Dear Alison Think this is a perfectly valid reason to get excited. I have certainly made quite extensive use of them in the USA to reconstitute families. So much stuff is going online now - it is getting quite difficult to remember where to go. We have a talk on Wednesday at the West Surrey FHS by Jeannie Bunting entitled - Is the Internet Spoiling the Fun of the Chase? I think the answer is NO - but I will be interested to see which side she comes down on Brian -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Alison Bryan Sent: 17 March 2012 08:27 To: [email protected]; Dyfed List Subject: [Dyfed] NLW scanning Welsh newspapers to put online Dear all Something to look forward to, NLW are digitalising Welsh newspapers (which are out of copyright) and will be freely available online: http://www.llgc.org.uk/blog/?p=3499 I'm probably more excited about this than I should be! Alison ================================ Dyfed list http://home.clara.net/daibevan/DyfedML.html ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

Brian P. Swann wrote: > Think this is a perfectly valid reason to get excited. > > I have certainly made quite extensive use of them in the USA to reconstitute > families. I agree. Newpapers can add plenty of meat to the bare bones of a family as well as pointers for further research. > So much stuff is going online now - it is getting quite difficult to > remember where to go. Agreed - again :)) I bookmark any new site or database but I have so many, I forget I have them. > We have a talk on Wednesday at the West Surrey FHS by Jeannie Bunting > entitled - Is the Internet Spoiling the Fun of the Chase? > > I think the answer is NO - but I will be interested to see which side she > comes down on Another agreement :)) The chase is still there and the internet is making it a LOT easier to chase down families all over the country and all over the world. It's no longer necessary to wait weeks or months to get replies to queries or copy documents or to find the time to visit archives. What has changed is the joy of being able to handle original registers and often other documents as well. So much is now on fiche or film. There is definitely a magic in holding and reading a register 200+ years old or an agreement dating from the 1600s and earlier. -- Charani (UK) OPC for Walton, Greinton and Clutton, SOM Asst OPC for Ashcott and Shapwick, SOM http://wsom-opc.org.uk http://www.savethegurkhas.co.uk/

Well - let's try and widen the debate a bit. I wonder if anyone on this list watched any of RootsTech in Salt Lake City about just over a month ago? It runs for 3 days, now attracts about 3,000 folk (nearly all Americans, of course) - and is becoming the place to go to for the latest in IT in relation to family history. I did watch the team from Ancestry through their whole 1 hour presentation. Two things stuck in my mind - they have spent $12 to $15 million dollars on DNA over the past year, in terms of upgrading their game. In anyone's language that is a non-trivial sum of money. If they can put most of London and Middlesex parish registers online - they can do most things. But Optical Character Recognition and indexing of handwriting remains a bit of a holy grail. And you have to do that before you can get into latin and other real paleographical challenges. But if anyone can tackle that - I think they can. Essentially that is where the family history revolution is heading now, in my opinion - back more into 17th century and earlier research by far more people, faster than ever. So all those estate records start to become important for Wales - let alone the Court of the Great Sessions material. But OCR scanning and indexing directly of older documents would be a game-changer for everyone, as will DNA. Brian -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Charani Sent: 17 March 2012 11:00 To: 'Dyfed List' Subject: Re: [Dyfed] NLW scanning Welsh newspapers to put online Brian P. Swann wrote: Think this is a perfectly valid reason to get excited. I have certainly made quite extensive use of them in the USA to reconstitute families. I agree. Newpapers can add plenty of meat to the bare bones of a family as well as pointers for further research. So much stuff is going online now - it is getting quite difficult to remember where to go. Agreed - again :)) I bookmark any new site or database but I have so many, I forget I have them. We have a talk on Wednesday at the West Surrey FHS by Jeannie Bunting entitled - Is the Internet Spoiling the Fun of the Chase? I think the answer is NO - but I will be interested to see which side she comes down on Another agreement :)) The chase is still there and the internet is making it a LOT easier to chase down families all over the country and all over the world. It's no longer necessary to wait weeks or months to get replies to queries or copy documents or to find the time to visit archives. What has changed is the joy of being able to handle original registers and often other documents as well. So much is now on fiche or film. There is definitely a magic in holding and reading a register 200+ years old or an agreement dating from the 1600s and earlier. -- Charani (UK) OPC for Walton, Greinton and Clutton, SOM Asst OPC for Ashcott and Shapwick, SOM http://wsom-opc.org.uk http://www.savethegurkhas.co.uk/ ================================ Dyfed list http://home.clara.net/daibevan/DyfedML.html ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

I too agree. If you want to see an example of newspapers going on-line, we've been very lucky in Australia that the National Library of Australia has been putting major and regional newspapers on-line. In most cases this is only up to the 1950s. Nevertheless, it has been possible to do a lot of family history using this resource. In addition, as an example of 'crowd-sourcing', the NLA has been using anyone who would care to register with them to correct optical character recognition errors, and tens of millions of lines have been fixed by this means, with some people having corrected over a million lines each! I hope the NLW picks up on this idea, as it i unlikely OCR will read everything correctly and this makes it difficult then to find. See: http://trove.nla.gov.au/ David Canberra On 17/03/2012, at 9:59 PM, Charani wrote: > Brian P. Swann wrote: > >> Think this is a perfectly valid reason to get excited. >> >> I have certainly made quite extensive use of them in the USA to reconstitute >> families. > > I agree. Newpapers can add plenty of meat to the bare bones of a > family as well as pointers for further research. >

> Alison Bryan'" <>; "'Dyfed List'" <> > Something to look forward to, NLW are digitalising Welsh newspapers (which > are out of copyright) and will be freely available online: Any extension of what is already being achieved by the British Library and by the British Newspaper Archive (harshly maligned by a small number of users on its feedback page) will of course be welcome. The only slight note of caution would be that Welsh newspapers were slower to develop than in England, with no regular weekly titles published within the principality until 'The Cambrian' in 1804, and with many areas still not covered by a really local title until much later. Also that newspapers are still unlikely to mention more than a relatively small number of people - the majority of people during the 19C still probably never featured even once within their local press. Some titles were written in English; some in Welsh, and some in a mixture of both. From: "Brian P. Swann" <Sent: Saturday, March 17, 2012 9:52 AM Subject: Re: [Dyfed] NLW scanning Welsh newspapers to put online > We have a talk on Wednesday at the West Surrey FHS by Jeannie Bunting > entitled - Is the Internet Spoiling the Fun of the Chase? Another interesting and related question (albeit not necessarily an easy one to answer) is whether the Internet is serving to increase or alternatively to decease the *proportions* of genealogical research being undertaken which actually meet the highest standards of quality. How far does it encourage impatience and carelessness, rather than emphasising the virtues of attention to detail? I wonder what Jeannie Bunting (and others) would say to that one? There are many potentially relevant sources which are not online, and which are unlikely to be available online for a long while yet (if ever). However any difficulties of access should NEVER be offered as though they were some sort of an excuse for failing to check alternatives, in those cases where the online evidence remains no better than tenuous. If the evidence remains weak, the cautious and the most appropriate attitude is to say "for the moment - at least - there is still too little evidence at my disposal for me to be certain". A few weeks ago on another group I noticed one contributor triumphantly announcing (courtesy of an online index) that he had finally discovered the baptism - within a more distant parish - of the ancestor for whom he had been searching for many years. Unfortunately another wretched individual then had to go and spoil the backslapping celebrations by unapologetically pointing out that the burial of the same baby had apparently been entered within exactly the same parish register during the following year! > But Optical Character Recognition and indexing of handwriting remains a > bit of a holy grail. And you have to do that before you can get into > latin and other real paleographical challenges. The considerable difficulties of recognising and deciphering different styles of handwriting by mechanical means are also the same reasons why many websites use a written "captcha" as a security feature when enrolling on the site. From: "Charani" > Absolutely, although there is another obstacle to be overcome. and > that is the resistance of some diocese to allowing their holdings to > be put online at all, let alone on a subscription site. This is > something that affects parts of England but I'm not sure Wales is > similarly affected. There are some archives and record offices which > are resistent as well because, rightly or wrongly, they fear for their > jobs. The issue is for individual parishes - there are currently no Anglican dioceses in England & Wales which have issued blanket prohibitions. The situation in England is governed by the Parochial Registers & Records Measure, which does not apply to the Church in Wales (since there is a separate agreement with its church representative body). It's worth remembering that many records were originally created for purposes other than family history or local history. At first, relatively few people would have needed to have access to them. Very frequently, once the records had ceased to be relevant for their original administrative purposes, their orderly arrangement (assuming it had ever existed in the first place) would have been allowed to deteriorate - in some cases disastrously - as might also the suitability of their conditions of their storage. Remedying the situation for historical research at a later date often requires the investment of a considerable amount of time and money for rearrangement, repair and conservation, cataloguing, better storage, together with making the administrative arrangements necessary for providing much wider public access. And the subsequent provision of digital copies and indexes - whether done in-house or externally - will always require the investment of still further money by somebody or other. All of which can't really be done satisfactorily on the cheap, nor without a considerable amount of patience. Deposited collections often require a great deal of initial preparation, and protecting the necessary investment ultimately requires that people are ready to take a long term view and not merely a short term one. Which may partly help to explain the misgivings of some record offices. AJ