The Third Trial: 11 June 1891, Part 1

A real difficulty using the London Times for research is the capriciousness of its search engine. It seems to give one's desired result upon a whim. Regarding the third trial and final trial pitting Valerie Wiedemann v. the Hon. Robert Horace Walpole, not much surfaced, but I was able to work out the trial dates and search through the paper, page by page, until I had found and took a "screenshot" of all of the pieces of all of the article, which was quite an undertaking!

The real downside of this is that, when the search engine delivers results, it also provides the article sought in text format—something that was suddenly unavaliable to me. Now, even though that text can be largely drivel, it was still useful in that I could cut and paste it into a Word document and spend an hour or so correcting it.

[Here's an brief example of an available 'text' from the London Times: "tiree of wvhom were called. 'to the Bar-and three daughters. The eldlest son, Ir. Courtney Terrell,- was appo>inted-lust- November Chief Justice of the High Cotur t of Judicature at Patna." There would be some corrections to be made there!]

Anyway, that's the method I used in patching together the previous entries regarding Trails 1 & 2 that are found here. It was faster than transcribing them in their entirety myself: I type with only two fingers, and given the length of some of those article, I'd have been transcribing them all day.

Since I ferreted out the next series of articles myself, there wasn't even a poor-quality bit of text for me to cut, paste, and edit. I don't have the time or the energy right now to sit and peck out the stories regarding the third trial in their entirety. What I've done is cropped the screen shots of them down to size and I'll post them for you to peruse at your leisure.

The downside of posting them like this is that they will not be searchable via Google, Yahoo, Altavista, or Dogpile. The upside is that I can get them on-line without spending days slowly re-typing them.

Another issue with viewing the articles in this manner will probably be that they may appear to be of different sizes on the blog. If they do, simply click on the article and it should appear enlarged in a new window, of the same size, and will be much easier to read.

You'll find the first excerpt of the trial from the 11 June 1891 issue of The Times above left, and the second to the right. I'll try to post an excerpt each day until we reach its conclusion in the 18 June 1891 issue.

More soon…