Brett Manuscript Histories

Help is still needed to complete the transcription of both these and many other source documents the website owner has collated to provide a useful resource for current and future historians.

Due to the sheer volume of text contained within these manuscripts, they are being split further from their original form of ten volumes into individual chapters. It will be seen that Brett largely alternates between St. Leonards and Hastings with each chapter. The original introduction and testimonials are collected in the page 'Brett Volume 1: A Few Testimonial Extracts'. The original scans which are unfortunately not fully capable of being converted via OCR (although efforts are underway to change this) to searchable text are currently linked at the footers to the Index pages as transcribed originally by Rod Lavers and published at Rootschat genealogy website. The indices and original scans can also be accessed by means of clicking on the desired volume heading in the table below.

Brett, for reasons only known to he, whilst quite meticulous in his reporting of events, did have a number of inaccuracies and omissions in his chronicling of the 19th century. These are in the process of being cross-referenced in completed transcripts and notes of the transcribers are included as footnotes in the individual chapters. In addition to this, in spite of him being a newspaper man, the pagination and titling of pages is not quite correct, with articles being literally cut and pasted with scissors and glue into the originals, interspersed with hand-written sections and a large number of images. An attempt at correcting this has taken place within the transcriptions, but original page numbers are inserted in the correct locations thus:  ^Pg.140  or as side-notes in the case of pages which have been proof-read. This should help others that wish to refer to the original material in finding the source pages more readily.