Federation Of Family History Societies

All At Sea!

A New National Project
Births, Marriages & Deaths

An army of keen volunteers in 2008/9 indexed sections of the 1851 census using the excellent transcription tool provided by Findmypast.co.uk which proved to be an enjoyable and interesting project for those who took part.

All we need is a large number of volunteers, not only in the UK but also abroad, who can work at home using their own computers (incuding Macs) and have broadband connection. Accessing the specially dedicated site set up by Find My Past, they will use a page which presents the well designed 'transcription tool' as illustrated below. [This shows the image of a census page, and the spreadsheet-like grid where all the information was entered].

Volunteers will find full instructions are given online as well as help and advice being available from each society project co-ordinator. Societies who participate will receive a small payment every time a researcher views the results of each page indexed by a volunteer working on its behalf. This will be another useful source of revenue for societies.

For this new project, we sincerely hope that many members of the Federation of Family History Societies and a host of individuals, along with a team from Findmypast.co.uk, can work together to produce a fully transcribed index to Births, Marriages and Deaths at Sea 1854 – 1888 the aim being to allow searching by virtually all fields, such as surname, forename, occupation, age and sex if this information is available in the records, plus the name of the ship. Once completed, these records will be added to the Findmypast complete set of England and Wales BMDs for the period 1837 – 2006 so that these under-used records will have far more prominence.

This project has commenced and is well on the way to completion.  There is another project in the pipeline and if you would like to take part in that by giving a few hours, days - or even weeks - please contact giving your name, email and the name of the society to which you would like to dedicate your work

Ann-Marie Wilkinson:
FFHS Projects Officer