"Women sailors, who fought in many battles"

From Chums, 26 April 1893

WOMEN SAILORS.

WHO FOUGHT IN MANY BATTLES.

IN a newspaper of seventy years ago, we are gravely informed that there died at Tamerton, in her sixty-fourth year, a Mistress Mary Pote. A very respectable person was Mistress Mary, popular all the country round, and, what's more, butt-woman of Tamerton Parish Church.

Butt-woman? What does that mean? Well, there is no explanation to be found in any reasonably accessible reference book, but no doubt the position of "parish butt-woman" must have been a highly responsible charge. That must have been so for the reason that the previous career of Mistress Mary was of such a distinguished character that it could not well have been capped by an office wanting in all the dignities. Mistress Mary had been a sailor on board a man-of-war for years, and she had fought under Rodney.

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Tedious things

I just posted that last article because I found it on the hard drive. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the Chums magazines, and I have a years worth of issues (and a Girls Own from the a bit earlier, also very interesting) and I'd love to post more material. But the print quality isn't that good (see image below) and the OCR results are very untidy. The first paragraph for the post I just did looked like this:

, WOMEN SAIL(lR§. f sons wao rousnr IN MANY Barrtrs. Y a newspaper ,of seventy years ago, we V are gravely informed that there _ died* at Tamerton, in her sixty-fourth year, a Mistress Mary Pote. A very respectable person was Mistress Mary, popular all the country round, and, what’s more, butt- womar: of Tamerton Parish Church.

If its a longer article, with images, it can take 2-3 hours to scan, edit and correct. So, I was thinking about ways to make the job easier. The obvious one being to just upload the scanned images. They're not small files though and they're not searchable.