Hi, Thank you John. Seems quite a challenge to locate, which should be relatively easy. I have e-mailed the Suffolk Library for help too. My cousin who lives in W. Harptree will, the next time he's in Bristol, do a search for me as well. With appreciation, Edna - Ottawa ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Addis-Smith" <genl@addisgen.com> To: <SOG-UK-L@rootsweb.com> Cc: "Edna & Ken" <ekbrit@rogers.com> Sent: Friday, July 29, 2005 11:50 AM Subject: Re: [SoG] T C J WORTH b. 1875 Newport area, Wales On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 14:37:44 -0400, "Edna & Ken" <ekbrit@rogers.com> wrote: > Would anyone have access to this Dictionary ~~ > > Dictionary of National Biography, Volumes 1-20, 22 > T C J WORTH Monmouthshire Chamber - Craigie Dictionary Of National > Biography CRA 1363. > >Have tried our Ottawa City Library but could not find this entry. I had hoped that someone else would have solved this problem by now. As this has not happened I have decoded the above and looked at two sources available to me at home: A. My Compact (12 pages reduced in size to fit on one page) paper edition of the (Old) DNB: 1. 'Dictionary of National Biography, Volumes 1-20, 22' very likely refers to Ancestry's online version of the DNB, since they do not seem to have volume 21 online . . . 2. 'Chamber - Craigie' refers to a particular original printed volume, where the first biography is for a surname 'Chamber' and the last biography surname is 'Craigie' 3. 'CRA 1363' refers to a biography surname starting with 'Cra' and the original volume page number in this volume is: 1363. Now the bad news: On page 1363 there are three biographies: - Walter Cradock (1606? - 1659) - Zachary Cradock (1633 - 1695) - William H Craft (d.1805) I have reads the page through several times and there is no surname WORTH. However, in the Walter Cradock biography there is mention of the Rev William WROTH, pastor of the congregational church at Llanvaches, Monmouthshire in the 17th century . . . B. Then I used Ancestry.co.uk to which I subscribe. 1. I searched the: 'Dictionary of National Biography, Volumes 1-20, 22' for WORTH, but there were thousands, since Ancestry does a word search of all the volumes based on optical character readings (OCR). TCJ (or T C J) WORTH did not find that page number either, but searching on: 'WORTH 1363' did! Ancestry uses a very crude search mechanism when more than one word is used in such a search: if each of the words (or initials) are found ANYWHERE on a page then that page counts as a 'hit' . . . As I have previously said, there is no WORTH on the page but there is WROTH ! Because the hit words are not highlighted in the result , there is no knowing whether the OCR interpretation of another word on the page was 'worth'. 2. The Ancestry 'hit' reference was the following: Title, Chapter, Section, Page Chamber - Craigie, Dictionary of National Biography, CRA, 1363 The best way to search the old DNB is from the CD-ROM version or the official online site for the new DNB, which includes all the old DNB biographies, most of which have been updated. I believe the New DNB has not yet been issued on CD-ROM. It is possible to carry out either single word or phrase searches on the complete text (that takes up 100,000 pages in the new DNB print edition). Cheers, John John Addis-Smith Thurleigh, Bedfordshire, England