My project's web site, A Vision of Britain through Time, includes what we always describe as the "full text" of three late 19th century gazetteer:
* John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England & Wales (1872)
* Frances Groome's The Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1885)
* John Bartholomew's Gazetteer of the British Isles (1887)
We have recently been sorting out a lot of long-standing problems with this material. Some quite big sections of the Imperial Gazetteer turned out to be missing, but are now there. We also sorted out a bunch of truncated entries.
We know about one remaining problem of this kind, and hope someone on this list can help. The original work on Bartholomew's Gazetteer of the British Isles was done with a copy generously loaned by Glasgow University, and one part of that copy was missing some text, I suspect on a single page.
The gap starts part way into the entry for Berkshire, as horribly obvious here:
http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/descriptions/entry_page.jsp?text_id=1868270
The gap clearly includes Bermondsey, which we have no entry for, and the first entry we do have after Berkshire is:
Berrick Salome, par., SE. Oxfordshire, 4 miles NE. of Wallingford, 600 ac., pop. 105.
Does anyone have a first edition of the Bartholomew Gazetteer which does not have this problem?
Assuming the gap is as short as I think, it would be very helpful if someone could e-mail a scan or send us a photocopy of the missing bit. It will appear on the site very quickly, and the site remains completely free for anyone to use.
While we draw on this text for our "place pages", reachable from our mai home page, most of the text in the descriptive gazetteers, and especially the entries for anything that is not a settlement, can only be reached by using our specialised search interface for descriptive gazetteers:
http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/descriptions
As well as sorting out these missing bits and correcting many OCR errors, we have made a few changes to how the searching works, and now try to identify variant names. For example, whereas before one entry was only reachable if you searched for "ALNMOUTH OR ALEMOUTH", you can now also reach it by searching for "ALNMOUTH" or for "ALEMOUTH". We have also mined alternative names, often archaic, as with this entry for Liverpool:
http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/descriptions/entry_page.jsp?text_id=2121510
(Go the bottom of the page to see the place-names we now associate with the entry)
Best wishes,
Humphrey Southall
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