Northland (1934) -- Discussion: Questions, Comments and Coordination

[Randi]

NARA URL	JPG Link	Location	Sector
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7284531	January February March April May June	Non Arctic Non Arctic Non Arctic Non Arctic To Arctic Arctic	- - - - P P
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7284532	July August September October November December	Arctic Arctic Arctic Arctic From Arctic Non Arctic	P P P P P -

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On the weather page, please enter: date, locations, distances, courses, and all the weather data in the columns outlined in red in the spreadsheet.
It is not necessary to record Sea Conditions or Swells from.
However, ice mentioned in the weather grid should be transcribed using the magenta Sea columns.

On the events page please enter: ice, location information, and sailing information.
Aurorae and volcanic activity should also be reported.
Other events are optional.

One person can do both weather and events (Stream 1), but the system also allows one person to do the weather page (Stream 1) and a second person to do the events page (Stream 3).
Unlike in OW3, where three transcriptions were required for each page, we are doing only one transcription per page.

Every transcriber needs to enter the date.
The date is used to organize the pages.
(If one transcriber does events and weather and they are in the same image, the date is only entered once.)

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OW web site: Northland

• Spreadsheet
• Tracker
• File Upload
• Transcription Status
• Voyage Plots

[Randi]

Do not hesitate to ask in Geog Help Board!

The Inside Passage to Alaska and the usual routes towards Unimak Pass are pretty well mapped by now (have a look at OWTools find place tool if you want). For Aleutian islands we have still a few white spots, but the area should be generally covered. North of the Alaska peninsula we've still a lot of grey areas in places which our ships were less inclined to visit.

With few exceptions 1929 names shouldn't have changed (Whaler's 1800s names were totally different - they could drop anchors at Ounalaska in the middle of the Bey and use Russian names for villages and capes!) and the places you see mentioned in logs are still named as such nowadays. The only thing that can reveal difficult to work out are native villages (whose names, position and existence could of course have changed in the last 90 years).
In my experience, when i find a placename i cannot really work out the issue is more oftenly A) that the place was noted down wrong by the logkeeper B) that I was reading it wrong when trying to decipher that terribly garbled handwriting.

A few references to work with during Alaskan trips:
[*]NOAA historical charts (https://historicalcharts.noaa.gov/) also cover almost everything in the US from 1880 to WW2 (less coverage for Alaska, yet useful maps).
[*]OldMapsOnline (https://www.oldmapsonline.org/) have nice "modern" (post WW2) and very detailed US and Alaska maps from USGS with a lot of "local" placenames.
[*]Geonames (https://www.geonames.org/) and Mapcarta (https://mapcarta.com/) can also be useful (like owtools they're visual... once you realize a ship at full speed cannot go further than a certain number of nautical miles it's easy to narrow down a relatively little area to search into).

On this page, they mention what I think is a "Hog Farm" at 5:35 AM:
https://catalog.archives.gov/OpaAPI/med ... 22_048.jpg

Not sure what else it could be, except "Hops Farm" - but Alaska is too far north for that!

It looks like Fox farm. Arctic foxes were farmed for their fur.

It is Fox Farm. I've seen it mentioned lots of times.

[Randi]

The voyage for 1934 is done. You can see it here.

Many thanks to the great work by Hanibal!!!

The 1934 fire also destroyed most of Nome’s commercial buildings, local food supplies, and nearly all the homes in town. With the start of the Arctic winter season only a month away, most of the town’s residents had to evacuate to southern Alaska, or even to the lower 48 states. A fleet of ships, including the new Coast Guard Cutter Northland, received orders to help evacuate the city.