Well genealogy and
computing have a lot to answer for. The all singing, all dancing PC and a book
on tracing your family history increased my interest in the history of my
hometown of Clay Cross. My maternal grandfather said the family had come to Clay
Cross when George Stephenson built the tunnel beneath the town, which in those
days was a village called Clay Lane.
In May 2001, I borrowed the family’s copy of Francis White’s Directory of
Derbyshire and after an unsuccessful attempt to scan it into the computer, my
wife asked someone at her work to photocopy the relevant pages. He was also
interested in the directory and before long I had set myself the task of putting
all the pages onto the computer. I am scanning the photocopies, in batches of
around 20 pages at a time and using the OCR text converter, to convert them into
Word. Now the easy bit, anyone who has used a text converter will know that it
will misspell words, miss them off completely or put “{[*(!,,’ wherever it wants
and have a total disregards for columns, setting them out anyway it wants. Then
the document was re-formatted. The unwanted bold highlights were removed and I
changed the font size. Next was the first read and check against the photocopy
pages, this was to ensure that the layout of the page was as close to the
original as is possible and most of the spelling and grammar is correct
according to Mr White and not the version that the PC spell checker would
prefer. I used the Find and Replace function on the software, because a lot of
the errors were repeated. The document was printed and I repeated the check, but
this time it was paper copy against the photocopy. I found that due to the font
size of the original, I could only check about 3 to 4 pages at any one time. To
view the sequence of the process visit Scan to Web
I had promised copies to Tom, who carried out the photocopying and to another
fellow researcher, but why keep it to myself, hence this. I had set myself a
target date of 2004 for
completing the transcription of the directory, and finished it with a week to go.