Edith Eleanor (Neapolitan school). Agreements for this top sail schooner, the last to be built in Aberystwyth, are included among the Aberystwyth Shipping Records.

In addition to listing the crew on each separate voyage, the crew lists contain details as to their age and place of birth, home address, previous vessel on which they served, date of leaving their present ship, in what capacity they were employed, together with reasons for leaving, if relevant. The official logbooks kept by the ship’s master record accidents, illnesses, birth or death on board, misconduct, deserters, punishment, and other entries relevant to the conduct of crew members – for example, skulduggery on board the ship Lovina in July 1867 is recorded in an entry relating to John Nicholson, aged 37, a cook from London, who threatened the captain and other crew members with murder and mutiny were he not discharged at Cagliari.

The harsh realities of life on the ocean waves are brought into stark relief in entries recording the death of individuals and the fate of vessels shipwrecked or lost at sea. From accidents on board ship (e.g. Thomas Oliver Jones from Aberystwyth, master of the ship Ellen Beatrice, who died at Cowes ‘by an iron hook falling on his head, from the boom, whil[st] in collision with ketch Alford’, 1910); to drowning at sea (e.g. John H. Jones, aged 15 from Borth, Cardiganshire, who fell overboard and was lost off Dover, 1886, or the crew of the vessel Maelota, lost with all hands in Holyhead Bay on passage from Dublin to Swansea, 1883); and crew members succumbing to illnesses and diseases on distant shores (e.g. John Owen, aged 21, of Blaenau Ffestiniog, who died in 1909 of typhoid in Genitschesk [Ukraine], John Thomas, apprentice, who died in hospital at Santos, Brazil, of yellow fever, 1877, or Samuel Morris, aged 28, of Cardigan, who died of leprosy at Rangoon, 1868), the fate, often tragic, of individuals and ships can be traced from one voyage to the next over several decades. Whilst children from the age of 12 onwards are often listed as crew members, Evan Davies, 9 years old, from Llansanffraid, Cardiganshire, included in 1857 as a crew member on board the vessel Ellen (‘this being his first ship’), is surely the youngest crew member listed among the records.

Names and signatures of ten Chinese crew members on board the vessel Adela S. Hills bound from Liverpool to Nagapattinam, India, 1876.

A volunteering project to transcribe available information relating to all crew members on ships registered at Aberystwyth is now underway at the Library. The end product will comprise a searchable database containing thousands of names of crew members, ships and ports, both in the UK and abroad. For more information, or to register an interest, please contact:
Gwyneth Davies, Volunteers’ Co-ordinator
Phone: 01970 632991
E-mail: gwd@llgc.org.uk

Alwyn J. Roberts

The Merthyr Telegraph for 7 June 1878 reported that a rumour that Pope Leo XIII was contemplating abdication were unfounded.

Thus startling events or rumours of startling events such as Papal abdications and resignations are not the preserve of the modern media.

On a minor but curious detail one should note that there was talk of Leo XIII abdicating whereas Benedict XVI resigned. Perhaps an interesting use of language reflecting how the Papacy has changed between 1878 and 2013.

Wyn Thomas

The picture here is of an enamelled metal network map of the Great Western Railway, such as would have appeared on the walls of many station buildings before the Second World War. It shows the network at its zenith before the ravages of war, economic decline and competition from road transport lead to the demise of many of the smaller branch lines.

A case in point is the Carmarthen to Aberystwyth line, which formed a link between South & North Wales in the West. Since the line closed in the 1960s it has been necessary to cross into England in order to travel from North to South Wales by rail.

The line suffered during the war when rolling stock and heavy loads (such as tanks) were carried over bridges not designed for the weight. The weakened bridges were not considered economical to repair or replace and further damage due to flooding caused the Northern part of the line to be closed at the end of 1964 and the Southern part closed to passengers in early 1965, though freight traffic continued on part of the line until 1973.

Many people have called for the line to be reopened; but while parts of the line have reopened as a heritage railway other parts have been lost to development.

The National Library has a key role in preserving information about the history of railways in Wales; we hold a large collection of maps and plans showing routes and detailed track plans and sections of proposed and actual railways as well as designs for buildings, bridges and even rolling stock. The collection is especially good for Northeast Wales and Central Wales, but has examples covering the whole country. We are continually adding to the collection and hope to receive a large amount of new material in coming years.

Huw Thomas

METS is a data structure for describing and managing complex digital library objects. Administrative, structural, and descriptive metadata is created for the webpage to hold all the pieces together, allow them to be managed, and allow them to be displayed and accessed online.

The Library has developed a MetsEditor for the purpose of creating METS documents – this used to be done by hand, and was a long and laborious process, which has thankfully now been mechanised.

A METS document is split into several sections:

METS header (METS Hdr) – contains data about the METS document itself – creator, editor, scanning dates, etc.

Descriptive metadata (dmdSec): describes the digital version of the manuscript

Administrative metadata (amdSec): describes the original manuscript source, how the digital files were created and stored, and intellectual property rights

File section (fileSec): lists all the electronic versions of the manuscript

Structural map (structMap): outlines the hierarchical structure of the digital images, and links the elements needed to ensure that separately digitized files (the different pages of the digitized manuscript) are structured appropriately.

The completed XML document is now ready to be passed on to the web development team, who will prepare the interface for the manuscript on the Library’s Digital Mirror.

Morfudd Jones

The project plan called for the digitisation of around 200,000 pages of audio, audio visual, archival, manuscript, newspaper, periodical, photographic material from the collections of the partners either from or relating directly to the period of the war and the creation of a unified interface. While listing all the material that we’re digitising would take far too long, here is a selection which gives a taste of what will be available.

NLW MS23059A; the diary 1916-17 and papers of Edmund Davies (1891-1979)

• Over 95,000 pages of newspapers. These include material in both English and Welsh and from all parts of Wales. We’ve also tried to ensure that different political and religious viewpoints are represented. Thanks to work undertaken by Canolfan Bedwyr at Bangor University we will be providing a facility to search Welsh language newspaper material in English and machine translation of individual articles.

• Archives from all institutions including the papers of the Welsh Army Corps and Aberystwyth Comforts for Fighters fund from the National Library of Wales, Edward Thomas archives from Cardiff University, papers relating to the poet Hedd Wyn and the conscientious objector David Thomas from Bangor.

• Minutes of the South Wales Miners’ Federation for the war period from Swansea University.

• Student magazines from Cardiff, Aberystwyth and Trinity St. David.

• Over 500 minutes of audio and audio visual material from BBC Cymru Wales and oral history recordings from the South Wales Miners’ Library.

• We have been working on preparation and scanning on material since the start of 2012, and between October 2012 and February 2013 material from most partners came to the National Library for digitisation. Cardiff University and BBC Cymru Wales have undertaken this part of the work themselves.

• While there is still some material to digitise, work is now moving towards the development of the website along with all the behind the scenes work to ingest digitised material into NLW’s digital repository. This includes cataloguing, development and use of volunteers to check the transcriptions of the audio material. We’re also working on publicising the project and making sure that once this vast amount of material is available freely on the web, universities, schools, community and history groups and individual researchers will be able to make use of it.

Over the next few weeks teams from the National Library will be visiting a number of locations across Wales and asking people to bring in any records they may have which relate to the experience of the people of Wales during the war; including records of chapels, societies and sports clubs. If you have anything stashed away in your attic, we’d love you to bring it along.

This has been a wonderful project to work on and we’ve found a wealth of fascinating material. We make regular updates on the progress of the project on our own project blog where you can see some of the examples of the material that we’ve digitised. You can also find a full list of the material there too.

Our aim is to open up this hidden body of information for others to re-use and to support the sombre commemoration of this terrible event in world history one hundred years on. If you know of any local groups, projects or schools that would be interested in using our digitised resources I’d be really glad to hear from you. You can contact us at cymruww1@llgc.org.uk.

Rob Phillips

Whilst Austen (1775-1817) is surely as popular in Wales as elsewhere, it’s fair to say her Welsh connections are few and far between. Therefore it was a nice and unexpected surprise, when cataloguing a manuscript recently, to stumble upon its writer’s connection with one of the most famous authors in the English language.

The manuscript in question, NLW MS 24023A, is a journal of a picturesque tour in the summer of 1812, mainly through Wales and parts of Ireland. Amongst its quite detailed and lengthy entries are descriptions of the sights of the lower Wye valley and the journey up through Wales to Holyhead, then onwards from Dublin to Killarney and its lakes.

The author of the journal doesn’t name himself at any point in the volume. However there are enough clues – his initials, mentions of friends and family (his travelling companion is his brother Maximilian), references to Kent and Harrow – to allow one to work out his identity after a bit of research. He was William Osmund Hammond (1790-1863) of St. Alban’s Court, Nonington, Kent.

St Alban’s Court is barely a mile from Goodnestone, the family home of Elizabeth Bridges (1773-1808) – wife of Jane Austen’s brother Edward (1767-1852) – and not far from Edward’s main estate at Godmersham Park. Both are places Austen visited often over the years. The Hammonds and their friends and neighbours the Plumptres of Fredville (who have a cameo appearance in the journal, following a chance meeting in Cheltenham) were part of the Kent county society that Austen knew well.

Austen mentions William Hammond, in passing, a grand total of twice in her surviving letters (see Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. by Deirde Le Faye, 4th edn (Oxford, 2011)). Discussing a concert in her letter of 6 November 1813, she writes ‘The Faggs & the Hammonds were there, Wm Hammond the only young Man of renown’ (Letters, p. 262). It’s good to know that the impression made by the author of our journal, such as it was, seems at least to have been favourable.

Rhys M. Jones

Sam Shaw:
“When the project with the tours opened up I was incredibly excited. This was a chance to do something really exciting and incredibly rare and unique. The experience was fantastic. The master class in handling manuscripts was so useful, not only to the task at hand but also in gaining skills to aid me in the pursuit of a career working within museums, hopefully with more objects such as the Boston Manuscript.”

Kat Donohue:
“Having the rare opportunity to volunteer on the Boston Manuscript project at the NLW is an experience I will never forget. From the training day right up to the end of the tour I was involved in, everything was extremely exciting. Of course there were nerves when it came to handling pages of the manuscript itself, but they soon vanished as I enjoyed showing members of the public one of the best pieces of Welsh history.”

Entrusted with the care of the original manuscript, both volunteers worked with Library staff to present the story of the volume’s history, and its consolidation and repair within recent months:

Kat Donohue:
“I have definitely learned a number of new skills, including how to handle rare documents and some preservation methods, and I hope to carry these skills with me to further my career in archiving and the conservation/preservation of rare documents. I would like to thank the NLW and it’s staff for giving me this amazing opportunity.”

Sam Shaw:
“The tour itself was exciting to say the least. This opportunity was incredible and I am truly grateful for the opportunity.”

Current volunteering opportunities are advertised on the National Library’s webpage.

This will be the seventh consecutive year that the Library has attended, to what has become great showcase of our work and collections. The Library is considered as the premier source for all Welsh genealogical research, and we hope that the visitors to this weekend’s event will visit the Library’s stand to take advantage of our presence to discuss their Welsh ancestry with the experts attending, under the banner of the Welsh Help Desk (Stand 336).

The Library’s unparalleled resources include parish registers, probate records, nonconformist chapel records, estate papers, maps, photographs, drawings, paintings, pedigree books, Great Sessions Records, local history books, journals, newspapers, census etc.., and especially for this event, we will have access to several indexes which are not currently available on our online website.

At this year’s event, Beryl Evans, the Library’s Research Services Manager, will be holding two workshops. The first, Welsh Newspapers Online, will be held on Saturday 23 February at 12.00pm, and will showcase the new and exciting online development of digitising Welsh newspapers pre 1910. This will undoubtedly be of great interest to everyone interested in Welsh history and research. This is your opportunity to be among the first to hear about this latest development in the Library’s free on-line resources. On Sunday, 24 February, 3.40pm, Beryl will be discussing Discovering Your Welsh Roots – a beginners guide.  Seats to both events are limited, so pre-booking is essential!

Guests visiting our stand over the weekend will include Huw Stephens, Radio 1 and BBC Radio Cymru presenter – so come along to meet Huw!

For show and ticket details visit: www.whodoyouthinkyouarelive.com

The collection includes audio tapes of interviews with people from the South Wales coalfields, who lived through the war, sharing their experiences; the aim is to make this collection fully accessible.

The work involves checking and editing existing transcriptions of the audio tapes, as well as creating new transcriptions.  Volunteers will receive the audio tapes on a USB stick and will be asked to transfer the content to a ‘Word’ document, which can then be e-mailed to the project officer.  Guidelines will be provided.

Essential requirements:
•    The ability to work independently;
•    IT skills – ‘Word’, e-mail, and experience of working with Realplayer or Quicktime;
•    Excellent literacy skills in Welsh and/or English;
•    An eye for detail  and methodical.

Volunteers can work from home at their convenience.

For more information, or to register an interest, contact:
Gwyneth Davies, Volunteers’ Co-ordinator,
Phone – 01970 632991
E-mail – gwd@llgc.org.uk

The projections mark the start of a month of exhibitions and events organised by the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation to celebrate the completion of Your Paintings. The Library has displayed almost 2,000 works from its collections on the website and you can view them all here