We're about two thirds of the way through typing up the 1938 Jurors List. If you can spare half an hour, please could you help type up a page?
Upgrade update: The work on pages for Photos and Places is done, and I'm pleased with how they're looking. This week I'll work on the Person pages, and then enough of the new site will be working to let people start testing it.
There will be a bit more work before the testing begins though. The upgraded site I'm working on is based on a snapshot of Gwulo.com that is about a year old, so first I'll have to re-run all the migrations again to bring it up to date, and check that doesn't break anything. Then the hosting package I use will need to be upgraded to cope with running both the old and the new sites at the same time. Once that is done, I can upload the upgraded site to the hosting company's server, so you can access it.
Places
Hong Kong island
Bisnee Villa[????-????], dating back to the 1870s or earlier
Interesting to see horses are listed in the 1863 ordinance about hiring public vehicles, but I don’t remember having seen any horse (except for racing) or horse driven carriages on old Hong Kong photos. If someone knows more, please leave a comment. <Read more ...>
The population of Hong Kong in the early 1840s was about 6,000 people, increasing to 125,000 in 1865 (about 2,000 were Americans and Europeans) (source).
Increasing numbers of inhabitants lead to increasing traffic on the roads. As the “Colony of Hongkong and its Dependencies” was a civilized area and had a tendency to set rules for every aspect of life, there obviously was the need for a regulation. <Read more ...>
Found this embossed bottle - Owbridge's Lung Tonic - on the side of a mountain on Hong Kong Island. Having not found this particular type of medicine bottle before, I took it home and went online to find out who Mr Owbridge was. I had no idea how serendipitous this chance discovery would turn out to be.<Read more ...>
In 1951 I went by BOAC plane to Hong Kong, arriving August 6th. Sitting opposite me for the whole way, a journey taking 2-3 days, was a 15 year-old schoolgirl, Angela Fairburn. We stayed the night before in Rangoon. I liked her a lot and hoped to meet up with her in Hong Kong. She asked me out with her parents, but I could not make it then. I never heard from her again and I have always wondered what happened to her.
I am 87 years old now so this query is a bit late in the day! <Read more ...>
Upgrade update: Here's a chance to see what the new site will look like, with a simpler page layout that should be easier to use. (If you're reading this in an email and you don't see the video below, please click here to watch it on Youtube.)
Free talk via Zoom on Tuesday morning, 22 March:WW II Civilian Internment in Hong Kong. "Our two speakers, Martin Heyes of Hong Kong and Julien Lehoux of Montreal, will tell you about Hong Kong’s civilian internees and how they lived during their imprisonment, the complex negotiations to repatriate the Canadians among them, and the impacts on their lives after their return to Canada."
Final-year university student Kai Hei asks for 5-10 minutes of your time, to complete a questionnaire. It will form part of their final-year thesis on heritage conservation and related online communities such as Gwulo.com.
1852 journal: This 39-page Chinese-language document is a journal kept by a Christian evangelist, Chen Dui (陳兑), detailing his daily activities in Hong Kong for a few months in 1852, when he travelled around the colony, seeking converts and distributing Bibles and religious tracts.
Upgrade update: I'm currently working on re-vamping the website's menus. The goal is to make them as simple as possible, while keeping all the important information easily available.
They have to meet our different visitors' needs, e.g. a new visitor who's browsing is different from a researcher looking for information, who's different from a regular reader who wants to add information to the site.
Finally we also need to take into account that what works well on the computer screen I normally use, may be difficult or even impossible to use on the smaller screens of tablets and smartphones.
I'll keep at it ...
