St Lawrence's--Proofreading Stage

No, it wasn't a two-week break. I got down to work proofreading St Lawrence's Ward on the Monday and am now part way through the last of the four districts.

I think I have said before that I did the original transcription of "Larry" in a hurry prior to a trip to Canada. Does it show! The full correction is going to take quite a few days. Yesterday I discovered an error in reading the folio numbers that followed on for more than 100 households. Folio numbers are the vital reference to original sources and I use them as identification codes in my database. All these people will have to have their codes altered to link them to the city directories correctly.

The quality of some of the folios are so bad that FamilySearchIndexing didn't even attempt to transcibe them. This makes it difficult because in these cases there is no facility in Ancestry to "fill in the blanks". On most folios it is possible to read the ages and determine the number of people in the household. Had the indexer entered the ages it would have allowed others to have a go at the names.

Just for fun I decided to see if I could find one of these omitted households in the 1871 census. In Ancestry the left hand side of Folio 649 was no more that a smear, but there were ages given for ten people. It looked like the first nine were a family and the tenth a servant. On the reverse the signature was definitely that of David Gorman. This must have been one of those folios that should not have been bleached when the census films were renovated in the past year, because I had made some guesses as to names in my database. I couldn't have done so working with what Ancestry provides now.

David Gorman was aged 60 in 1861 so looking him up in the 1871 census was a bit of a long shot, but one might as well try. There he was aged 72 and still in St Lawrence with his wife, Margaret, and five of his children--the ones whose names were pretty well illegible.

I tried a couple of other folios of the same quality. One was successful, but the other must have belonged to a family who decided Toronto was not the place to seek their fortune after all.