The Manchester Historical Society's website is packed with information, and we've added this tool to help viewers find what they're looking for, or help them browse through their areas of interest.

We've come up with a table that presents characteristics of each page by...

> A Theme : What major phrase or idea describes what it's all about.
> The Principal Person : Who is the page primarily about or, if appropriate, who is its author?
> The Race of the Principal Person.
> The Gender of the Principal Person.
> The Page's formal Title, which can be clicked to access it.

The user can sort each column by clicking the top cell in each column, colored with a beige background. In this way the user can see all articles with particular Themes or People or people's Race or their Gender. The order of the sorted column's contents -- initially ascending -- can be reversed by clicking that heading again.

In other words, no more searching through multiple lists of pages, sometimes with multiple such lists on each page, with every list sorted differently.

One unanticipated item encountered was that only about ⅓ of the pages had People as their main focus. But, for many users, it's people they're primarily interested in. As a result, when you initially enter this page you'll find the Principal Persons shown in ascending order, even though, when you re-sort that column, that particular alignment won't appear. This is because the sorting is based on the value of the contents of each cell in the column. Where no Person is involved, the contents of that cell, as well as its Race and Gender columns' cells, will contain a dash, which basically says "not applicable". The value of that dash is less than any letter, hence the oddity when you re-sort any of the columns which have a dash in them: Ascending order will result in dashes at the top of the column, while Descending order will result in the dashes at the bottom of the column.

You can get back to the original Person Sort order by clicking the "Refresh Display" button at the top of the page. It simply pulls the image from the server, and replaces what was sorted by the user.

Not every page in the website is shown; for example, the Manchester Herald newspaper pages, the 1937 Cheney Property Auctions, and the Yearbooks. Those pages have their own indexes. This Tool will get you to those specialized pages.

Gender and Race. not previously recorded, are shown here. If minorities of any type are presented in numbers less than might be expected, that fact will become immediately available. And what is there can be more readily accessed. As appropriate, any questionable situations can be addressed, through increased participation (in the form of additional articles/pages) by Manchester residents.

The values used for Gender are, of course, M = Male and F = Female

The values used for Race are: W = White, B = Black, and AI = American Indian or American Indigenous. The thought occurred to use just "I" for Indian / Indigenous, but that would present a problem when we receive articles from individuals from the Indian subcontinent. The thought also occurred to use "NA" for Native American; however, NA can also stand for Not Applicable. That didn't fly.

Meanwhile, if you have any suggestions or other feedback to share, please do so: Send an email to our webmaster: Susan Barlow.

Thank you!