Transcription Tuesday

TUESDAY 5 FEBRUARY 2019 It’s back! We reveal how you can get involved with our third annual Transcription Tuesday event and help make thousands of rare records accessible to all

Find out how you can team up with readers around the world to unlock vital information in historical records

It is difficult to overstate just how much family history has changed over the past 20 years. While there is a certain romance to visiting your local library and rifling through records on microfiche, the internet has made the hobby much quicker and easier for all. Through large-scale digitisation projects and the rise of subscription websites, rare record sets once buried away are available to anyone at the click of a button.

But what many researchers don’t realise is that a great deal of records are only searchable thanks to the hard work of volunteers. Although machines can scan pages and read printed text (both to varying degrees of success), living, breathing humans often have to decipher the handwritten scribbles to make them truly accessible – by transcribing the entire document, or indexing the most pertinent details.

Here at Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, we think it’s important for family historians to give something back, which is why we are running our third annual Transcription Tuesday event on Tuesday 5 February 2019.

Just as we did in 2017 and 2018, we are asking our readers to devote anything from minutes to several hours working on the four online projects listed on the page opposite, helping to make thousands of records available to family historians across the world.

How To Get Involved

Unlike previous years, you won’t need to complete a registration form on our website in order to participate, and you won’t have to stick to a specific project. Instead, if any of the projects piques your interest, simply visit the relevant website and follow the instructions for taking part. If you change your mind, don’t worry – just try a different one, or have a go at all of them!

We would love to hear about your progress during the day, along with any interesting stories you manage to uncover while transcribing or indexing the records. On Twitter you can use the hashtag #TranscriptionTuesday to share your thoughts, and you can also post comments on our Facebook group ( bit. ly/WDYTYAFBG) and forum ( whodoyou thinkyouaremagazine.com/forum).

Once the day is over, we’ll be in contact with each of the four projects to find out how much work has been completed across the 24 hours, with a view to publishing the results in our April 2019 issue. However, we hope that some of you will be inspired to carry on helping the projects long after Transcription Tuesday has finished.

‘A great deal of records are only online thanks to volunteers’

Stay Up To Date

In the weeks leading up to the big day, we recommend that you visit the Transcription Tuesday homepage (the address is listed at the foot of this page), which will have more details about getting involved in each of the projects. We’ll also be publishing updates via our weekly email newsletter, which you can subscribe to at whodoyouthinkyouare magazine.com/newsletter.

If you have any questions, send us an email at wdytyaeditorial@immediate. co.uk, and we’ll try to respond as soon as possible. Good luck!