Old Boar's blog (Old Boars blog)

The church I belong to is celebrating its centenary next year (2009). To be strictly accurate, I suppose we are celebrating the centenary of the building, because the organisation has been rearranged a few times in the interim.

Anyway, I started doing a little research into the first minister of the church - Rev. Joseph Nettleton. I didn't have much to go on, except what was engraved on a brass plate we found (unscrewed from the wall!). It told me that Rev Nettleton had been a missionary in Fiji, between 1860 and 1873. That got me interested.

Now, I wouldn't say that I have uncovered Nettleton's life history, or that there is much evidence that he was a particular hero but, after a letter to the Fijian High Commission in London and a couple of enquiries on the internet, with the help of a couple in Australia (I think, or maybe that is Fiji) I found a quotation of, a letter sent by, Nettleton himself to "The Times" just after he returned from Fiji, on the subject of "slavery" in the South Seas. It's obvious he was indignant.

As a way of thanking people for their help, I've spent a couple of hours correcting the version of the text of the letter which the search engines use. It was full of errors, but then what do you expect when the source material was 135 years old newsprint (and the type the newspaper were using was pretty worn. It was only possible to tell an "o" from an "e" by context), I think the Optical Character Recognition had done a pretty good job.

The institutions and people who put these old documents on the web do an enormous service to research.

• Here's the letter from Nettleton: http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/1327848 (I'm the anonomous editor)
• And here's the blog of the helpful couple: http://babasiga.blogspot.com/