GenMassachusetts-L Archives

Archiver > GenMassachusetts > 2001-03 > 0985892472


From: David Blackwell <>
Subject: [GM-L] History of Taunton book
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 14:03:29 -0500
In-Reply-To: <200103281748.f2SHm5n19035@lists5.rootsweb.com>


As Janice said earlier,
The Free NE LHG Book Online Effort is now part of the USIGS library,
and I'm one of the USIGS volunteer librarians.
http://www.usigs.org/library/books/books.html
http://www.usigs.org/library/books/

My scanned page images and files for Taunton by Emery are now here
http://www.usigs.org/library/books/ma/Taunton1893/
These G4TIFF files are scans of a xerographic copy of the book.
http://www.usigs.org/library/books/ma/Taunton1893/Taun00.html
Note - Windows ME and 2000 have MUCH improved viewing capability of G4TIFF
images
from Win95/98/NT, even better that Irfanview. The 50% image resizing of
the 200 or 300
dpi G4TIFF images is excellant.

Pat Griffiths edited chapter 1 and I recovered it from the Google cache
and put it in the above directory just now.
http://www.usigs.org/library/books/ma/Taunton1893/taunton.html
I have not been able to contact Pat since genweb.net went down.
It is likely that she changed her email from aol.com
and aol does not tell senders that the account is no longer active.
I'll have to recover her History of Easton HTML pages from Google.
http://www.usigs.org/library/books/ma/Easton1886/east173.html
http://www.usigs.org/library/books/ma/Easton1886/east314ch19.html
(Easton with Norton and Mansfield were part of the Taunton North Purchase),
etc.
http://www.usigs.org/library/books/ma/Easton1886/
which has great JPG pictures and maps from the book
http://www.usigs.org/library/books/ma/Easton1886/EAST021MAP3SM.GIF
http://www.usigs.org/library/books/ma/Easton1886/east020NorthPurchase150dpiMap.jpg
78KB
http://www.usigs.org/library/books/ma/Easton1886/east450mapsurvey.jpg 324KB
http://www.usigs.org/library/books/ma/Easton1886/Easton1600.tif 275KB
http://www.usigs.org/library/books/ma/Easton1886/east684RRStation.jpg 217KB
While some of the genweb.net websites are now at rootsweb.com
like Sue Martins website -
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~massasoit/
Pat Griffiths ( of New Jersey) did not move hers there.
Since I have not been able to contact her,
I've slowly been recovering her website from the
http://www.google.com cache.

Can someone make a list of websites that were at genweb.net
and that are now at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/
e.g.
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~mckaughan/
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~barlow/ funny and slow Java mouse
cursor there.
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~nuck141/Nuckolls.html
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~abenaki/
or elsewhere.

To recover cache pages at Google, you do an advanced search
and limit the result to pages from the genweb.net DOMAIN.
e.g. search for Taunton or Easton ONLY at genweb.net in the Google advanced
search page.
then save the cached page. (and remove the google bits if you have time).

I did this for the King Butlers wonderful transcription of the Braintree
MBD Records
http://www.usigs.org/library/books/ma/Braintree1793/000.html
http://www.usigs.org/library/books/ma/Braintree1793/Contents.html
though 14 pages out of the 300+ pages were missing at google cache.
(Note Kingsley Bulter did an exact page by page transcription of the MsBsDs
of the book
(which is ordered by date of the event within MBD)
Frank Dyer http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~dyer/braintre.htm
did an alphabetic, database transcription, two different and both very
valuable efforts.
King Butler (of Canada) is another volunteer I have lost contact with.

Now the History of Taunton by Samuel Emery, published in 1893 has its page
image online.
Pat edited or retyped Chapter 1, but has not had time to do any more.
We need more volunteers to OCR or retype individual chapters.
http://docmorph.nlm.nih.gov/docmorph/ single page free OCR service.
This History of Taunton was scanned in from a xerographic copy of the book
so the images are mediocre or poor but very readable. 2 pages per image
usually.
The History of Easton was scanned in at 300dpi from an original unbound book
and so it OCRed much better.
If anyone buys OmniPage10 (for $99.95 upgrade from anything)
from Scansoft http://www.scansoft.com/ I might help advise you.

I should add, This Free Books Online Effort
should NOT be referred to as Blackwell's Free Books Online Effort X X X X
IT is OUR collective EFFORT
So refer to it as the Free LHG Books Online Effort ( LHG - Local History
and Genealogy)
or just the Free Books Online Effort,
which has several volunteers (AND NEEDS MORE)
and I'm the lead volunteer and a primary coordinator. My focus is New
England and Derbyshire.
There is no formal organization, you pick a book or a chapter to put online
and you TELL us you are doing that book or chapter, and report your
progress each month.
The Free Books Online Effort more of a concept than an organization,

I would like individual USGenWeb state and/or county coordinators to
coordinate
or have someone coordinate the books on each state, and individual family
name groups
claim each family genealogy. There are too many books for me to take care of.

Many other groups and individuals are putting other kinds of books online
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/bplist/
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/subjectstart?F Local History

Seems to me too much time is wasted organizing, and make rules,
and bickering and not enough time is spend just doing the work of putting
books online.
These are mostly out of copyright books, anyone can copy them for personal
use,
I'm relying on peer pressure and personal integrity to credit the volunteers
who do the work. And we want to put links to newer copyrighted works on
related subjects.

I'm just a techie who has a slightly fanatical interest in
old books, local history, genealogy, and maps.
More later if I find the time.

Best Regards,
David C. Blackwell
Groveland, Mass. (member NEHGS, MSMD)
NE LHG Free Books Online Effort coordinator
http://www.usigs.org/library/books/books.html
where I've tried to credit each volunteer where the book is linked in,
and volunteers put their names in each chapter they edit, type in, or put
online,
Old Links to genweb.net should now go to the above USIGS directory.
Too much work remains to be done.



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