Hello everybody,
just a shortish update to bring things up to speed with the status of the ADM8 Project.
Larry and I have been hard at work, trying to get all of the deployment reports in volume 1 finished. We are well on our way, with quite a few reports ready to be checked before they are made live. There does remain some issues with things, for example with the reports from 1689 newly entered officers did not create officer service records, so I need to go through every report and make sure that records are created for all the new officers (who were saved to the database properly).
Another major task is going through the reports- live and not-yet-live and sorting out all the times that it was unclear which ship was specified in a line. In some cases, for example with hired ships where you’ll often have several with the same name, this is very difficult to do properly, especially if mention are years apart and there are no commander’s/master’s names in common. Solving this issue will mean that when researchers look up the records for individual ships, as many records as possible will come up properly. The good news is that the new interfaces for transcription and for viewing reports (and the new database structures) seem to be everything we hoped they would be, in terms of the flexibility of structure and order, which bodes well for future transcription such as the fleet lists that have multiple abstracts.
We do have another feature that we’re working on. Larry and I have identified a number of issues or mistakes with ADM 8 volume 1, including the use of incorrect names for officers, or pages bound in the wrong order. We are in the process of compiling a document that we will publish and update so that researchers can be less confused by ADM 8 volume 1 (and 2) than we have been.
we hope that by the end of the summer, all of ADM 8 volume 1 and a good chunk of volume 2 will be transcribed and live.
Does anything in your research indicate which political party they supported or received support from? I am thinking about doing research to see how often in pre-georgian times politics caused failure in naval action. I recall reading where an admiral didn’t support his commander because he was supported by the opposition party to his. Now it could have been the writers opinion but it old also be a trait.
Hello, no- these documents are just the Royal Navy’s deployment lists, so they don’t contain that kind of information.
Will your database be searchable for the dates various ships were paid off? For instance, if someone wants to know which ships were paid off between 1 January 1713 and 31 December 1715, could he/she get a list of ships? Likewise, could the database yield a list of ships that went onto sea duty between two dates?
It hasn’t been built with that functionality at the moment- the functions currently limited to
a) View individual reports
b) View all mentions (from the uploaded data) of a single ship
c) View all mentions (from the uploaded data) of a single individual
d) View all mentions (from the uploaded data) of a single location.
Once I get all the reports in ADM 8 volume 1 live (which I’m hoping to do by New Years) I’m going to consider adding more pre-programmed functions. So that would certainly be one possibility. But at the moment, the focus is on correcting some underlying issues with the data (mostly with differentiating small hired vessels that may or may not only appear once in the records), and getting more records up live.
But that said, depending on the length of the period you’re looking for, it wouldn’t be too difficult to do that task “manually”- you would call up each of the reports for the period you want to look at and see how many ships came into service.
A significant portion of the reports have a table at the bottom that shows how many ships and men were in service that month- supposedly, anyways, and some of those tables even show the number of ships fitting out and that kind of thing.
We don’t differentiate between kinds of mentions in a report- if a ship or person is mentioned in a report, then that’s a presence (as opposed to an absence). So even if I wrote up a quick function, it would provide- on a report-by-report basis- how many ships were in service, but you’d have to go to the individuals reports to find out the details.
Actually, that would be a rather quick thing to put together, I’ll put it on the to-do list.
Thanks for getting back to me.