I thought that the list might find it useful to hear about my experiences regarding the purchase of a tithe map on CD from East Sussex Records Office.   1. Although it is technically possible to phone up ESRO and order the tithe map CDs over the phone and pay by credit card, in reality you can only do this after posting a a signed declaration that you will not infringe their copyright to ESRO. So you might just as well post a cheque with your declaration.   2.  Delivery took 4 working days and was by normal post. Although mine came without damage, the CD was posted in a jewel case in an ordinary unpadded envelope.   3. Although all the tithe maps in East Sussex have been transcribed on to CDs the apportionments have not all been transcribed yet. If you just order a CD of the tithe map for a particular parish this will be all that you will get.  The tithe map is only a large scale map of the parish showing the boundaries of every piece of land.  Each piece of land has a plot number written on it on the map.  Apart from the names of important buildings such as farms, inns and mansions and the names of neighbouring parishes there was nothing else written on my tithe map (mine was a rural parish). There weren't even any road names! So £13.80 is a lot of money to pay for just a map with a lot of numbers on it.   4. If you want the apportionment that goes with the tithe map you have to ask for this as a separate item and send your email address to ESRO.  They then will tell you if it has been transcribed and if it has they will email it to you as an excel file without further charge.  I don't know how you get on in the unlikely event that you don't have an email address!  For those who don't know about these things, the apportionment is a list of the plot numbers with all the information relating to each plot.  This is what all us family historians need because it includes the land owners full name, the occupiers full name (the farmer or householder), the name of the plot, what if anything is grown on the plot and the size of the plot in acres, roods and perches (one acre equals four roods and one rood equals 40 perches).   5.  I am under the impression that if you discover that the apportionment for a parish that you are interested in, has not yet been transcribed, they will give transcription a higher priority if you make it clear that you will not buy the tithe map CD until it is transcribed.  When I asked when the apportionment for a neighbouring parish would be transcribed, I was told 'possibly several months' but then two days later they told me that it was now available!!   6. The tithe maps on the CD have been scanned in high resolution and in my case the parish had been scanned as twelve overlapping sections. The maps are viewed using built in software called Archangel Image Browser which allows the the user to navigate and zoom in on places of interest.  Printing of sections of the map is also possible, however the Archangel browser does not have a save facility built in.  With some ingenuity, however, it is possible to extract each scanned image for separate manipulation.   7.  Once a plot has bee identified on the map, it is very easy to locate the details from the apportionment file because the plots are in numerical order.  However on my tithe map the surveyor had not numbered the plots in any sequential manner but had used the order in which they had been surveyed.  All the plots for a particular farm are sequential, but odd pieces of land seem to have been surveyed at odd times during the survey of the entire parish and so are numbered accordingly.  This means that if you identify from the apportionment that your ancestor occupied say a house and garden amounting to one plot number, it means that you have to literally check every plot on the map until you find the one of interest which can be very time consuming and difficult.  Kind regards Roger __________________________________________________________ Sent from Yahoo! Mail. A Smarter Email http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html