Wednesday, April 01, 2009

LMA at Ancestry - name indexes

I noted in a previous blog entry that one of the three new databases of records from the London Metropolitan Archives now up at Ancestry has not been indexed by name. Word from Ancestry, via a response to my question on their blog, is that they are focusing their time on indexing the parish records in the LMA series, and may go back to index some of the less critical LMA databases later on.

I do hope they eventually go back and index them all, but I certainly agree that the parish registers are a higher priority.

I also wish that while we're waiting for Ancestry to maybe get around to indexing that database, someone out there in internet-land would put together a detailed list of the individual documents/registers within that one "records" database. That would be a much more helpful finding aid than taking forever to drill down to see what documents are in there, then not knowing exactly how the images are structured, then giving up before you get to the real information (like I almost did with the example below). Entries like...

"Register of Apprentices Bound or Assigned by the Board of Guardians of the Parish of St Johns Hampstead 1851 to 1890 - LMA ref HPBG/110 - images 2 to 11 lists apprentices alphabetically with a folio number, this folio number corresponds to images 12 to 20 which contains the detailed entry including their age, parents, date and details of apprenticeship entered into"

...with a link to the Ancestry page which links to the images for that set of documents. Wouldn't that be 100 times better? Anyone want to put that together? I'm already occupied with my Wing vision......

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