The Wright Treatment

The "Wright Treatment" is the transcription of the text from Thomas Wright's History and Topography of Essex, 1831/36.

I started this process by looking up the history of Belchamp Walter and decided that the Wright text was a good source of information relating to the whole county. There is some overlap with Suffolk and the other home counties so I created a list of nearby communities from Thomas' text and added a few more from other sources including The Manors of Suffolk"

I created a page that features North Essex and South Suffolk.

The Process

This is not easy! The text is copied and pasted from the Google Play copy of the History and Topography of Essex that can be found on the Internet.

Finding the entry for the region/village in question is not always easy and the search sometimes does not come up with the expected results. In fact some of the searches have to be made knowing where the village is located and the possible different spellings.

I still have to do a lot of work on the pages that I have added the Thomas Wright history and the cross references and the formatting of the text still needs work on a lot of the pages. For example, when I quote Thomas the text will be in a green "quote box". If I have not completed this the text will appear as normal text (the same as the text that I authored). I some cases I have yet to add all of the text from the History and Topology and in other cases I have yet to start.

Thomas' text also has footnotes that are well worth following and I have added them on some pages. These are useful as they not only reveal some of his sources they also provide additional informatio. As the text is from the 19th Century the wording and style will be very different from modern texts. It is also interesting to note how Thomas Wright carried out his research and it is obvious that he obtained some of the information anecdotally. This is partictularly the case with Belchamp Walter as the information came from discussions with Samuel Millbank Raymond, who died in 1863.