I
reply to Caroline Sampson's query publicly, because others may be interested in
this.
At
Gloucestershire RO we started a similar project back in 1992 with a group of
volunteers, largely from our local archaeological society. The project was
prompted by a local cartographer, Geoff Gwatkin, who
wanted to make reproduction copies of the tithe maps, partly for commercial
purposes, but also to share with the Archaeology Dept to assist the Sites and
Monuments Record team, and to supply surrogate copies for the Record Office to
use. He needed the plot numbers and field names transcribed and this was seen
as mutually beneficial.
We
transcribed all the information in the tithe schedule except the financial
detail of rentcharge, which nobody could ever
remember anyone making use of (please don't all write and tell me how useful it
is ! ). The transcripts were made in manuscript on a
pro-forma sheet in the Searchroom and it took nearly
ten years for the full set of 180 apportionments covering the diocese of
The
next stage is to convert those manuscripts into a digital form, for which we
are using MSExcel. This work can be done at home by
volunteers, but then has to be checked again.
In an ideal world you would cut out the manuscript transcript stage, but
it will depend upon your circumstances. Things were different when we started
all those years ago. Even now there are some volunteers who prefer to work with
pencil and paper. There is also a practical problem in trying to work on a
computer side by side with a tithe apportionment, which is usually still
attached to its map.
The
final stage is to load up the data into a database which has been designed
specifically for us by our in-house IT people. It is a very powerful piece of
software which enables a variety of searches across one or all parishes. You
can search for names of owner and occupier, cultivation code, plot number and
field names. The search box has an a choice of "begins" or
"contains" which is very useful for tracking down field names which
have slight variations. There are pop-up screens for the plot detail to
overcome the limitations of what you can display in table view. (Joint owners
and occupiers especially take up a lot of space in a table). There is even a
calculator which adds up the total acreage of the selected plots, so that you
can assess the extent of one person's holdings. If you identify a landowner
through one plot, one click will find what other property he held within the
parish ( this mechanism deliberately does not work across the whole database in
order to avoid any suggestion on our part that a landowner is the same as one
of the same name in another parish. You can, of course, use a fresh search to
search for one name across all parishes.)
Only
about a dozen parish apportionments have been loaded up so far and these are
available on our Searchroom Intranet. More will be
added soon. In due course it will be possible to web-enable the database for
the Internet.
In
the meantime, the manuscript transcripts are in use in the Searchroom
, together with the Gwatkin surrogate maps, and users
are referred to these in the first instance instead of to the originals, saving
a great deal of wear and tear on the latter. We do, of course, have the NA
microfilm copies of both maps and apportionments, but these are much less
user-friendly.
One
of the joys of a project like this is that, as the years go by, you wonder
whether you will ever see completion, but here we are, nearing the end, and we
have created the most amazingly powerful tool, as well as given protection to some long-suffering
documents in our care.
Kate
Haslem for
Gloucestershire Record Office [log in to unmask]
-----Original
Message-----
From:
Archivists, conservators and records managers. [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Caroline Sampson
Sent:
Subject:
Tithe apportionment project
Dear
all
Warwickshire
County Record Office is hoping to launch a project over the next month or so to
improve access to the data held in tithe apportionments. A team of volunteers will be capturing
details of landowners, occupiers and plot numbers, with the intention of
reducing wear and tear on the originals (and the staff that produce them in the
searchroom!), and making it easier and quicker for
visitors to locate information of interest.
My
colleague, Robert Eyre, Archivist, would be interested to hear from any other
record office that has carried out a similar project with a view to sharing
ideas and suggestions. If you would like
to send any comments, please email him at [log in to unmask]
Thanks
Caroline
Sampson
Head
of Archive Service