This collection of photographs from the West Wiltshire area forms part of the Moonrakers genealogical CD-ROM produced by Mike Caswell and members of the Moonrakers mailing list. (See the section on Devizes for an explanation on why Wiltshire folk are known as Moonrakers.) The project was inspired by the postcard collection of Frank Lane which appeared in the original Moonrakers book published in early 1997 and edited by Mike Caswell.

Frank's wonderful collection is the result of a popular hobby of his two great Aunts, Nellie and Detta, who collected over 700 cards between 1903 and 1967. Collecting postcards was very popular with the Edwardians, and the majority of this collection dates from before 1906. The story behind the collection is told in Frank's original article as it appeared in the Moonrakers book.

The main purpose of this album is to show those Moonrakers now living abroad, many of whom may never even have been to Wiltshire, or perhaps left when they were very young, the places their ancestors would have lived and worked at about the turn of the century.

It also gives us the chance to see the postcards in colour!

In July 1997, Mike put forward the idea of producing a genealogical CD-ROM. He suggested that it should include some of Frank's postcards and other local photographs along with the genealogical database files (650Mb is a lot of space to fill with just GEDCOMS!!). After looking at the postcards reproduced in the book I realised that many of the places shown were still easily recognisable after almost a century, and, more importantly, the bulk of the collection showed scenes within only 20 miles of my house in Bradford-on-Avon. I came up with the idea of taking equivalent modern photographs of the postcard scenes and displaying them side-by-side in HTML documents: an electronic version of the Scratchy-Bottom in Old Photographs type of book!

Mike readily agreed to the idea, Frank was keen to share his postcards with others, and David Hatch kindly offered to scan the new photographs. Over the next few weeks Frank sent selected scans from his collection to me by e-mail; at the same time I was busy driving around the countryside and taking photographs based on the postcards at every opportunity. Soon the first batch of photographs were developed. David Hatch powered up his scanner and the Royal Mail was despatched with a jiffy bag containing the first set of prints. Several iterations of this process later and I had a good collection of postcard images, several films worth of scanned colour photographs, and a collection of local history guidebooks on loan from various friends and libraries.

All of this began a little over two months ago (at the time of writing), and I must admit I that it has been a fairly major task! In those two short months I have spent most of my spare time in the evenings and at weekends driving to tiny villages along narrow country lanes, waiting for the rain to stop, and have spent more time in front of my computer screen than I care to remember! Having said all that, I have really enjoyed combining my hobbies of photography, genealogy and computing in this way, and have learnt a great deal about the area in which I have lived all my life. My main wish is that those Moonrakers whose ancestors emigrated from Wiltshire during the 1800's will be able to see how much (or how little) the places their families knew so well have changed over the years.

Browsing the Album

After successfully loading up the file D:\ALBUM\INDEX.HTM the browser window should now be divided into three sub-frames. The top frame extends across the entire width of the browser window and should contain the main index for the towns and villages included in the album. This top frame is designated as the main picture area, and when one of these main index links is followed is loaded with inlined images of the place selected. At the same time, the smaller frame to the bottom left is loaded with a sub-index with a list of pictures available (as described, left, now!). The frame in which you should be reading this text, bottom right, is loaded with corresponding text, information and comments about the photographs in the top frame.

Whenever possible, two pictures are shown simultaneously in the top frame: on the left will be an old postcard view, and on the right will be a modern colour photograph of the same or similar scene. This is not a rigid rule: sometimes the equivalent scene no longer existed, or perhaps a variation on it was more interesting!

The height of the picture window has been set at 240 pixels and the size of each picture adjusted to fit. On my own computer, allowing for the Netscape toolbar, location bar and frame borders, the window occupies just over half of the screen. Using a higher resolution monitor the pictures may appear quite small, but this ensures that those of us with small screens can enjoy them too! If the browser window is not at least as wide as the lines in the main index, then pictures intended to be viewed side by side may appear one above the other. If this is unavoidable (how?!) then the lower picture, which normally would have appeared on the right, may be viewed using the picture window scrollbar.

A full size copy of each postcard or photograph may be displayed by clicking on the reduced size picture within the frame. A new resizable window is opened to contain the picture with scrollbars if necessary. Keep an eye on the status bar which gives an indication as to whether a link will open a new window such as this, or simply scroll the picture window to a different place.

Within the text window is a short history and description of each place. If the title of a particular subsection is a highlighted link, then clicking will bring up a separate comparison window (try this one of Bradford-on-Avon for a demonstration). Once the modern picture has loaded within this window, placing the mouse anywhere within the border of the photograph (don't click!) will cause the equivalent old scene to replace it. By moving the mouse in and out of the border, the picture can be made to flick between the old and new. Note that although the two scenes may be similar, they are never exactly the same. Most of the time the precise viewpoint, angle of view and composition was unavailable due to modern intrusions (parked cars, lamp posts, heavy traffic etc.), and so the picture was changed slightly taking these factors into account.

If the change between the two views is not instant, then check the technical details and read the section on memory cache. Clicking anywhere inside the border of the picture will close the comparison window.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Frank Lane for agreeing to share some of his wonderful postcard collection in this way, and to David Hatch for applying his scanning skills on a wad of my photographic prints! Thanks to Judy Watten who provided me with some excellent scans of West Overton and some invaluable information about this little known village; also to Tony Furze who was born there and provided further information. Many of the books I referred to were loaned by Darren Giddings, and I am very grateful that he let me keep them for so long!

Special thanks to my wife, Ruth, who meticulously proof-read the text (or is about to once I've finished writing this!), and showed patience each time I waited for half an hour for "that car", "that cloud", "that man with the red jumper", to move out of the way!

Robert Slade, September 1997.