Carey Hampton Borrer Diary

[Editor: Anthony Bower]

Here we are indebted to the usual friendly support given by the West Sussex Record Office who copied this vast diary for us. Carey was Rector at Hurstpierpoint from a very young age and served the community from 1838 until his death in 1898. During much of this period he kept a diary of about 650,000 words. From the text he was obviously a very caring and loving person but was not able to hide his absolute loathing of Nathaniel Marchant who was one of his Churchwardens and a second great grandson of the diarist Thomas Marchant whose diary we also published some time ago.

As at June 2006 we have transcribed approximately 70% of the Borrer diary and hope to be able to release a book in 2007. We have a team of transcribers and proofreaders working on this project worldwide. However without Hilary Wild’s transcription skills we would be struggling as she has put in a huge contribution and actually dictates her work accurately and directly into her computer via Word Recognition software at a rate of 1,200 words per hour. She is also one of the few who can read Carey’s difficult handwriting fluently.

Behind the scenes we have an enormous amount of work to do in identifying all the diary characters in order to satisfy the genealogists amongst our readers. With them in mind we shall be releasing a CD next year as well.

We are still looking for transcription and proofreading volunteers for this project. If you are interested please contact Anthony Bower under abbo700@hotmail.com