This in the latest Society of Genealogists Newsletter. I imagine it is not essential to be a member to be able to help.
Volunteers needed for Pedigree Rolls Project
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 100 sq.m. of shelf space.
after a small pilot project, the Society has ordered some specialist scanning equipment and we plan to start the digitisation project of the rolls in March. The current plan is to digitize all of these over a two year period. We will then hope to be able to make these available in a number of different ways:
● firstly,wewillhavehighdefinitionimagesofalltherollsavailable within the library. The images are too large to make it realistic to put onto data online.
● Secondly,wewillprepareaproperindextotherollsdescribingwhat is on each to go into the library catalogue.
● Thirdly,wewillinputthedetailsfromeachoftherollsintofamilytree software and plan to make the trees available directly through the website.
● fourthly,wewillprepareafullnameindexofeveryoneonthetrees (more than 1 million names)
● finally,wehopetobeabletomakeavailableanoptiontogetafull print of relevant scrolls. However, there will inevitably have to be a small fee for this service (reduced fee for Members)
on completion, we will have made a key set of information available to members, will have released a substantial amount of space at the Society and unlocked a valuable source of unique genealogical data.
To do all this we need your help. We need some people to scan the rolls and some to produce the library index. This work can only be done within the Library at the Society’s premises as it involves physically handling the rolls - some of which are quite fragile.
In addition, we need a large number of people to volunteer to input the rolls into family tree software. We plan to do most of this work using home-based volunteers. So if you want to get involved in any part of this project please contact Christine Worthington o and let her know what type of help you can give.once the project is fully underway, we will publish occasional updates in the newsletter.
