21 July 2021.
Want to help?
In case you haven’t seen them, here are some great projects supporting historical and genealogical research, which just about anyone with an interest in family history and a few hours to spare each week can get involved with from home.
Agents of Enslavement, part of the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, explores how Caribbean colonial newspapers both ‘facilitated and challenged the practice of slavery’. The researcher said about this crowd-sourcing initiative: ‘Newspapers are a rich source of data for understanding the practice of enslavers & the acts of resistance by the people they enslaved. The help of the Zooniverse community is key to unlocking this information & giving a voice to those who were silenced.’
The Great Card Index, Society of Genealogists. These cards link people to a range of sources held by the Society. Christine Worthington writes: ‘Since the content of the cards themselves are so varied, it was thought that the simplest approach to creating a modern index would be to draw out basic links between people, places and years – the types of fields that may inspire today’s researchers to want to seek images of the original cards to glean further information.’
C115 Schedule Project, The National Archives. This relates to a widow, Frances Scudamore, Duchess of Norfolk, and an inventory of family papers. ‘This is a wonderful opportunity for volunteers to assist in improving data in Discovery, our online catalogue. The aim of the project is to transcribe the content of the schedule using a spreadsheet template. This will enable the information contained within the schedule to be adapted to form detailed descriptions for upload into Discovery to improve access for all researchers.’
The Pedigree Rolls Project, Society of Genealogists. Alan Pursell the project creator said of this home indexing and unique digitisation intiative: ‘The Society has around 10,000 handwritten family trees in a collection we call the pedigree rolls. These have been collected by the Society over the last 100 years. Some are typical small trees, while others are huge, heavily researched trees with thousands of names. They currently live in ‘Store A’ behind the desk in the Lower Library and take up more than 100sqm of shelf space.‘
Transcribe with Free UK Genealogy. You can choose from three open-data projects: FreeBMD, FreeREG and FreeCEN. These projects are about transcribing and full training is provided.