On Aug 26, 9:34 pm, Cheri Mello <[email protected]> wrote: > Repost for Katharine Baker: > >...He was very helpful during my 2004 > visit to Horta, when I spent a good deal of time in the Regional > Archives.
Katharine, I'd be curious to know more about your (or anyone else's) experience in the archives in Horta. As I posted previously, my experience there this past June was kind of a bust. They would not let me look at any of the actual record books. They pointed me to a computer set aside for "genealogical research only" that linked to the Centro de Conhecimento web site with scans of the record books (http://pg.azores.gov.pt/drac/cca/ig/), which I had looked at before. The web site is organized by island and freguesia; for Pico they only list three frequesias: São Roque, Madaleina, and Lajes. When you select one you eventually get to pages with hundreds of links that are in no order that I can ascertain. Each link goes to a bunch of documents from a particular time period (I think), but there is no way to tell what that is before you click on it. Here is an example: http://pg.azores.gov.pt/drac/cca/biblioteca_digital/PSRQPNB1764-1783%5CPSRQPNB1764-1783_item1%5Cindex.html (BTW, I can not get any of these links to work on my computer at home; they all say "The page can not be found."). I can understand them wanting to go the scanning route, so they don't have tons of people pawing through the original record books and eventually destroying them. But not all of the records have been scanned yet, and the scans themselves are often too faint to read. I did not get the sense that anyone there specialized in this material or knew much about how it was organized. And the computer had a sign on it that said you could only use it for (I think) 30 minutes at a time! Not very user friendly... Did I miss something? Or was this your experience too? I only had one afternoon to spend there, so it wasn't like I had much time to figure it all out. On the upside, the new library building is very nice, and a couple of the librarians made an effort to help me in spite of the language gap. Steve (Peters) -- To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. Follow the confirmation directions when they arrive. For more options, such as changing to List, Digest, Abridged, or No Mail (vacation) mode, log into your Google account and visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Azores. Click in the blue area on the right that says "Join this group" and it will take you to "Edit my membership."
