Program features |
Comments |
1. The program is supplied on a single CD-ROM with an install routine, setup.exe in its root directory. Running this will install the MACH Bucks 1891 search engine to your hard drive and create a Windows Start menu entry for launching the program. All of the data remains on the CD-ROM from where it is searched. |
The data remains on the CD-ROM to avoid putting some very large indexed database files onto your hard drive. It is not possible to run the program with data on your hard disk since the search engine checks to make sure it is reading from a CD drive. |
2. MACH contains a gazetteer that lists the following for each parish: Church name, old hundred, modern hundred, registration district (in 1891), ecclesiastical jurisdiction, area, and all hamlets and places within it that are named in the 1891 census data. The total population for all the census years from 1801 to 1901 for any parish can be seen in a graphical display. Distances between parishes can be calculated. |
The population changes in the 19th century were dramatic with a large-scale exodus from many rural parishes in the second half of the century and growth of towns and industrial centres at the same time. This information is very useful in trying to understand why people moved from one census decade to the next. |
3. The entire census entries for Buckinghamshire in 1891 are included - over 185,000 people. The birth place names have been extensively standardised to make them consistent and mappable to civil parishes. Chapman county and coutry codes are used. |
Although this standardisation may introduce the occasional error, it is nevertheless a useful exercise for mapping, as over 90% of the people who said they were born in Bucks can now have their birth place identified. This makes it possible to study patterns of migration between place of birth and place of census for subsets of the total population. |
4. Two search engines are provided. The normal one allows you to search on any field using AND logic between them. Drop-down lists of all known occupations, parishes, relationships and handicaps are provided for search term entry. Wild cards can be used in any position and in any combination. Compound searches provide for multiple searches on the same field, any Boolean logic between fields, and any sort order for the results. |
The ability to search using the * wildcard at the beginning of a text string and searching on fields such as occupation and address are notable omissions from the LDS 1881 v. 2.0 search engine that MACH adds in. |
5.Search results are displayed in a grid that can be resized, reordered and printed.Graphs of the mean age by gender and gender split for the results can be created. Full details of any record can be seen. |
The grid of results shows a scrollable group of 24 records at a time. This is an ideal format for scanning through data, and columns can be reordered to show relevant fields next to one another if needed. |
6.Double clicking any search result drills down to show a reconstruction of the census enumerator's book from which it was taken. All heads of household are identified with a coloured band to assist identification of families. Book pages can be scrolled backwards and forwards and printed. |
Drilling down to see the 'as enumerated' view for any census event is a good way of seeing what kind of neighbourhood someone lived in. Printed page reports should match those from the facsimile microfilm obtainable from the PRO, and can be a good way of checking for census completeness. |
7.Search results can be mapped to a civil parish map of the county by any of 6 methods: by census parish, by census parish weighted for area, by census parish weighted for population, by census parish weighted for population density, by place of birth, and by place of birth including border parishes from neighbouring counties. |
The different patterns of place of census and place of birth can be an index of migration. The weighted views are useful for occupations (by area) and for one name studies and finding a family focus (by population). The ability to toggle on and off the border parishes shows cross-county boundary migration. |
8. Parishes and places whose whereabouts are unknown to you can be identified either by clicking them on the map or clicking their name in the map results summary grid. |
Clicking a parish name in the results grid makes it light up a bright lime green colour for half a second to identify it on the map. Clicking any colour-filled part of the map tells you the parish name and the number of events there. |
9.Similar maps by county in the British Isles can be drawn, but this time only showing county of birth since the census county is Bucks by definition! The country of origin of all people in a search result can be plotted on a pie chart. |
Patterns of migration into Bucks are only really relevant for the growing industrial centres and railway towns, although some occupations show interesting attributes too. |
10.The maps can be configured to any of three preset colour scales and thresholds for colour change. Any individual map colour and threshold can be edited with a couple of mouse clicks. |
You can alter the appearance of the maps to suit your taste and the amount of data they contain. |
11.All maps can be previewed, printed and saved. All search results can be saved as CSV files. |
You can include any data from MACH into your reports, family documents and external databases. |
12.A comprehensive integrated context-sensitive help file is included. It contains a tutorial that walks you through the major features of the program. |
Press F1 at any stage in the running of the program for assistance. |
