Thursday, November 20, 2008

Results of Research at Salt Lake City - 20 Nov 2008

Today was supposed to be transcription of the Manor Records of Upper Clatford but I decided to take a look at the Protestation Returns for Cumberland. I already have Bewcastle translated as I purchased it from the Carlisle Record Office a few years ago. I quickly transcribed the Bewcastle Return just to refresh my memory on the earlier writing in this part of the country. I then decided to do Lanercost as that parish is my other strong interest in Cumberland along with Farlam and Arthuret. Lanercost was ten images and all but one were quite sharp. Fortunately I overlapped quite a bit so was able to compensate for the one slightly blurry image. I set up my headings in Excel - Ward, Quarter, Status (Sworn or other), Surname, Forename, Suffix and Standing/other information. I have all the Tweddle and Robson names already from this parish which was about 50 names but the time that I completed the transcription (4 hours later!) I had 271 names from the four quarters - Lanercost, Askerton, Triermanie, and Burdoswell - and Kirkcambeck was also included in this return. I will go back and carefully proofread as there were about 20 that did not fit into the usual names and the letters were not well formed. There were a number of aliases (about 25) and a few locations noted. The number of different surnames was likely close to 70 and will determine that later after proofreading.

I am thinking that this would make a good submission to the Cumbria Newsletter and will think about doing that in January.

I will get back to working on the Manor documents for Upper Clatford this evening. We are putting together a slide show of our trip to England to show to some people who had us over to see their slides for Ireland and another couple. We had over 5,000 images which have been reduced to 1,200 images which is still quite a few but they cover a lot of territory. We will likely go with that many. Our family has over time watched all 5,000, sometimes just glancing!

I am now accumulating the evidence for proving the 4x great grandparents - I actually have four done already of the 64. I am missing material on 8 people although I have ordered fiche and books to help to do so. I have at least 1 that I will not be able to solve likely as the father of one of my 3x great grandmothers is unknown unless it is in the Bastardy Orders which I have not yet checked.

Taking 4 hours to work on 10 images lets me think that working on the 2500 images from Salt Lake City will take me all winter. Certainly the 30 slides for the Upper Clatford Manor Records are going to be a challenge. The writing is Secretary Style and is one of the hands that I have not done a lot of work with although the letters are very well formed.

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