Another short form I recall seeing and using in the 1970s was w/ which stood for ‘with’, an alternative to the lower case c with the slanted stress mark. I believe the lower case c with stress mark is derived from the Latin ‘cum’, meaning ‘with’. Another term I saw, particularly in ads for camera equipment was w/o which stood for ‘without’, as in ‘body only,w/o lens’.

While it is regrettable that official bodies don’t always permanently retain listings of community names, especially if those communities are at some point amalgamated with or absorbed into other communities or are abandoned and become ghost towns, contemporary maps of the area, from when such a community did exist, may be very helpful in locating ‘lost’ communities.

One of the benefits of ‘geo-tagging’, offered in many cellular (mobile) phones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant), as well as a few D-SLR and other digital cameras, is the ability to include, in the IPTC data, precise longitude, latitude, and elevation of the camera’s position when each photo is exposed. An alternative method of geo-tagging photos if neither built-in nor external add-on GPS capability is available with a digital or film camera, but an external GPS unit or cell phone with GPS display capability is available, is to take a photo showing the GPS display with the general scene so that the GPS information can later be added to the image(s) after they have been transferred to a computer, using Google Earth or Google Maps. Such information will help people in the future to determine the location for each photograph, even though the physical features at those coordinates have changed significantly since a particular photo was taken. If a shot of a ‘Welcome to …’ sign is included in a group of photos from that community, a comparison of its GPS information with that of the other group photos will give a definite location, even if the community as such eventually vanishes.

Art Taylor

While I understand the point of view that nearly everyone uses a keyboard of one kind or another these days, and very little ‘writing’ is actually done by hand, I see this practice as being a very real problem in the future for anyone trying to read today’s hand-written documents, let alone any of the documents we consider to be archives. It seems to me that future generations will be faced with the same kind of problem trying to interpret handwriting as many of us have trying to interpret ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Other than introducing hand-writing as part of the curriculum for future archivists and historians, I don’t see a ready solution to this future problem.

Reference to books of frequency of use of specific letters, such as might be used by code-breakers, may be helpful. If one can find a particular letter form frequently in a given document, it might be linked to a particular letter of the alphabet in terms of its frequency of occurrence.

If the lettering in a document is badly faded or very light, such as a lead pencil’s mark, scanning the document at a high resolution (at least 300 dots per inch) to enlarge the image, yields a digital image where the contrast can be easily increased in software such as Adobe Photoshop Elements. If the document text is in coloured ink, the use of a complementary colour filter in software, or in front of the lens of a digital camera used to photograph the document, will also help to increase the contrast. If photographing a document, refer to books about film photography using black-and-white film and colour filters for more information about this aspect.

Art Taylor

One point of interest is that some legal documents have terms that are not now in general use or standard phrases. For example old systems titles almost always had a reference to buildings and other things which is a stock phrase whether or not the land had buildings on it. It does not indicate that a building such as a house was on the land or not it merely covers the situation where a house or other buildings or fences …etc were on the land.

I have found that purchasing a few of the older legal texts helps understand Old System titles and selection files because in those days old documents were often encountered by lawyers.

Another point to note is that the Geographical Names Board does not necessarily hold information on old or obsolete place names. It would be good if they, did but they don’t. For example the small mining town Argenton near Emmaville was active for 10 years but there is no trace of it on the Geographical Names Broad but the Aregenton at Lake Macquarie is listed. This is not a criticism of them but a warning about the incomplete nature of the information.