Connected Histories

[Coromandel]

I've only just discovered the Connected Histories website. It allows you to search 15 different resources at once (many results can be seen free but many are on subscription-based sites):

• British History Online ('80% free and 20% subscription')
• British Museum Images (free)
• British Newspapers 1600-1900 ('subscription; free to UK HE')
• Cause Papers in the Diocesan Courts of the Archbishopric of York, 1300-1858 (free)
• Charles Booth Archive (free)
• Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540-1835 (free)
• Convict Transportation Registers Database (free)
• House of Commons Parliamentary Papers ('subscription, free to UK HE')
• John Foxe's The Acts and Monuments Online (free)
• John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera ('subscription, free to UK HE')
• John Strype's Survey of London Online (free)
• London Lives 1690-1800 (free)
• Nineteenth Century British Pamphlets ('subscription, free to UK HE')
• Origins.net (subscription)*
• The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online 1674-1913 (free)

*The Origins.net collections searchable here include 'a substantial subset' of their material 'including abstracts of apprenticeship enrolments taken from the records of 60 of the City of London's livery companies, 1442-1850; abstracts of City of London settlement examinations from the parishes of St Botolph Aldgate and St Sepulchre, 1742-1868; and abstracts of Surrey and South London wills, 1470-1856'. You can see snippets of the results.

None of these databases is new: you can search them all individually already. What is interesting is that Connected Histories seems to be offering more than just searching across all these databases at once: if I understand it correctly then the original data from some of these resources have been used to create new indexes:

'Connected Histories has not created any new digital content. Instead, it provides integrated access to electronic content already available on distributed websites. Our search engine does not search these resources directly. Instead, it searches indexes we have created from the full content of each resource. Our approach to indexing depends on the nature of the electronic resource available:

• databases, such as the Clergy of the Church of England Database, and semi-structured sources where the text is marked up with xml tags, such as the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, were processed by extracting identified information on names, places and dates into indexes;
• text which is largely unstructured, such as the British Newspapers 1600-1900, was processed using natural language processing in order to identify names, places and dates in the original texts...

In theory, this should be a help to those trying to research a surname that is the same as a place name . . . if the natural language processing has been able to distinguish the two.

As they point out, the success rate varies from one data source to another, with OCR'd sources (e.g. the newspapers) coming off worst. It will be interesting to test it out and see what the results are like.

[Coromandel]

Oops, sorry, I forgot to give you the address! The home page is here:

http://www.
connectedhistories.org/Default.aspx

and advanced search here:

http://www.
connectedhistories.org/Search.aspx

[susan-y]

Another useful site to add to my favourites! Thank you....

I had a look around and tried a few names.... nothing from my tree so far, but lots of interesting tidbits about people with the same names anyway!

Sue

[Coromandel]

Try putting names in the keyword box too, as the natural language processing hasn't always recognised names as names:
I tried out a rare surname I'm researching, and got no results at all by putting the surname in the 'Family name' box, but eight results by using it as in a keyword search.

If you know the full name you're looking for, you can put it in the keyword box with double quotation marks around it. This seems to be more successful than putting in the surname and first name in separate boxes.