At RootsTech 2024, FamilySearch announced a new full text search that uses AI to transcribe images of handwritten and typed text into machine-readable format. This allows searching before any indexing is done. It also allows the searching of relatively unstructured … Continue reading →
In 2015, Bram Hoonhout, then a PhD student working on the 18th century history of Essequibo and Demerara, alerted me to the existence of references to Hendrik, Jan and Nicolaas van Cooten in the letterbooks of Theodore Barrell, a merchant … Continue reading →
Tim Sherratt, historian and hacker, has been devising creative ways of mining and displaying the digital collection of cultural institutions, the majority Australian, for some years. Many of these have explored the Trove collection, but a current project is a … Continue reading →
Costa, Emilia. Crowns of glory, tears of blood : the Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. As a teenager old family letters about the Van Cooten family in Australia triggered my interest in family history. … Continue reading →
James Benjamin Edwards, jeweller of Bendigo, was a well connected and well respected citizen. He was also my wife’s great-grandfather. He was a stalwart of the Forest Street Methodist Church, including being a trustee, chairman of the Bendigo Chamber of … Continue reading →
Hendrik Van Cooten was a plantation and slave owner. In Britain, in August 1833, the Slave Emancipation Act was passed, giving all slaves in the British empire their freedom, albeit after a set period of years. Plantation owners received compensation … Continue reading →
In a previous item I referred to the Australian Newspapers on line project. There are a number of other resources that I have encountered in my research. The first I would like to mention is the transcription of Guyana colonial … Continue reading →
The National Library of Australia released in December 2008 the first stage of their project to digitise out of copyright newspapers. They are creating a free online service that will enable full-text searching of newspaper articles. This is a really fantastic project, … Continue reading →
Someone contacted me recently trying to determine if he was connected to the Annie Jones lurking in the Van Cooten tree. The information I had for her was sparse, so the contact prompted me to do a little more research. … Continue reading →
In working out the equivalent value in today’s money of the legacies that Anna Maria left, I found the Measuring Worth site. Very useful for gaining some idea of equivalent values of money, but also a little confusing as the different … Continue reading →