As I've just posted the 1941 Jurors List online, now's a good chance to talk about using the Jurors Lists for research. This list is also a bit different as I've used OCR (optical character recognition) to convert the scanned document into text, so I'll give some tips if you're thinking about using it. Then finally some thoughts on sharing this type of work.
1. What you can find in a Jurors List?
This list is a snapshot of Hong Kong in early 1941. Let's see what it can tell us about a couple of the authors of our wartime diaries.
1.1 Barbara Anslow
Unfortunately Barbara definitely won't be listed, as women couldn't serve as jurors in Hong Kong until after WW2.
Her father, Mr Redwood, was in Hong Kong at the time, working in the Navy Dockyard. And the two Mr. Anslow's, her future husband and father-in-law, were in Hong Kong too. But as they worked in the armed services or civil service, they couldn't be jurors either.
So, a good example of the limitations of the Jurors List, but we'll have much better luck with our next author.
1.2 Paul Atroshenko
He was just 4 at the time, so far too young to be a Juror. We can find his father though:
| Atroshenko, John | Overseer, Marsman, Hong Kong (China), Ld. | 5 Ashley Road, Kowloon. |
That's helpful. Paul remembered his father had worked for Marsden, but we can let him know it was actually Marsman.
Then in an email Paul asked if we could tell him anything about the Smirnoff sisters:
I can't be certain, but I think that the three girls who my brother and I visited during that first American bombing raid may have been the Smirnoff sisters. Perhaps you can ask for info on this in your blog. Someone might remember. The block of flats they lived in was on a road running parallel to Nathan Road and to the East of it. I know that it wasn't too far North of the Peninsula Hotel. It didn't take us long to get home, which was then close to the Star Ferry terminal.
There's an entry for Smirnoff in the Juror's list too:
| Smirnoff, George Vitalievitch | Architect, Marsman, H. K. China Ld. | 14 Hart Avenue, Kowloon. |
We can see two connections between the fathers, a similar heritage and the same employer. The addresses fit too, with Hart Avenue on the East of Nathan Road, and not too far from Ashley Road.
So the obvious information from a single list includes full names, title & employer, and an address. (Note that sometimes the address shows where the person lived, and sometimes where they worked.)
With a bit more investigation, and comparison of lists over several years you can see how businesses rise and fall, new residential areas appear, and the changing nature of work.
2. Turning to text: type / talk / OCR
Scanned copies of the jurors lists are already very useful, but looking through them for an address, say, is slow and error-prone. It's much quicker to find information if we can search through the text in our browser. eg we saw that Mr Atroshenko and Mr Smirnoff both worked for Marsman, and we already know that Marsman had been busy excavating the tunnels for the wartime Air Raid Shelters. How many people in the 1941 list were working for Marsman?
I use the web browser to search for "Marsman" and it instantly shows 42 matches. Looking for them by hand will take a couple of minutes, with a good chance of missing one or two.
So if text is better, how can we convert the scanned copies to text ?
2.1 Type them up
This is the simplest approach - look at the scanned copy and type the text into your computer.
It's usually a slow process, but with the Jurors Lists we can use a trick to speed things up. Each year we start off with last year's list and update it. Since many people on last year's list are still there this year, it saves a lot of typing. Working like this it only takes 20-30 minutes to finish typing a page.
2.2 Dictate them
I've used the Dragon speech-recognition software. I find it works well on general text, eg a newspaper article, but that with lots of names I have to spell them out. This makes it a lot slower, slower than typing.
2.3 OCR them
OCR, or Optical Character Recognition sounds great. Special software reads in the scanned pages, and converts them to text for you.
As Dragon had worked well I started off trying the Omnipage OCR software from the same company. I was disappointed with its accuracy so tried Abbyy Finereader instead. It was a lot more accurate and I've used it since, including converting all 80+ pages of the 1941 list to text.
If you give it a scan of a modern document, it just takes a few seconds and returns almost 100% accurate text. But with old documents like the Jurors Lists you'll still have to check and correct its mistakes where it can't recognise text that isn't clear.
Still, it learns and improves over time, so by the end of the list I was only spending around 20-25 minutes per page.
2.4 Summary
For Jurors Lists, the current method where we type a page, but use the previous year's list as the starting point, is still my preferred solution. Anyone can join in without needing to buy any software. That's a big plus as we can share the workload. Converting the 1941 list took me around 35 hours, so any help is very welcome!
But if you're converting a lot of unique scanned documents where you can't make use of similar, earlier versions, or if the scanned copies are very clear, OCR is a big time-saver.
3. Type what you'll never read
Finally, how can we get people to join in and help us type up more pages from the Jurors Lists? I'm still struggling to find a good way to explain why it's a good thing to type a page you'll never read!
We know that the typed version is much much faster to work with than the scanned version. And if we got everyone who'd spent half an hour looking at scanned Jurors Lists to type a page, we'd have the lot done in no time and we'd all benefit.
But when it comes down to actually typing, you're typing a page you'll probably never use yourself, and that feels like a waste of time.
A conundrum!
Regards, David
PS You can see the 1941 list online at http://gwulo.com/jurors-list-1941, and if you'd like to have a go at typing a page you can find the instructions at http://gwulo.com/current-j-list
Comments
Many thanks for this, David.
Many thanks for this, David. It confirms that my father did move to 21, Broadwood Road in 1940/41 as I'd suspected.
I think that George V. Smirnoff/Smirnov was probably the man who escaped to Macau and is now considered to be one of the most distinguished painters of that territory. If so, I have some information about him and I'll make a Person page tomorrow. The man I have in mind qualified as an architect in Harbin before coming to Hong Kong, so it looks promising.
Atroshenko / Smirnoff families
Some more information on these families. First, Brian has created pages with more information about Nina and Yuri Smirnoff.
Next Paul Atroshenko writes:
Thanks for your research on the past. I was only 4 at the time and no doubt I have got little bits mixed up, such as the misspelling of Marsman.
One thing does intrigue me. According to the jurors list my father is shown to be living in 5 Ashley Road, Kowloon in 1941. I vividly recall that when the Japanese attacked HK, my mother, my brother and I were taken in a convertible to the Star Ferry from our flat in Kimberley Road Kowloon. On that journey I sat in the rumble seat at the back of the car. There were sounds of war all around us. I clearly recall the journey to the Star Ferry. And that journey was definitely not from Ashley Street. We drove along Chatham Road and then Salisbury Road to the Ferry terminal. I have a very clear visual record of this in my mind.
We had to move to Ashley Street after HK surrendered because the Japanese Kempetai stopped us from going to our old flat in Kimberley Road. We discovered after the war that the flat was used as a torture chamber by the Kempetai. All our possessions were locked up there and it took us a while to get our possessions from the Kimberly Road flat. (There is another story about how we got our possessions back.)
In Ashley Road, in the first year of the War, we four lived in just one room on the top flor of a block of flats, with all the other rooms occupied by various Russian families.
How on earth did the jurors list show my father as living there prior to the Japanese occupation? When were those lists composed? Where were those lists stored during the War?
I'm not sure about the Kimberley / Ashley Road difference. There would have been around a year between the compilation of the Jurors List and the outbreak of war, so the family may have moved in between.
Each list is a copy of the document compiled in the year the list was issued, so the 1941 list is a copy of a 1941 document. I don't know if these lists survived the Japanese occupation, or are copies of duplicates held in London.
Finally, I was very pleased to receive an email from Irene, now living in Florida:
I am one of the Smirnoff sisters mentioned.
I remember Paul and his brother Viascheslav. We were all very little.
Yes, one of our addresses in those days was Hart Avenue. And my father was with Marsman.
That area of Kowloon suffered bombing and one had to be ready to grab the children, anything you could
carry and run.......and look for somewhere else to stay.
Paul is a very fine and interesting artist. I think I heard that Viascheslav lived in London.
I have a sister, Nina. My brother, Alex, was a baby when we lived in Hart Avenue.
I think I have some pictures of the Atroshenko youngsters from our days in the Tsim Sha Tsui area.
I'll have a look.