A researcher has recently been making use of the General Register of the Poor for Stornoway for 1895-1905 as part of his PhD research. The General Register lists all the people in the parish of Stornoway who were receiving support from the parish and can make for pretty grim reading. Anyway, as I was looking through the volume myself before imaging a page or two for the researcher, I came across this:
Now, I thought it was a little odd to see such a cut taken out of the back of one of the unused indexing pages of the volume but didn’t really give it much thought (although I did wonder if a square jawed mouse may be responsible).
Later in the volume, I found the missing section.
The clerk copying details into the register must have made a mistake and, with no tipp-ex to hand, measured and a cut a bit of paper from the front of the book and glued it over his mistake. He obviously took pride in his work, as he even drew on the tram lines through the middle of the page to make his mistake less obvious!
