mothers.

But, even while that's useful it's an index probably ... and I see, say, 3 lines, giving their two names, 12 words on what the case was about and 8 words on the judgement. And then it tells you which book that's in ... but, what then.... if I drive the 200+ miles and open the book, does it just tell me that much but in handwriting, or is there more? That's it... nobody says... the transcription doesn't open with the words "This is a summary ..." or "This is a full transcription, you can see the original book but there's no other information in that than what we've typed below"

I bet for your book you'd like to see a photograph of the book and a simple sample page of what you'd be confronted with inside.... so you can judge how hard it'll be to achieve what you want....

"Box of Miscellaneous papers" - go on, just show us a quick snap of what that means A trunk stuffed? Or a shoebox with 12 bits of paper?

PasturesNew

vivatifosi wrote: »

...

I've a few, nothing "bad" in the main. My gt-grandfather was in court for not sending his kids to school, riding a bike without a light, suspected of poaching (let off/not proven) - and "the big one" was when he and his mate nicked a neighbours chickens one night when they were probably drunk. The police followed their footsteps in the snow. Police turned up at gt-granny's house she showed them the remains of a cooked chicken.... my granny was a new born baby and my gt-grandfather spent her first Xmas in jail (he got a month).

That gt-granny was no stranger to the idea of jail as her own mother had been to jail twice before she was born (released in the last week or two of her pregnancy) - doing hard labour for dropping the kids off at the Workhouse and doing a runner .... twice!

There are a couple of black marketeering cases in the wars etc - and a bigamy. And I've discovered a bigamy that was probably never known about (except the bloke who did it and his brother) - they married two sisters, so they might've told their wives... but he could've used the "I thought she was dead" 7-year rule.... but his wife had also remarried, so nobody was going to "tell" as it was usually the wife finding out about the new wife that brought these cases to court.

Pyxis

Riding a bike without a light!


Oh God, I wish we had a few more of those convictions these days!

Last night, doing my usual poodle home so as to avoid the jay-walking foxes, and I barely managed to see a bike that was end-on, no lights at all, getting itself into the middle of the road to turn right. Dark clothes of course.
Only noticed there was 'something' there because there was a rear reflector that gave the very, very faintest glimmer of a warning, but I had to really peer to see if it was actually a person or what.


Nearer home, there was a guy walking on the pavement, not in any danger at all of being run over, and his jacket had two small reflective strips on each elbow.
I could see him a mile off.

Jackmydad

Pyxis wrote: »

Riding a bike without a light!


Oh God, I wish we had a few more of those convictions these days!

Last night, doing my usual poodle home so as to avoid the jay-walking foxes, and I barely managed to see a bike that was end-on, no lights at all, getting itself into the middle of the road to turn right. Dark clothes of course.
Only noticed there was 'something' there because there was a rear reflector that gave the very, very faintest glimmer of a warning, but I had to really peer to see if it was actually a person or what.


Nearer home, there was a guy walking on the pavement, not in any danger at all of being run over, and his jacket had two small reflective strips on each elbow.
I could see him a mile off.

Only saying about this the other night in the pub. Seems that the locals around here prefer to go around in camouflage, with no torch. Walking or cycling!
Foreign farm workers on the other hand seem to manage to wear Hi-Viz and carry a torch.

There were a couple of beauts on my regular Saturday drive the other night. They were walking along the (narrow) main road against a high wall. No footpath either side. Camo jackets, no lights. Walking towards me on the other side of the road (so the wrong side). I saw them, and the car coming too fast the other way. I slowed down. knowing what would happen. Car coming had to pull out to avoid hitting the walkers.
But it's usual. Nine mile drive each way regularly on a Saturday evening. Quiet country roads mostly.
I'll see at least four or five idiots going each way.