cuffie81 -
Wendy, thank you again for looking into this. I really hadn't expected you or anyone else to spend their weekend looking into it but I'm grateful never the less.
You're welcome! OFHS doesn't stop for weekends - there's transcribing, checking of transcripts, posting out of books and CDs, planning for WDYTYA in Birmingham in April ...
As for the scans I have found they've been great quality, so all credit to everyone at OFHS and OHC. Credit is due for the OFHS transcripts too. They were very useful prior to the scans and transcripts on Ancestry, and the OFHS transcripts are still proving more reliable than Ancestry's.
Thank you. It's worth mentioning that many OFHS CDs cover the twentieth century, beyond the Ancestry cut-off dates. For those parishes that aren't yet transcribed that far, volunteers are working with the scans to add transcribed data to the CDs. For instance, a volunteer has just finished transcribing Kidlington baptisms for the 20th century, and is starting on marriages. Anyone can join in, from anywhere in the world!
Re. viewing scans at the OHC, I had presumed the images were the same, it was how the images are viewed I was curious about. By the sounds of it OHC has their own viewer and doesn't rely on Ancestry for viewing the images. My thinking was that if certain scans do exist but they're not available on Ancestry (for whatever reason) I could always take a trip to the OHC (which isn't too far for me).
Let's start with some history! The whole scanning project took over a year, with 180 registers being checked out of OHC every fortnight and taken securely to the scanning facility.
After that OFHS had to consider how the scans could best be put on the internet, and then consider, with our legal advisors, the contract we would have to sign. Having signed a contract with Ancestry, and handed over the scans (should have photographed that moment in the Society's history!) there was then over a year before they went live on Ancestry, while Ancestry indexed them all.
One of OFHS's objectives is to make records available, and another is to preserve the records. We were therefore keen to make the scans available at OHC, such that the original registers would no longer be used, during the period before they were on the web. Alan Simpson, who has authored our Search Services, devised a viewing program, and it is that which you will have used.
Currently you can use it to view registers with records nearer to the present day than the Ancestry cutoff dates, in the registers we scanned, which were all those held at OHC at the time.
However - it gets better!! Registers have been deposited at OHC since the first scanning, and a second scanning has been carried out.
The computers at OHC are shortly to be replaced, with a new way of viewing the scans incorporated - and this will include the scans from the second pass.
Wendy
OFHS HelpDesk
