First of all,

Thank you for wanting to share your work with other Kerry researchers!

We post data transcribed by many researchers, including baptisms, deaths, marriages, 1901 and 1911 census, Griffiths Valuation and Tithe Applotment surveys, and other Kerry-related material. To make it ready to be published on the Kerry site, it needs to be in a certain format. That format is described below by Ann Hammer who changes the material you submit into user-friendly web pages for us. Please read her explanation and contact her if you have any formatting questions. If you have questions about what to submit, email me. Once you are ready to submit your data, you can attach it to an email to me in a: .doc, .xls, .xlr or .txt file. Waterlilys

If you have Griffiths data go here: Griffiths- Transcribe & Submit

Note: Please realize the formatting of what you submit may not look the same once it is online. There are many technical details that create this situation. The goal is to get the data online and done as accurately as possible. So please do not wed yourself to your formatting - we cannot promise it will appear the way you submit it nor as you prefer. To a certain extent, how the data looks on different browsers is out of our hands.

Formats and procedures for your Co. Kerry data

The following instructions are for data that we will attempt to format into a table.

Most types of records are well-suited to display in a table format. These commonly have easily recognized categories and the data is brief, such as name or date, not a sentence fragment or explanation. Birth, baptism and census records are examples of data that display well in a table.

Submit this type of data using Excel

It works well to send this type of data in a spreadsheet. Here's an example of column headers for baptismal data as seen on an Excel worksheet.

	A	B	C	D	E	F
1	Name	Date	Father	MotherMaiden	Witnesses	Townland
2	John	May 1 1860	James Cochrane	Margaret Cockley	John Smith, Tom Connelly	Dunquin

You may switch them around to make data entry easier, and rename them to match your data.

For records that do not have an entry in each category, putting your data in a spreadsheet works well for several reasons. Mostly, it helps you see that each data type-- ie. marriage date, spouse, witness-- is in the correct column, and it eliminates an inadvertent extra tab or spacebar.

• Don't worry about how plain the heading looks. For us, its best kept simple. The formatting you put in to make the spreadsheet attractive, we take out, and it can be time consuming.
• If you are using Excel or another spreadsheet, please do not span columns, except perhaps for the title rows. Please do not leave a line blank between records-- save them to separate a set of records, such as between townlands.
• If you are submitting records from multiple townlands, you may put them all on one Excel page.
• if you enter your data in Works, we ask that you save it in two file formats. For one copy for your own viewing in Works, you may wish to save it as a regular Works file. To send the second copy to the Kerry site, please also save it from Works as Excel 97-2000(*xls), the file type that Excel can open. Attach that file to an email you send to waterlilys. Why two file types?-- we understand that Works cannot open an Excel file, and Excel cannot open a Works file.

Submit this type of data using Word

If you are starting the data entry from scratch, and all the rows will have an entry in each "column", I prefer data that is separated by a comma, where the commas are used only for this purpose and not as its normal use in a sentence--
example--
name,birthdate,place
example:
John Cochrane,May 1 1860,Dunquin (notice no spaces around the commas)

ONE tab is also effective, as is a slash / symbol

John Cochrane(tab key)May 1 1860(tab key)Dunquin
John Cochrane/May 1, 1860/Dunquin

A good separator serves two important purposes for accurate and easily created web pages. First, it helps you check the data for position of the separator and delete any empty spaces either side of the separator, and second, we use it to convert the text to table columns.
If one data field is missing, be sure to add a comma for it. Note the 2 commas in:
John Cochrane,,Dunquin.

Records not suitable for tables

Some other types of records are better left in text or sentence format, that is, just as you type them into a word processor. In that case, it is important to insert an ENTER only at the end of each record, not within the record line. This means a long record may wrap to the next line, but let the computer do the wrapping, and you separate each individual record with the ENTER key.

If you are just starting transcribing and your data is not obviously table material, please contact Waterlilys so we can decide how to best present it on a web page. You also can review some of the records already in Kerry's Online Records section to see how we handle various types of data.

Note: Always enter four digits for the year!  (i.e. 1865 or 1965; not 65)

Hints that make the process most efficient

If your data is very short, we may accept it pasted into the body of an email IF it is separated by commas. Otherwise, attach the file to the email.

The format- your data will be converted to columns. Determine your ease of data entry to help decide the columns. Check how other pages are done for ideas, or take it from the material itself. Just be aware that on the final web page they may appear in different order or be combined. I often try to minimize the number of columns- (its related to minimizing the code it takes to define the columns, and code is a factor in file size, which dictates download time). So we want enough columns, but not extra. For example, I am working on a page of baptisms which list child, father, mother, date, and age. I combined date with age.

And if the same data appears in every row in a table, I delete the column and list the common data in a line near the top of the table. For example, when all people in a list are "born in Kerry."

Excel should open a Lotus 1-2-3 file and an QuartroPro/Dos file.

- if your data is already in a text file (ex .doc) , it is important that it is separated into "columns" by a distinguishing character, preferably one comma, or something such as ONE tab, / or # or similar, between each of the "cells".

Example: baby,parent,date. The "," character will be search/replaced with code, and translated into a row with 3 columns (3 cells). If one data is missing, be sure to add a comma for it, such as baby,,date.

I hope this doesn't sound like a lot of work- if you're starting from scratch, it shouldn't be, and it makes a better hard copy for you. After all your work researching material, knowing that someone else might benefit from it is a quite satisfying bonus.

Please contact me if you have further questions or I didn't explain this clearly." Ann Hammer

Again, Thanks for Sharing your Stuff!