Volunteering

[Abbreviation]

My son has become very interested in the family research I have been doing and often patiently goes through records or manages to decipher less clear names (when he is about anyway!). As the long summer holidays approach he was wondering if there is any sort of voluntary work he could do to do with family history research. He is willing to do most things but I don't quite know who to approach. He is very good on the computer. Any ideas much appreciated.

[Jan1954]

There are both the FreeCEN and FreeREG projects.

[pattenwalsh]

You could transcribe for FreeBMD.I do six pages of births or deaths a week (approx 900 entries a week) and this takes me about 5 hours in total.Total transcribed up to 12th July is 68,456 entries which is ,I think,my best way of thanking FreeBMD for their valuable contribution to people like us.

[spison]

The National Library of Australia (NLA) TROVE is digitising all Australia's newspapers. They are scanned and volunteers correct and tag various articles. There are a surprising number of articles about the "home country" (aka the UK) and often the papers reprint items from the UK papers. People from all over the world are correcting. It's free and all you need to do is create a login identity and prove you're not a spammer. It's very addictive and you can learn some very surprising things by searching, correcting and tagging articles for your particular county (or whatever he wants). Search engines will then search for his tags as well as corrected content and make information available world wide.
Jane

[Chris Doran]

You don't say how old he is. Note that some of the online projects have an over-18 requirement.

There's also transcribing with Ancestry's World Archives Project. He doesn't have to have a subscription, but there's currently not much English stuff being done, and IIRC this an over-18 one.

He could do some OCR checking with Distributed Proofreaders or the Australian Newspapers (which have many GB articles).

If he wants some fresh air, there's photographing gravestones with Find a Grave and other similar projects. A camera of at least 3 megapixels is desirable, as you can then do most of the transcriptions back home, and a GPS logger helps others find them later.

And if he's really desperate, I have a huge backlog of stuff for my One-and-a-bit Place Study that needs to be OCRed/checked, transcribed, or indexed , but it's not related to your part of London.

[Mutley]

I think that the Free BMD or FreeCEN and FreeREG projects are a wonderful contribution for us all to benefit from, including future generations that will continue to use these resources.

Power to his elbow.....

Good Luck

[Abbreviation]

Thanks so much everybody for replies which have certainly given him something to think about. He is only 17 so age might be against him for some things. I am leaving it to him to investigate further and will keep you informed.

[Peter Goodey]

London Metropolitan Archives (Clerkenwell) has a volunteering scheme with some interesting projects in progress. He might welcome the opportunity to get out and spend some time in an adult workplace environment.

See http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corpo...teers.htm#Ways

[Abbreviation]

Well son now volunteering for the freecen project with the ever helpful Bev. I think he will do quite well when he gets the hang of the abbreviations and it is helping him to gain experience of deciphering some hand writing!

[spison]

Excellent Choice.
Jane