Transcription Questions

[katerimmer]

I've just started doing some 1837 marriages which include "abode". I have a couple of questions about this:
1. The help info that pops up when you key into the field says "Be especially careful to surround the field in quotation (speech) marks if using commas ... please note that only the following special characters ?!;:.+=*,"()[]{} are allowed in a text field".

The Abode section of the help file states " This is a text field. It may include most normal characters a-z,A-Z,0-9, space and the special characters ?!:;.+=*,"()[]{}_ " but it doesn't say anything about surrounding the field in quotes.

The second of these marriage entries I have includes the residence More-croft. As the hyphen isn't listed in the characters allowed, what do I do? I did actually key it in because I didn't notice it wasn't allowed, but I didn't get an error message about it (yet).

2. Then there is the residence King Street, St James's, London. Again, if I key it in as seen there is no error message but what am I supposed to do exactly? Can I leave the commas in if I put "" around the text, and should I put two apostrophes in instead of one, or are apostrophes not allowed at all?

Hope someone can help me. Sorry if this has already been covered elsewhere.

[Mike Fry]

As the author of the program WinREG, I suppose that I should be best qualified to allay your fears.

a) Don't worry about the quotation marks! The program will add and remove these automatically as required. They won't normally show on the screen unless you type them, but if you were to examine the CSV file on disk with Notepad, you would see where they have been added.

b) There are, now, very few characters that FreeREG won't accept, and the hyphen and apostrophe aren't among the list of unacceptable characters. The rule is: TYPE WHAT YOU SEE. Then, if FreeREG won't accept it, come back to us and we'll see what we can do.

Regards,
Mike Fry, Johannesburg.

[katerimmer]

Thanks for that, Mike.

[katerimmer]

I'm currently transcribing 18th century PR's for the parish of Elkesley and have come across the following entry in among the entries for 1732:

Joseph Hancock Born April 6th 1732.

There is no actual baptism entry but I would think it worth keying in with the baptisms? But my question is, where do I put his surname? As neither parent's name is given I don't know whether to put it in as father's surname or mother's surname, and there is no box for the child's surname.

Presumably people have come across the same problem when keying those early baptisms that only give the child's name and not the parents so hopefully someone can tell me what to do, please?

[Kirk Dawson]

I'm currently transcribing 18th century PR's for the parish of Elkesley and have come across the following entry in among the entries for 1732:

Joseph Hancock Born April 6th 1732.

There is no actual baptism entry but I would think it worth keying in with the baptisms? But my question is, where do I put his surname? As neither parent's name is given I don't know whether to put it in as father's surname or mother's surname, and there is no box for the child's surname.

Presumably people have come across the same problem when keying those early baptisms that only give the child's name and not the parents so hopefully someone can tell me what to do, please?

Enter Hancock in the Father's Surname field and add a note that Information on parents not provided.

Kirk

PS This sort of entry is often seen with an adult baptism. However that is just one possible interpretation.

[katerimmer]

Thanks, Kirk.

[Helen Proudfoot]

Instructions about putting in quotation marks are intended for those of us who use a spreadsheet package. We usually find this method quicker because we are very used to our spreadsheet packages, but a record with a lot of essential commas or several full-stops in a row can give us trouble. Luckily such records are pretty rare. My partner lovingly types every dot or splotch as accurately as possible into quotation marks in the notes, but I am too impatient, and so tend to replace a dangerous comma with a safe semi-colon and I leave apostrophes out. To me it seems that FreeReg is intended to give the information in the records and does not have to give an exact transcription of the Vicar's taste in punctuation.

[katerimmer]

The old version of WinREG used to state in the instructions for groom and bride parish, in marriage entries, not to key anything if they were "of this parish" or if the parish name was the same as the parish where the marriage took place. I went along with this although I would have preferred to key OTP as leaving the field blank means that researchers don't know whether the actual entry says OTP or nothing.

The instructions in the new version of WinREG say "If the actual entry states where the Groom / bride comes from, enter it. Otherwise, leave it blank. Also, a very common entry that can be found is 'of this parish' or 'otp'."

This doesn't actually say whether you should key otp or not, but seems to imply that you should? So have I been wrong all this time in following the old instructions not to key anything if they are otp?

[Mike Fry]

I don't think it matters very much what the instructions currently say The fact is that the parishes and abodes are not used as part of any search routine. And I don't know if they ever will. With this in mind, and taking into account that the fields can not really be validated against anything, you can exercise your best judgement and enter what you want. Just remember that abbreviations are almost sure to cause problems for someone at some time further down the line - OTP could be regarded as a typo for TOP - so spell it out in full the first time. After that, you can enjoy the benefits of the Autocompletion feature.

Regards
Mike Fry (WinREG Developer)

[katerimmer]

Thanks, Mike.