New source for Medfield, County Norfolk, Massachusetts

Question

Hi All,

Paul Harwood (Harwood-2709) and I have scanned and transcribed the Court Diary of Paul's ancestor John Baxter (Baxter-9235) for the period 1812 to 1822. Paul mentioned this source in a previous post.

https://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Space:Medfield%2C_County_of_Norwich%2C_Massachusetts:_Court_Diary_of_John_Baxter_1812_to_1822

This post is, firstly, to let people know that the resouce is now available, and secondly to ask if someone can add it to the Sources-Massachusetts page so people in the future know its there.

Finally I would like to thank Paul for making these family held records available to all.

Comments

I've added it to Sources-Massachusetts. Is the transcript available online?

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This is great... AND... the image quality of the PDF as posted on WikiTree currently is not very good. I read on the description page that you had to post a lower quality version due to WikiTree's size limits on file size.

Makes me think you should find an alternative server for storing the high resolution images. Have you considered donating a high-resolution version to NEHGS?

In either case, thanks for making this content available.

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I have some experience uploading large PDF files to archive.org. They can handle any size file (I think) and it will allow us to reference specific pages within the file, which is something that can't be done with a PDF file.

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High resolution images can be posted on Archive.org.  https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360001820212-How-to-upload-scanned-images-to-make-a-book

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Did you happen to create a MARC metadata record for any of the files you uploaded? I read the Library of Congress description of them and left more confused than when I began.

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I did not create a MARC record, that I am aware of.  Here is the record I created: https://archive.org/details/ostrom-schoolbook-images

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Those scans are really nice. Do you recall what resolution you were scanning at?

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Paul, those were scanned at the maximum resolution on my Brother printer/copier, 1200 DPI, They took a long time to scan. 

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See also: https://www.wikitree.com/photo/pdf/Pawling-112 , https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Ostrom_Schoolbook

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That's a wonderful free space page, Paul, and Peter.

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I was just about to compliment you on the page you created for the school book. I'm still very new to WikiTree (which is why I'm so grateful for Peter's help: He did all of the heavy lifting for anything to do with WikiTree) and I'm repeatedly surprised by just how solid the effort is here and how kind and helpful the people are.

Answer 1

I am ready to submit the high-resolution scans to archive.org. I want to make the list of subject tags as complete as possible. So far I have "Baxter" and "Medfield". I am open to suggestions. I would like to make it as easy as possible for people to stumble across this

Comments

You might need to create a new post for this Paul as no one else apart from me is probably looking at this post now. I could suggest Norfolk, Massachusetts, Court, Justice.

Answer 2

I am happy to make the high-res scans available. The low quality needed to observe the 10MB max on WikiTree was something that Peter and I discussed but had to accept as a fact of life. I have been drawing extensively on archive.org for historical material in tracing out my own genealogy so it only seems right to give something back.

There are 68 individual diary page scans, each about 3 to 5 MB. Unfortunately, because I was wary of damaging the binding, most of the even-numbered pages are somewhat out of focus in the top left. Also, because I was trying to minimize overall file size, I cropped the pages to different sizes depending on the amount of text they contain. I still have the uncropped files, so I can go back and re-crop the pages to a standard size, but there's not much I can do about the focus.

Peter and I have an Excel file that contains the transcripted litigant names and court dates indexed to the image files and pdf page numbers, and we are happy to make that available as well, though apparently we can't upload it to WikiTree. We did not do a verbatim transcript of the diary as most of the entries follow exactly the same format (as described on the free space page).

Comments

The Excel file can be printed to a PDF file and then merged with the PDF file of the scanned images, so there is one file that has everything. Once the Excel file is converted to PDF, it can then be uploaded to WikiTree.

The fact that the pages are cropped to different sizes should not be problem.