A different New Year resolution
December 31, 2008Do you have some spare time? Is one of your New Year resolutions to volunteer some of your time, but you really don’t know where to expend your efforts? Are you computer savvy? Do you like the idea of volunteering by sitting at your computer? Do you like the idea of contributing as much or as little as your time permits?
No doubt there are many ways you can do this—checking and editing Wikipedia articles of interest springs to mind.
There are several world family history projects happening, all of which require a community of volunteers to help transcribe scanned and microfilmed records of immigration, births, deaths, marriages, censuses, etc. into digital form.
Some of these projects include:
- World Archives Project (Ancestry.com)
- FamilySearch (LDS)
- FreeBMD (British births, marriages and deaths)
As an example of the time it takes, a 10-record set of Southern California Naturalization Index cards from the World Archives Project took me about 5 to 10 minutes to enter. And I was totally new to the software and had to reverse the dates in my head so I got the month and day in the right order!
CyberText Newsletter 
[…] there are many people actually requesting decent Help for a product. I’ve been doing some voluntary keying of records for the World Archives Project, and they recently released a non-beta version of the keying tool. The blog comments related to the […]
[…] bit of back story… In some of my spare time, I transcribe information for various genealogical projects and digitized newspapers. I do this from my computer, so it’s easy to volunteer a […]