Just returned from a research trip to the UK where I spent time at the wonderful U.K. Archives at Kew. So much material is digitized or transcribed these days I wondered if I really needed to spend all that time in the bright modern facilities sitting with 200-300 year old home office correspondence. The answer is yes.
Looking over coroner reports from between 1820 – 1824, looking at deaths on the hulks, I’d have never noticed it if I hadn’t held the actual papers, and looked at the witnesses seals. Sometime over those years, a coroner’s panel “assembled of 12 good and lawful men” moved from more educated participants to those who could not sign their names but rather left their marks. Not sure what it means, if anything to the Hulks’ story but it seems to me that bureaucratically at least, you’d get easier agreement as a representative of the King’s Majesty and a medical person from semiliterate citizens than from those who might ask questions. Or maybe coroner Moses Greetham just ran out of men to sit on his panels after a spate of drownings off the Racoon convict hulk.
That, combined with the handwritten marginalia is so valuable, I wonder how researchers in the future will manage with just a trove of texts and e-mails.
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