Sharing Your Family History Online by Chris Paton

Author:Chris Paton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REFERENCE / Genealogy & Heraldry
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

At the top right of the page is another handy facility, a small box marked ‘Tips’, which, amongst its offerings, provides a link to ‘Ask a Question in the Indexing Community’, where you can seek particular guidance on a dataset from more experienced indexers, as well as being able meet and get to know many fellow participants!

iii) FreeUKGEN

www.freeukgenealogy.org.uk

First established in 1998, FreeUKGEN is one of the world’s longest-running crowdsourcing projects, with a well-deserved reputation for quality control. As a Charitable Incorporated Organisation it currently oversees three separate volunteer-based open data projects designed to help genealogists specifically within Britain.

FreeBMD (www.freebmd.org.uk) is perhaps the best known, and is a volunteer project designed to create a free-to-access index to the records of births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales from 1837–1983, as compiled through the civil registration process. Its sister project FreeCen (www.freecen.org.uk) has a similarly long standing mission to provide free-to-access transcriptions of the decennial censuses in Scotland, England and Wales from 1841–1891, whilst FreeReg (www.freereg.org.uk) focuses specifically on church records of births/baptisms, marriages and burials/deaths, including both state parish churches and the records of nonconformist denominations.

Whichever project you may wish to participate in, you will be given full training before you start. If we take FreeReg as an example, from the ‘Volunteer’ menu option at www.freeukgenealogy.org.uk, navigate to the ‘Transcriber Opportunities’ page and then click on ‘FreeReg’. This will take you through to the project’s ‘Transcriber Registration’ page, which explains the basic set up of the project, where you will be invited to choose from one of the groups of volunteers (known as syndicates) that is currently requiring assistance. As part of the registration process you will be asked to read and agree to several documents, including the ‘Transcription Agreement’, the ‘Volunteer Induction’ handbook, the ‘Code of Conduct’ and the ‘Volunteer Policy’. Upon successful registration you will receive log-in details to help you access the project’s transcription system.

Once registered you will be provided with a point of contact called a Syndicate Coordinator, with whom you can communicate to discuss issues, and who will monitor your progress and act as a friendly mentor. A County Coordinator will also be available (who may well be the same person as the Syndicate Coordinator), who oversees what work is available for that county, and with whom you will need to correspond for additional opportunities when your chosen assignments are complete.

The basic set up is that FreeReg will allow you to download an image to your computer and request that you transcribe its contents, before uploading the file back to the server. If you have a Windows-based computer, the project offers a transcription programme called WinREG, but will also take a spreadsheet from an office-based software programme; if your computer is instead a Mac- or Linux-based system, then spreadsheets are the only available option.

A page at www.freereg.org.uk/cms/information-for-transcribers provides all the basic information needed for transcribers, including how to communicate with team members. In addition to this there is also a dedicated Facebook group for members

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.