Breezing through Alice Thornton's Books with our Text Search Function

Blog article published by Eleanor Thom on 20 November 2024  digital editionvideo tutorialweather

A new feature on the Alice Thornton’s Books website, the text search, is now live. This makes it even easier to search within the pages of the digital edition. In this post, we’ll take a look at the different ways you can use the search function to explore the events in Thornton's life, and how she presented them.

Researchers, whether academics or members of the public, often want to know if their specific topic of interest is written about by Alice Thornton. If you are researching a local town or an ancestor from Yorkshire, you can use the people or places searches to see if they appear, but other topics of interest we've been asked about have been diverse and sometimes quite surprising. They have included newts, fashion, saddle designs, and even whether Alice Thornton mentions early versions of the Yorkshire pudding. With the new text search, finding the answers to these kinds of questions is at your fingertips.

Searching for the Weather in Thornton’s Books

Recently, on social media, Rebecca Rideal commented on how useful it would be if an interactive historical weather database existed, one that historians could update when they came across references to forgotten weather events. Similar projects are already in existence, including a database compiled by Martin Rowley, maintained by weatherweb.net. Cordelia Beattie also referenced the Western University Department of English and Writing Studies’ ‘Weather Extremes Historical Database Creation Project’, which brings together information from multiple archive sources covering England during the period 1500-1700. This was during Thornton’s lifetime, and it was also in the midst of England’s ‘Little Ice Age', when recorded average temperatures were lower. If weather was a topic you wanted to explore in Thornton's four books, the new search function now makes this much easier to find all the pages with references to the weather.

It's not always possible to pinpoint exact dates for weather events in Thornton’s books because she wrote about her life when she was older, looking back. We also know that sometimes she misremembered dates. Through cross-referencing with other documents, the Thornton’s Books team has worked out when some events must have happened, but others remain uncertain. Weather is mentioned quite frequently and a database of historical forecasts, like the one suggested by Rideal, could help to date more precisely some of Thornton’s recollections.

Finding Weather References

At the moment, one hundred pages of each book is online, but when the complete digital edition goes live, a search for ‘frost’ will yield four hits, and ‘snow’ yields five, although one is not weather-related. In the picture below, you can see a preview of a page that mentions both snow and frost. This is page 178 of Book 1, and here the text also carries an editorial note with more information about the Little Ice Age.

The search function shows us how many pages a keyword is used on, and whether it is used more often in one Book than another. Looking at each of the pages, you can also find examples of Thornton using references to the weather in different ways, or for different purposes. For example, Thornton wrote the word ‘storm’ at least 24 times in her books, and ‘stormy’ is used on one page, but not all these usages relate to the weather. In most cases, storms refer to her emotions or to the troubles she had endured in her life. Thornton says this kind of ‘storm’ was sent by God for her to endure, and Satan was involved too, sending her ‘storms of temptations.’

Metaphorical storms aside, Thornton found herself on ships crossing stormy seas several times in her life and these experiences must have left a mark on her. One such example is recalled in the Book of Remembrances (page 22). This is an event that Thornton dates to 22 Augist 1639. One candidate for entering or checking in a historical weather database.

Fine Weather

Although Thornton lived during a period of cooler average temperatures, she also described warmer days. For example, she also wrote about the extreme heat in the summer after her marriage, when she was pregnant with her first child, and there was an eclipse of the sun.

And speaking of fine weather, if you're on social media, you can now find Alice Thornton's Books on Bluesky too!

Beyond the Weather: More Insights Through the Search Function

The new text search together with the entity search for events will help users find references to a wide range of topics. You might be interested in finding out about Thornton’s descriptions of childbirth, her accounts of travel, or her reflections on the political upheavals of her time. Now anyone can quickly locate specific themes. As additional pages of Thornton’s books are released, this tool will only grow more useful.

The search function is easy to use, but if you need help, our two-minute video tutorial below will show you everything you need to know to start searching. To follow the video instructions more easily, we recommend enlarging it to full screen. A subtitled version is also available.

We'd love your feedback on the first hundred pages of all four books which are already online.