What am I looking at?
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This is my website where I host transcriptions of documents which are helpful in chasing up your family history. I also have a little bit about my family. The transcription pages are made up from excerpts of old documents such as newspapers and magazines. Presenting the pages in this way makes them very easy to search for words, in particular surnames. Before the existence of websites documents were indexed manually and a list of keywords, such as surnames, were recorded and added; either when the document was published or many years later by interested and dedicated persons. The advent of websites and search engines means indexing can be done without manually reading and noting every single surname or keyword. I started this project when manual indexing was still being done and registered in a central repository, in this case for genealogy. The website came about because I wanted to give something to the community and I wanted to learn how to have one that was useful and not too fancy. The pages have a function and that is to provide information - it makes it easier to copy and paste if there is nothing to distract the reader. That is why the guts of the information is just plain and uninteresting black and white text. |
| What is a transcription and why don't I correct obvious mistakes? A transcription is an (exact) typed up copy of what the original document is. I didn't type up all the documents so I can't guarantee that they are accurate - however the people who did all the work wouldn't have done it to leave deliberate or obvious mistakes. You must remember that many hours of typing has gone into this project and even a perfect typist makes an occasional mistake. So if your relative Jon Smythe is in the transcriptions as John Smith I will not correct it. The most obvious reason is that it may not be your relative. Less obvious, the reporter may have been told exactly how to spell the name, may have made it up or you have the wrong spelling. The transcriptions are exact copies of existing documents so if it is wrong in the original document it should be wrong in the transcription. |
| Did you use a search engine to search for a family name or town name? If so you have probably ended up at Greville's 1872 Post Office Directory, the Queenslander or one of the other transcriptions I host. |
| Can I give you any further information? On my website I host lots of transcriptions that have been done by dedicated people - I just display them I don't have the original documents and I can't really help with more information. You can get further information by going to a local or state library or family history centre and viewing the microfilms of the original documents. Most libraries have microfilms of some part of what appears on the website. |
Did someone send you a link? They should have sent you link to the top of my website and then you would understand it better. |
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