Workington Albums picture index

WORKINGTON ALBUMS PICTURE INDEX

Since the 1980s, over 20 albums of old photographs of Workington in Cumbria have been published, each containing scores of pictures- but only two or three of them have indexes. In a moment of irritation, I decided to compile a master index to all the others, and make it available online (actually, not quite all: another unindexed album was published just before I finished work- I may add it if somebody buys me a copy for Christmas). This index includes not just locations, but personal names, dates, and a guide to the sort of subject matter in each photo (e.g. cars, or football).

Although this index is designed as a database, with separate fields for picture source, street/area, location details, date, and topics, it is presented online as a single list, with the fields separated by _ marks (there's a separate list of the actual books, which are referred to in the index by codes indicating the book / page-number). You can perform simple searches in this list using your browser's "find in page" facility (first click at a random point in the frame containing the list, or you will only be searching the page heading!). However, it would be more convenient both for you and my Internet Service Provider if you copy the entire list and save it on your own computer. Feel free to amend your own version, and to contact me with suggestions for improvements.

TECHNICAL STUFF (MOST FOLKS CAN SKIP THIS BIT)

You should even be able to copy it into your own database software. If your database program allows you to choose the field separators when pasting, then simply choose _ , otherwise paste the data into a word processor and use "find and replace" to change all the _ characters to a character your database will accept (if you do this, don't forget to check whether the data already contains instances of the chosen character; for example some software uses the ordinary comma , to separate fields when pasting). Don't forget, before you start playing around with the index in your database, that it's useful to add a sequential reference number field to each entry.

If you have a fairly sophisticated database program, you may like to get more adventurous and split the single "Topic" field for each entry into separate fields for each topic listed. You'll find that within the "Topic" field I have used the semi-colon ; as a separator. Also, I have tried to be fairly consistent in the way I have handled the topic data; for example, names of individuals depicted are given as: Surname, Forename/initials :Title if any, whereas names of individuals mentioned for other reasons but not depicted are given simply as: Title/forename/initials Surname.

This database is deliberately designed to be Workington-centric (specifically, entries for places outside Workington have the place-name in the field normally reserved for the street-name, and the street-name in the location details field). If anybody's interested in the possibility of expanding the database to include other major towns, I can supply a more suitable version.

A NOTE OF CAUTION

Please bear in mind that the information in this index is based almost entirely on what is presented in the original books. Many fields, particularly dates, contain only an x, indicating that no information is available (and that I don't fancy hazarding a guess). Dates are indeed the least reliable information in this database, and should be taken with a huge pinch of salt, even when they give an exact year. Years followed by c (e.g. 1935c) indicate approximations, years followed by s (e.g. 1920s) indicate decades.

OK, you have been warned. ON TO THE INDEX