General Chat

I think it's called Optical character recognition.

I do have a Lancs library card which is very useful also :-)

Lancashire Library has not been available to all and sundry for 3 or 4 years ............... I missed the opportunity to get on there :-(

Maggie, I use Lancashire Library too, but it's mostly 19th century and I think that it's no longer available to all and sundry. Those who already have tickets can continue to use them, but new members have to have an address in the local area.

Prior is a laugh - NOT!! :-|

I use the original site, the British Newspaper Archives

There is also Trove ............. the site for Australian newspapers

http://trove.nla.gov.au/

Both suffer from the same thing .............. the originals were scanned by machine, and machines do not recognize a lot of letters and words.

Trove does allow one to make changes to the scanned material. I do not think any of the British sites carrying the old newspapers yet do that.

I. too, love searching the newspapers on Findmypast. I have found lots of different bits and pieces about several members of the family. I particularly like some of the family notices as you can often get exact dates of birth or death from the newspaper entries or find family members that you didn't know about mentioned.

Kath. x

Try having a surname of Banner :-(

Mind you, I did come across a trial report - a different surnamed couple were found guilty of running a 'Bawdy House'. Since their daughter later became a single mother, they may not have changed their ways! They weren't even mentioned in his father's will!!!

"read by a machine" would explain it! I wasn't searching anything in particular. it would have been fun if one of my family had turned up - I must try another site.

Not sure what its called either, but the transcription is created by being 'read' by a machine/IT programme.

If you think back, there was a lot of complaints on this site when Ancestry introduced various 20th century historical ER. The names were about the only thing remotely correct. Even then the J for jury service notation was frequently included as a 2nd (or 3rd) initial!

I use Lancashire Library. It's free to join (online), and viewing scans of original newspapers is free too :-D

GR sent this link in their newsletter so thought I'd have a look searching Weymouth. I know GR don't compile these things themselves but point you to them - but does anyone know who compiled this lot? It was so full of spelling and printing mistakes - it seemed the transcriber had no knowledge of the English language at all. I would have had to use credits to read the originals (small smudgy reproduction only shown) to check what the original really said, I wasn't going to waste that kind of money - but it does seem a pity.