History

Name? Age? Who knows?

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The Buckinghamshire Archives said…

We’ve had a few enquiries come in after chatbots told researchers that we hold documents we don’t actually look after

…in response to a warning from the ICRC about AI nonsense-bots generating fabricated references because they are designed to spew out something that looks like an answer even if there is no answer available.

Having fallen down a family history rabbit hole recently it seems that such erroneous content is not limited to AI bots.

    Birth dates before 1st July 1837, when a national register started, are endlessly variable and a person may have five or more different years recorded as their birth year during their lifetime.
    As old records are handwritten details such as surnames may not be deciphered correctly.
    Just because somebody ticked the box confirming that all the information provided on a census form is true and accurate does not mean that all the information provided on the form is true and/or accurate.
    The transcribers of census forms can miss people from a listing because they were ‘hidden’ on the next page.
    Even if somebody is included in another family tree it does not mean that person actually existed.

Flaky Sabbath

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Will the flaky Sabbath mural at the tattoo place in Hulme be retired once Black Sabbath finally retire?

Sabbath mural

I was never a fan although it was claimed that their roadies lived locally in the house with the deep purple (see what I did there?) curtains that were always drawn. Our teenage vocabulary was insufficient to describe the imagined debauchery within; but they were probably just sleeping having worked all night.

A view of Ludgate Hill

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A game of TimeGuesser turned up a picture of crowds gathering, at the end of the First World War in 1918, at Ludgate Circus looking up Ludgate Hill towards St.Pauls Cathedral caused me to wonder what had changed since then.

The street view today shows much has changed – click image to embiggen.

View up Ludgate Hill towards St. Pauls from 1918 and 2024

The spire of St. Martin’s church is recognisable; and just above the chap’s hat on the far left it looks like the top of one of the fancy finials that still adorn the building on the left.

The railway bridge was never much admired:

Of all the eyesores of modern London, surely the most hideous is the Ludgate Hill Viaduct— that enormous flat iron that lies across the chest of Ludgate Hill like a bar of metal on the breast of a wretch in a torture-chamber. – Walter Thornbury, ‘Ludgate Hill’, in Old and New London: Volume 1(London, 1878), British History Online [accessed 9 March 2025].

and it was removed in 1990 with the arrival of the City Thameslink rail service (the canopy protruding on the right) which passes under the road.

But perhaps the single greatest change since then… nobody is wearing a hat.